Of rose and wartime

A while back I read a book called Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein.

My friend had suggested I read Code Name Verity by the same author, and while I tried to read it I just couldn't get into it. A few months later I picked up Rose Under Fire completely forgetting that the two were written by the same author, which was probably good because had I realized that they were I might not have read Rose. 

This book takes place during World War II, originally in England, and then in a bedroom in Paris where flashbacks to Ravensbrück, the Nazi's women concentration camp. Rose Justice, an American pilot, transports planes across England to be used in combat, but never actually sees combat herself. Dodging bombs and having to suffer the war far from her family is hard on Rose and her fellow pilots, but when she gets the chance to be more involved in the war by transporting a plane to Paris, Rose cannot refuse. To her, this is her chance to contribute more effectively to the Allied effort. This was discounting the fact that she would be found by the Nazi air force and made to fly deep into enemy territory where she would eventually find herself a prisoner in the now-infamous women's concentration camp of Ravensbrück. There she becomes a shadow of who she used to be, kept alive solely by the scrappy group of women she befriends, and by her incredible memory for poems, and her own poetry writing. Among the notable characters of her friends are a Rabbit, which was the name given to the girls used by Nazi doctors for experiments to test war wounds, a widowed novelist who has lost her entire family, and a Soviet fighter pilot. Despite indescribable pain and loss and terror, these women refuse to lose hope in rescue or in the end of the war. 

This book was captivating, as I believe a lot of books about WWII are. It was also, not surprisingly, incredibly heartbreaking. I picked it up at the library and read it in under a week because I could not put it down. The poems in it do a good job of conveying the mood in a way that mere description could not. Personally, it had a strong effect on me simply because it hit me once again how tragic the entirety of the war was, and the cruelty that some humans are capable of. The characters were fiction, but the stories were real. However, the author was able to balance the awfulness of the war with some more light-hearted but not too corny moments of warmth. 

All in all, a good book, and I would recommend it with the knowledge that it is quite dark and some description are quite graphic, especially concerning the Rabbits.