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The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa, Atria Books.
Although Armando Lucas Correa’s novel is inspired by a specific atrocity in the Second World War, it feels incredibly topical. This is a story about the desperate plight of refugees, of what happens when borders are closed and basic humanity is overcome by fear and prejudice. Correa is a journalist and the ingrained sense of purpose in his debut work of fiction gives this new window on the horrific consequences of the rise of Nazi Germany a sense of electric urgency.
The novel is told through two narrators in alternate chapters, and it is their wide-eyed appeal that captivates. First is Hannah Rosenthal, an almost 12-year-old Jewish girl who, until now, has known a bourgeois life in 1939 Berlin. Hannah spends her days roaming the city with her best friend, Leo, but Berlin is changing. Hannah and Leo are now spat upon and sneered at. Their favourite cafe has its windows smashed and everywhere is stench and ugliness. Hannah’s mother is the self-obsessed, needy Alma, an opera singer with an over-dramatic nature to suit. Her father, Max, is a university professor of some note. But as Berlin turns against them, this family must flee. Max secures tickets on the St Louis, a luxurious liner offering passage to Cuba, where the government has promised to give safe haven to Jewish refugees. Leo and his father also manage to secure places.
Interspersed with this story is Anna Rosen’s; an American girl who on her
12th birthday receives a package from her great-aunt, Hannah, which contains negatives of photographs she has never seen before. Anna longs to know more about her absent father and these photos are the catalyst to connect with her family history and eventually meet her great-aunt in Cuba. We soon learn that while Hannah and her mother ended up in Cuba, her father and Leo didn’t make it. The Cuban authorities reneged on their promise, only allowing 28 of the ship’s 937 passengers ashore, the rest forced to return to Europe, where most perished.
This incredible story was based on real events which Correa outlines at the end of the book. The author was inspired, he tells The Weekly, by his children. “Emma, 11, and twins Anna and Lucas, six. And my grandmother, the daughter of Spanish immigrants, who was in Cuba, pregnant with my mom, when the MS Saint Louis arrived in Havana. When Cuba denied them entry, my grandmother never grew tired of saying the island would pay dearly – for the next 100 years – for what it had done to more than 900 Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis.
“It’s a story that’s recent, it didn’t happen in the times of Barbarians but in the middle of the 20th century, just yesterday, in the heart of the most “civilised” continent in the world,” says Correa. “We can only ask the same question my 11-year-old daughter asked me when she read The German Girl: why?”