There are aspects of the story that are hauntingly familiar: A banging on the door and an arrest; people being crammed so tightly into boxcars that many have to sleep in cramped discomfort or not at all; the degradation of one toilet on a hot, nearly airless train trip lasting many days under such circumstances; and then being brought to a work camp, where life or death depends on the whim of the guards.
No, this was not about the concentration camps controlled by Nazi Germany; this was a story about the near parallel horror perpetrated on Poles, Jews, Ukrainians and other people of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union.
This is a fictionalized account of the Kohns, a middle class Polish Jewish family consisting of two parents and two children, who fled the Nazis only to be brutalized by the Soviet Communists. We witness them experience survival, and in one instance, death. The author’s omniscient approach allows us to imagine what people think as they face privation; what their response is to romantic attention, and even how they review their past as they await execution.
We are privy to the thoughts of a husband who is taken from his family, and the wife who is left to care for two teenagers in the face of terror. We learn how the older child, a son, steels himself to become a protector both for his mother and his younger sister.
Rather than being a catalogue only of cruelty, of which there was plenty, this novel also lingers on moments of unexpected kindness from strangers, who are moved to demonstrate their humanity no matter how harsh and inhumane the circumstances
The novel also brings us to the Kohns’ life after the Soviet Union permitted military-minded Poles and their families to leave the work camps of its vast wasteland to volunteer to fight Hitler’s troops in a reconstituted Polish Army. From the camp, the surviving Kohns were transported southwest to Iran, where, having left one life behind, they could begin to start new lives.
Author Kim Dana Kupperman’s novel is a helpful addition to Holocaust literature. It is scheduled to be published on October 15.
Republished from San Diego Jewish World