Story of boy in Nazi Germany is an exercise in empathy
Children believe what we tell them. And as we see in The Pact, the latest piece of historical fiction by Perth, Ont.-area writer Amanda West Lewis, that can be a force for good or evil depending on who’s doing the telling.
Lewis’s coming-of-age story is set during the Second World War. It tracks Peter Gruber as he goes from a life as the loving, 10-year-old son of a single mother in Hamburg, Germany, to being a Hitler Youth recruit. Over the course of Lewis’s deftly paced novel, Peter turns increasingly inward as he witnesses the destruction and cruelty of war and fanaticism.
At heart a moral person, he’s shunted into a world he’s neither made nor understands, a world that buries childhood, empathy and individual agency under the boot heel of the Third Reich’s propaganda and violence. He’s told he’s part of a great, international movement. When his country loses the war, he finds himself without purpose or direction.
“You’ve lost your sense of self, of your country, and how do you move forward?” asks Lewis when we meet to talk about her book. “How do you have any kind of functioning life?”
The particulars have changed, but she sees Peter’s story still being replicated decades later.
“We’re living in a world where (child soldiers) are indoctrinated at young ages. They see the world as black and white, and the minute you see the world as black and white you’re in trouble ... you have to empathize with others.”
In Peter’s case, that purblind world view does eventually yield to one containing what Lewis describes as a “kernel of hope.”
Lewis got the idea for the story from a casual conversation years ago with a neighbour. Lewis, her husband (author Tim WynneJones), and the neighbour were watching their children play when Wynne-Jones asked the neighbour if he’d gone to summer camp as a child.
The man paused, then replied, “Yes. Hitler Youth camp.”
“We were stunned,” says Lewis, who tucked the information away. Years later, she wrote September 17, a fictionalized account of the 1940 torpedoing of the SS City of Benares, which was carrying evacuated British children to safety in Canada.
After that book was published, she felt compelled to balance the ledger by telling the story of German children during the war. Her neighbour’s words still remembered, The Pact began to take form.
The result is a book that’s being marketed for young readers, but whose reach is much broader.
Along with writing, Lewis has had an extensive career teaching and directing theatre for young people. That includes founding Ottawa Children’s Theatre for drama education. The stage informs her writing at every turn, Lewis says.
“(Writing) is like being a director who sees the whole thing. And a set designer, a sound designer, a stage manager,” she says with a laugh. “In the theatre, the lights come up on a world, and (as a writer) you have to do that, as well.
“I’m used to hearing words, dialogue, rhythm, the spaces between words. All the things we work on in drama I bring to writing. Pauses are so important onstage because you need that for the tension to build. In a novel, you can get that silence by moving from inside the character’s head where it’s noisy, to outside the character. I might go to smell or texture to do that.”
Credible characters are also crucial to theatre, and empathy for their characters is essential if actors are to inhabit fully the roles they’re playing. “Especially with young children, we work so hard to create empathy,” Lewis says.
And relearning empathy is exactly what The Pact’s Peter Gruber must do.