Clara will not be daunted. Her life will not end when her beloved
husband dies too young. She will become a second mother to the young
children who live away from home in order to visit a rather special
school. When life becomes desperate for a particular class of disabled
children growing up in Nazi Germany she takes a few risks. Is her
ultimate faith in the goodness of human beings a fatal flaw that leads
to her tragedy, or is her story actually one of hope?
I
was unsure of how I would react to this book, as the holocaust is a
very real story in our family. However, the social history starting
before World War 1 and continuing to the present day, was extremely
interesting and Clara herself had the attitude that where there’s hope
there’s life. A well-written and thought-provoking book.
This
was a fascinating and thought-provoking read. Holocaust books that I've
read in the past have been through the eyes of adults. In this book we
experience it mainly through the round robin letters of a group of
school girls who slowly become aware of some of what's going on but
also, increasingly conscious of the police state they're in, trying to
put a positive spin on their lives. The two main characters are a
"Jewish" girl who didn't even know she was Jewish who is sent to England
and a German girl who risks her life to help the special needs children
in a secret school. There were a lot of characters and if I read it
again, I'd keep a crib sheet so I could keep track but certainly worth a
read.
Girl in a Smart Uniform is the most fictional of the stories in
the Schellberg Cycle to date, though some characters, familiar to those
who have read the first two books, appear again here. Clara Lehrs, Karl
Schubert and Dr Kühn really existed. We have a few, a very few,
verifiable facts about them. The rest we have had to find out by
repeating some of their experiences and by using the careful writer's
imagination.
