Product Description

By Martha Hall Kelly

"On a September day in Manhattan in 1939, twenty-something Caroline Ferriday is consumed by her efforts to secure the perfect boutonniere for an important French diplomat and resisting the romantic advances of a married actor. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish Catholic teenager, is nervously anticipating the changes that are sure to come since Germany has declared war on Poland. As tensions rise abroad - and in her personal life - Caroline's interest in aiding the war effort in France grows and she eventually comes to hear about the dire situation at the Ravensbruck all-female concentration camp. At the same time, Kasia's carefree youth is quickly slipping away, only to be replaced by a fervor for the Polish resistance movement. Through Ravensbruck - and the horrific atrocities taking place there told in part by an infamous German surgeon, Herta Oberheuser - the two women's lives will converge in unprecedented ways and a novel of redemption and hope emerges that is breathtaking in scope and depth"-

My take, this is the reality of how women brutalize women to prove themselves in a male dominated toxic enviroment, Dr. Oberheuser, epitome of this in her treatment of the women at Ravensbruck. But overwhelmed with the respect and duty Caroline showed to people she didn't even know to better their situation.  I was still floored the extent that the Nazi's went through to cover up their heinous crimes. Ravensbruck served as a front using women and under the guise of a spa just the same as the Block 31, the family camp was used to disguise the ovens and gas chambers of Auschwitz.