Louise Adler

I know this review goes against the laudatory comments of others about this story of the impact of WWII on 2 Prussian farmer families who supported Hitler initially but then suffered the consequences of the war. While i am somewhat sympathetic to the travails they had having to leave farms that prospered greatly during the war (who wants children to suffer?), that suffering is dwarfed by those suffered not only starvation but torture and systematic extermination such as the Jews, the Poles, Roma, homosexuals, and all others targeted by the Nazis. These farmer families that we are supposed to sympathize with had “Zivilarbeiter”—a/k/a slaves from areas the Nazis overran such as Poland—and were none too kind to them. The Pole Janusz was “cut loose” at the end to fend for himself in the flight from the Russians toward the end of this story. Janusz was supposedly like a son to the father of the farm family and loved and protected their children and the wife as though they were his family. Some treatment! Frankly it seems a whitewash of the German sympathizers (and the farmer families were sympathizers until the Germans started suffering reverses in the war) with far too little reflection of the harm done to others,. Perhaps the author is too young to understand what truly happened in WWII. Having been acquainted with Holocaust survivors, I feel I have a bit more realistic appraisal of where sympathies should lie.