Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

 

Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly is a novel based on true events and the real life story of one of the three main characters, Caroline Ferriday. In 1939 Caroline Ferriday was an American heiress and former Broadway actress working as a liaison to the French Consulate in NewYork.  The two fictional characters are Kasia, a Polish teenager, sent to the nazi concentration camp, Ravensbruuck, with her mother, her sister and her friend; and Herta, a young German doctor working  at Ravensbruuck. 

Ravensbruuck was a females-only prison which was, to put it mildly, a living hell. That horrifying experiments were carried out on women by other women is unthinkable. The German doctor, Herta, is unhappy that her profession is dominated by males and suffers bouts of depression and anxiety because of the unfairness of her situation; yet, she has no compassion for the women she tortures, the sick women and babies she kills and the prisoners she watches being shot for having committed whatever her nazi bosses deem to be offences, such as being heard to speak any language other than German. The three lives eventually converge and the story goes through to 1959. There are some very interesting photographs in the book, one of the beautiful Caroline Ferriday and others of  some of the survivors of the vile, disgusting, evil nazi camp, Ravensbruuck. 

Obviously, this was not an easy read but stories like this one must continue to be told. Caroline’s goodness, kindness and generosity shine through the story as a counterfoil to the darkness of Hitler’s mad plans for world domination. It was Martha Hall Kelly’s first novel and she did an absolutely magnificent job.

Penguin Books

Published by Random House Australia