Lately, I have been a sucker for World War One and World War Two historical fiction. If the description of the book promises a story about strong female friendships, I cannot get it off the shelf fast enough. This recent obsession led me to pick up Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly (one of our April picks). 
Lilac Girls follows the lives of three women from three different walks of life during World War Two. Caroline Feriday is a New York socialite who works at the French consulate, Kasia Kuzmerick is a young Polish teenager who gets put in a concentration camp for being part of the resistance movement, and Herta Oberhauser is a German doctor who gets a post at Ravensbruck, a Nazi concentration camp.
The women that Kelly follows in her novel really lived during World War Two. Although Kelly took some creative license with their stories, her writing shows the harshness of the war, its impact on these women, and the determination they all had to survive.
I learned about “The Ravensbruck Rabbits,” a group of women (prisoners) who were experimented on during the war. They were called “Rabbits” because, after the surgeries, they hobbled around the camp due to the damage done to their legs. Kelly’s website follows her journey from Caroline Ferriday’s estate to Warsaw to Berlin to Furstenburg. In writing this novel, Kelly kept an important story alive.
The number of books written about this time period often overwhelms me, but every time I read one, I am reminded that each story is important.
Did you get a chance to read it? What did you think? Let us know @TheWriteTeach, and don’t forget to use the hashtag #TWTBookshelf.
Live, Love, Learn,
Candice & The Write Teacher(s)