One sees this unusual title and beautiful cover, and going by the blurb takes it to be a halfway serious account of three young women with lives intertwined, assuming they began perhaps at a boarding school together. One couldn't be further off.
One begins to read, and the first sentence is more appropriate for a love story that ends in a tragedy due to a young girl falling for someone perhaps more fond of playing with hearts and breaking them. Again, one couldn't be further off.
Then one sees the date, and it's the day Poland was invaded, so one expects a bit more interesting book. This time, the expectations fall short. Perhaps all this misleading was not entirely the fault of the reader?
Then begin the chapters switching between three, two young - and one slightly less young - women, telling their stories first hand. One is an upper class society person working in N.Y. city with homes in CT and Hamptons, another a young girl in Lublin looking at devastation of her home town by German military, and the third, a medical student in Dusseldorf who is forced to work for her uncle the butcher, out of necessity, in more than one capacity, since her parents aren't well off, and her aunt supports her education.
Each of these has her problems, some from the society she is part of, and others due to the time. Caroline deals with working without salary and more for charity, at the French consulate in N.Y., sending clothes and more to displaced children across France in orphanages. Kasia is dealing with devastation of her hometown and society invaded and trampled, as they are being picked on to be sent to camps. And Herta is trying to be a doctor in a highly misogynistic society that is worse under the regime she sees as something good for her country.
It's not until one is through three quarters of the book that one realises with a jolt, that this isn't a novel one thought it was, even based on real events and places, but is about characters that were real persons, not just types that they represent.
Herta is the most disappointing, in that being a doctor and facing obstacles of recognition in that capacity, she throws ethics out and joins in the experiments performed on live camp incarcerated women who aren't volunteers, without compunction. Here the author takes the view that she ought to have been better as a woman, and gives her performing sexual slavery to the uncle as a sign of her moral weakness, perhaps with an idea that a woman in that dilemma ought to give up education and be content with a life approved by society. That this approved life is after all an approved sexual slavery is not perhaps a problem for her. But one may take the view that Herta is a product of her times and nation, not that different from the average German who made similar choices in whatever capacity including doctors, and is more determined to keep her status as a doctor because of the hard fight she has throughout her life in keeping it.
Caroline is of course the easiest to like, being kind hearted as to hock her family heirlooms to fund her charity boxes sent to France, and so ethereal even in her one love. One can be in awe, or take it thst being cushioned by her security and her mother's love, she can afford the strength. Either way, lovely person.
It's the young Polish Kasia and her other friends, relatives and more, innates of the Ravensbruck camp, rabbits as they were called, who form most of the body of this horrendous story, one that hits deeply and repeatedly, surprising even a reader familiar with the horrors of the era through a dozen or two books of the memoirs kind.
Where they found strength to go on, is the eternal unspoken question. One is glad they did.
