Just Finished Reading Mischling by Affinity Konar

When I went to my local public library and checked out Affinity Konar's novel Mischling, which I later discovered was based in part on a true story, as usual I read a preview of what it was about...and so knew well in advance that I was in for a story about terrible suffering: after all, anything about Auschwitz is going to be very, very serious and somber.  So I braced myself and proceeded, knowing that no matter how many accounts I hear or read about this horrible chapter in human history I will never be able to fully understand and feel what these people had to go through...

During World War II, within the German Nazi concentration death camp Auschwitz in southern Poland operated one of the most infamous "physicians" the world has ever known: Josef Mengele, who routinely mutilated, poisoned, and in other ways tortured and killed countless victims...all for the purported "advancement" of science.  One of his chief areas of interest was twins ("Zwillinge"), and he sought them out among the population, mostly Jewish, sent against their will to this hell on Earth.  And so arrive Paula and Stasha, identical twin girls with distinctly different personalities, accompanied by their mother and grandfather and then separated from them soon after they disembark from their train.  Mengele interviews them...wondering aloud whether they are "Mischling" (of "mixed" race) and they join a large group of other children, twins and triplets...some of them are horribly disfigured and others are ominously missing their counterparts.  It is the year 1944, when the extermination camps are going full throttle carrying out Hitler's "Final Solution" in murdering the Jewish population of Europe (along with other groups like the Romany) in a mass genocide...at first, it appears that being twins has saved them from this fate.  But as the story progresses, with alternating chapters expressing first Stasha's point of view and then Paula's, they discover that their futures may be eventually much worse and Mengele is in truth anything but the kindly "Uncle Doctor" that he insists they call him...

Two reactions: something that has always fascinated me is the way some brave people, while appearing on the surface to work "for" the bad guys, are really working for those suffering oppression.  In Mischling, one of Mengele's assistant doctors fills this role and ends up saving the lives of many...but later on she is still scorned as being a collaborator by one of the former girl prisoners.  The other reaction is the fascination I feel about the anarchy at the close of the conflict: the Nazis are in retreat ahead of the advancing Soviet army, and the protagonists, as wandering refugees, find themselves in a social no-man's land as they alternately encounter pockets of German soldiers, Russian soldiers, the Jewish resistance, collaborators with the Nazis, other concentration camp refugees...and just people at large struggling to simply survive, the need to make any sense of this insanity long vanished from their priorities...

No, I'll never fully be able to emphasize with the torments and struggles of the German death camp prisoners under the Nazi regime. With Mischling, Affinity Konar has put my own so-called problems in perspective: in stark contrast with the experiences of Paula and Stasha, my trials are trivial...