Auschwitz, 1942: This unforgettable novel, based on a true story, brings to life history’s most powerful tale of forbidden love. Set within the barbed wire of Auschwitz, a man and a woman fall in love against unimaginable odds. What happens next will restore your faith in humanity, and make you believe in hope even where hope should not exist.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he whispered, pressing a note into her hand. Her entire body trembled when she read it: I am in love with you.
Helena steps off the cattle train onto the frozen grounds of Auschwitz. She has twenty-four hours to live. Scheduled to be killed tomorrow, she is not even tattooed with a prison number. As the snow falls around her, she shivers, knowing that she has been sentenced to death for a crime she didn’t commit.
When a gray-clad officer marches towards Helena and pulls her away, she fears the worst. Instead, he tells her that it’s one of the guard’s birthdays and orders her to serenade him.
Inside the SS barracks the air is warm, thick with cigarette smoke and boisterous conversation. After she sings to the guard, Franz, he presses a piece of cake into her hands––the first thing she has eaten in days. On the spot, he orders her life to be saved, forever changing the course of her fate.
What follows is a love story that was forbidden, that should have been impossible, and yet saved both of their lives––and hundreds of others––in more ways than one.
Fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Choice, and The Orphan Train will be utterly entranced by this unputdownable page-turner. This completely heartbreaking yet beautifully hopeful novel shows that love can survive anything and grow anywhere.
*Previously titled: Auschwitz Syndrome
Author Bio
Ellie Midwood is a USA Today bestselling and award-winning historical fiction author. She owes her interest in the history of the Second World War to her grandfather, Junior Sergeant in the 2nd Guards Tank Army of the First Belorussian Front, who began telling her about his experiences on the frontline when she was a young girl. Growing up, her interest in history only deepened and transformed from reading about the war to writing about it. After obtaining her BA in Linguistics, Ellie decided to make writing her full-time career and began working on her first full-length historical novel, The Girl from Berlin.’ Ellie is continuously enriching her library with new research material and feeds her passion for WWII and Holocaust history by collecting rare memorabilia and documents.
In her free time, Ellie is a health-obsessed yoga enthusiast, neat freak, adventurer, Nazi Germany history expert, polyglot, philosopher, a proud Jew, and a doggie mama. Ellie lives in New York with her fiancé and their Chihuahua named Shark Bait.
Social MediaFacebook: https://m.facebook.com/EllieMidwood/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elliemidwood/Website: http://elliemidwood.com/
My Review
This is another emotional World War II book by the author. As with her previous books, she has a profound way of presenting a story that is so thought provoking, it will stay with the reader days after finishing.
All too often we here stories of victims being held captive by a horrific person, only to develop a connection so strong, they believe they are in love. Are they truly in love? Or, has the yearning to be saved grown so strong, they are only being fooled?
The subject matter in The Girl in the Striped Dress revolves around the Stockholm Syndrome, as described above. Helena is a victim, taken prisoner to a camp during World War II. Being sentenced to the gas chambers upon her arrival, one of the SS officers pardons her due to her singing voice. Franz soon becomes quite enthralled with her, and even falls in love. Helena (his now wife) also claims love.
What happens when someone is put in a situation where death is inevitable and one person reaches out a helping hand? Not ever being in that situation, I have no idea how I would handle it. Is it the desperate situation that tricks the mind into ‘loving’ a person of pure evil? Is it the will to live, the act of trying to survive? Given that Helena was in such a situation, leads me to believe that when faced with death, the human reaction is to grasp at the only possible way of survival, even if it calls for depending on the enemy.
The author, who based this work of fiction on several true accounts, presents the story in a way that had me going back and forth on the idea of whether it truly was love that brought Franz and Helena together. I’m not going to share my conclusion. Instead, I will leave it up to you, my friend, to read the book and discover for yourself.
Kristin's Novel Café 