Last year I read the first three of Rebecca Cantrell’s “Hannah Vogel” series one right after the other, and by the end, her evocative prose had me dreaming that Nazis were following me through Pike Place Market (really!). She’s that good. But I figured that, since a year has passed, I wouldn’t be so deeply affected again by a single book.
I was wrong. She really IS that good.
In A City of Broken Glass, Hannah is writing for a Swiss newspaper under her pseudonym, Adelheid Zinsli, and she is sent to cover the Feast of St. Martin in a small Polish town. What should be an easy assignment and a lovely day out rapidly becomes much more serious when Hannah, her son, Anton, and their driver, Fraulein Ivona, find some of the 12,000 Polish Jews that were deported from Germany in the fall of 1938 and then housed in silos and stables. Their plight becomes personal for Hannah when she meets her old friend, Miriam, exhausted, hungry and in labor. Hannah resolves to bring Miriam medical help, and her actions take her right into harm’s way.
Kidnapped by two members of the Gestapo, Hannah is brought back to Berlin, where there is a price on her head. She is rescued by an unlikely duo, but after that, their escape out of Germany is complicated, not only by their lack of passports but by Hannah’s need to find Miriam’s daughter, Ruth, who was left behind when Miriam was taken.
Rebecca Cantrell caught the building tension and horror of the days leading up to Kristallnacht with a vengeance. The implacable and relentless determination of the Reich to eradicate the Jews, the Jewish resolve intermingled with anger and despair, and all through it, the ongoing search for two-year-old Ruth, born of a Jewish mother but with Aryan features, placing her squarely at the center of the spiralling hatred. It would not in the least surprise me to see these books used as textbook examples of what happened during those dark days. Cantrell weaves in so much actual history, it’s hard to believe these are works of fiction.
If you haven’t read the Hannah Vogel series, let me encourage you to do so. You absolutely need to read them in order, beginning with
A Trace of Smoke, Cantrell’s writing is powerful, compelling and altogether human. This is a series not to be missed!
