If I’d known I was about to meet the man who’d shatter me like bone china on terra-cotta, I would have slept in.” - Caroline

On paper neither she nor any of her guards had any official standing. The women were not merely subordinate to the men, they had no badge or rank and were merely SS ‘auxiliaries’. Most of them were unarmed, though some guarding outside work parties carried a pistol and many had dogs. Himmler believed that women were more frightened than men of dogs.When I was 22 and at university studying for my education degree, I attended a session in which I heard my first Holocaust survivor testimony, a man who lost his parents and all seven of his siblings in the camps, who survived Auschwitz, immigrated to Canada and for forty years never spoke to anyone about his experiences during the war. Although his closest friends knew that he was Jewish, he never told them he was a survivor of the Holocaust. He only decided to talk when the stories of Holocaust denial began to surface and he realized that he no longer could be silent. During the Q&A, a young man, a history major, asked " As a Holocaust survivor, which film "Schindler's List" or "The Pianist" has done a better job of telling the story of the Holocaust survivor?" You can imagine that all 100 people, including myself, leaned in to hear what he would say because of course we had watched those films. He thought for a long moment and said " Honestly, if Hollywood were ever to make a movie on what we all went through in those camps, no one in Canada or the United States would ever want to see it." The White Rose Society, for those of you unfamiliar with this part of WWII history, was founded by Munich University students who desperately wanted Hitler out of power as they had begun to discover his atrocities. They were never violent, they wrote tracts, spray painted graffiti and wrote letters. Yet, even these activities were enough to be sentenced to death or a concentration camp during that time. Johanna Langefeld had come with a small advance party of guards and prisoners to bring equipment and look around the new women’s concentration camp; the camp was due to open in a few days’ time and Langefeld was to be the Oberaufseherin – chief woman guard. She had seen inside many women’s penal institutions in her time, but never a place like this.

It was impossible to try the crimes of the 'abnormal world' of concentration camps within the confines of a 'normal' court... Only the accused and the witnesses understood the 'abnormal world', which made them partners in the sharing of this awful knowledge; the rest of the world was in the dark. This is an excellent historical fiction novel. The author provides a nice follow up at the end discussing how her writing of this novel started. This is a debut novel by the author. I look forward to her next book that I hear is in the works!Kasia annoyed me many times but I was satisfied with the end. I guess the author tried to make her as real as possible, but after all, she went through I understand. Is it about how the Nazis sent political dissidents and academics to concentration camps? Nope. Another missed opportunity. I think everyone knows how the Jewish population was targeted, but the other groups that were killed sometimes get glossed over. I would have rather seen more about the activities sending Henryk and Frieda to the camps over the abuse endured by Miriam.