BoW 1: The Violin of Auschwitz by Maria Àngels Anglada

My first Book of the Week* (BOW! KAPOW!) actually ended up being a Book of the Day. I read it in one late evening after the hubby and baby were asleep. I recommend to you 'The Violin of Auschwitz' by Maria Àngels Anglada.

It was a short novel (109 pages) about the building of a violin in the Auschwitz labor camps by a Jewish violin maker from Krakow, Poland. Most of the story is told from the same person's perspective, making it an economically short story. The book is about the journey.

The final turn in the story centers on the questions with which survivors must live out their lives - what happened to loved ones and those they met in the camps: did they make it out alive?

Nightmare questions abound for people who have seen and lived through tragedy. A vast, organized evil thing like Nazi death camps is sweeping**, but each tragedy is still intensely personal, and each person who suffered and lost loved ones must walk their journey their way, and ulitamtely by themselves. A survivor can be surrounded, build a safe life around themselves, but it is their own mind - the memories and the worries - that is a constant companion.

One character in this book does get answers in the end, but I am sure for many answers were never found and all too often those answers were less than satisfactory.

If you do read this book, please ask yourself this question: Would this book be highly acclaimed and as satisfying to you the reader, if the answer in the end were different?

As for my story, I will never know what happened to Serenity. I am not searching for a missing person, so I can say for the most part that there are many questions I don't bother asking anymore. Why? How? It turns out that I'll neither get answers to those questions nor would those answers change anything - she'd still be dead, missing and missed.


*Perhaps from this book you can see what kind of books I am trying to read, books about life. I also hope to cover personal stories (historical fiction or autobiographical personal stories) about each of the wars in the last two centuries.
*to me, also unimaginable and unbelievable, although I do know that it actually happened. It is just unfathomable. Perhaps I should try to meet a survivor before they are all gone.

Thanks for reading.