Tears of Amber

Who could get me to read an almost 500 page WWII historical fiction novel? Sofia Segovia - that’s who. 

After falling in love five years ago with her first translated work The Murmur of Bees set in the time of the Mexican Revolution, I knew she’d take this topic that’s been done over and over again from countless angles and make it an equally unique and special experience, and she did with help from her wonderful translator, Simon Bruni, who returns for this book.

I don’t love war fiction, but what I do love about Segovia’s writing is her talent for immersing you in the experience of her characters. Her ability to capture time and place and the sensory details of what they’re going through - of putting you in their shoes - is what brings her stories to life in a way that immediately draws you into the story, even if those details hurt.

The setting for this story is Prussia. I won’t try to detail its history, other than to say it was a German territory that had been divided after WWI, giving the western part to Poland and separating the eastern part from Germany. For those living there, Adolf Hitler represented the hope that their homeland and people would be unified and restored. They believed his assurances that he didn’t want another war. 

Told from a third person omniscient perspective, we see the birth of WII to the years after its end through the eyes of two Prussian children Ilse and Arno and their respective families, the Hahlbrocks and the Schippers, who naively believed their leader. Ilse is only four and Arno five when the story begins, so there’s an innocence imbued in their perspectives which evolved as the years passed. Theirs is the story of ‘innocence lost’. Not only did their own leader betray them, but many of their fellow Germans and their supposed liberators after the war did as well.

Ilse and Arno and these two families grabbed my heart, as did Hahlbrock’s Polish servants Janusz and Jadwiga. We see how two honest, hardworking families could be victimized by their own hope. I felt all these characters’ pain and sorrow, the betrayal of their hopes, the loss of their dreams, and the rude awakening to a reality they’d never imagined possible, yet at the end I also cheered their resilience, determination, creativity in the worst of circumstances and their sheer determination to survive and rebuild after so much loss. Read the author’s note at the end. It’s worth it!

This story isn’t for the faint of heart. The carnage of war and what people do and how they change to survive it is gruesome and distressing, but it’s also a reality for many in the world, and a reminder to me that no one is immune to the deceptions of an influential leader. I hate politics, but history can and does repeat itself in many ways, even if we’re not the ones currently experiencing it.

I'll leave you with Segovia's gut-punching first line of the book:

At the first breath, life hurts.

No truer words were ever spoken.

★★★★ ½