If this is Tuesday, it must be Berlin
Since close of World War II there has been a deluge of fascinating books about the Nazis. Histories such as The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by journalist William Shirer, Survivor Elie Wiesel’s Night and, of course, The Diary of Anne Frank. In the last year we had Caroline Moorehead’s A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Study of Women, Friendship and Survival in World War II and Erik Larson’s compelling In The Garden of the Beasts.
The Nazi period grips us because it is a reminder about the potential degradation of any civilized community. A recent arrival in the pantheon of books about Hitler-era Germany is The Accidental Captives, The Story of Seven Women Alone in Nazi Germany by Carolyn Gossage. It focuses on what happened to a boatload of civilians, mostly missionaries — including seven Canadian women — who were sailing to South Africa when their ship was sunk by a German raider. Luckily most of the passengers were saved and sent to Germany, although not to concentration camps.
Gossage bases her accounts on books written by some of the survivors. One of her interview subjects, Peter Levitt, was a small boy when he, his sister Wendy and mother Kathleen were taken by the Germans. They managed to keep their Jewish background well-hidden.
The Accidental Captives is in many ways like Larson’s book In the Garden of the Beasts because it reflects daily life in wartime Germany and the naivety of many North Americans who came there briefly during the period. Mostly Gossage’s Canadians lived in hotels and although the beds weren’t always comfortable and the electricity erratic, they didn’t have it too bad.
Sadly, the writing is very prosaic and the stories of the captured Canadian women are not gripping. Maybe because many of them were missionaries they chose to see the positive around them; but that leaves one wondering about Gossage. She knew. And even if the women couldn’t ask questions about what they saw in Germany post-1941, she could have filled in the blanks.
Nothing of Kristallnacht and book burnings seems to have been noted by the women — although those events happened just a few years before they arrived. And there’s little mention of the concentration camps, which were flourishing by the time the women arrived in Germany. There was sadness over the elderly Jewish German man they met, a Professor, who let two of them live in his greenhouse, but even that lacks gripping pathos, though they knew he could be rounded up like his co-religionists.
It is regrettable Gossage provides little analysis about the horrors going on around the Canadians, the rounding up of Jews, Gypsies, the mentally and physically handicapped people. In fact, the women, at certain points felt a twinge of guilt as they watched Allied bombs being dropped on their neighborhoods.
To understand the complexity of Nazi Germany I’d go back to William Shirer or Caroline Moorehead. Her book on the women in the French Resistance was fascinating. Sadly, I found Gossage’s book far too jejune, especially for those whose parents or grandparents were touched by the war. jhunter@thestar.ca