The novel begins with Part I Liberation Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp April 15 - 1945. This first part of the novel tells the story of sixteen-year-old Gerta Rausch who has been at Bergen-Belsen for a year. She is barely alive and ill with typhus. Her previous three bunk mates have died; and old woman who was diabetic and had a seizure, two younger girls slowly starving to death. Her current bunkmate, Rivkah is from Koln and knew Gerta's parents. She is also dying of typhus.But Gerta is saved when Bergen-Belsen is liberated by British soldiers on April 15, 1945. Gerta is taken from the filthy barracks, stinking of death. Lying on the ground next to her is a boy, "another skeleton" who "looks like a marionette, with glass eyes and a smile painted over his skin-wrapped skull." He tells her that they are free and the British are rounding up the SS. He is only starving, so once he begins to eat, his strength improves. The boy feeds Gerta and tells her the SS guards are now being forced to bury the thousands of dead.
Ten days later, Gerta watches as the British soldiers round up the women from neighbouring villages and walk them "...through the corpse-woods, past the stinking mass graves, into the storage rooms where luggage molders unclaimed and shorn hair piles up in a corner, destined to be stuffed into mattresses and woven into cloth for SS uniforms." A month post-liberation and Gerta learns the red-haired boy who helped her is Levi Goldszmit.Gerta and Lev share their past with Lev telling Gerta he is from Kielce, Poland. Reflecting back on her childhood, Gerta begins to realize that her father hid the reality of their life from her. She remembers thinking, "The war was hard on everyone, but thank goodness we weren't Jews, I thought. How awful to be harassed, beaten and humiliated in the street, to not be allowed to work or go to school. At least that didn't apply to us."
Part II briefly tells Gerta's experiences in various camp. It flashes back to when Gerta was six-years-old and living in Koln. Music is a big part of Gerta's life: her papa is first chair-viola and she loves to sing. At age twelve, Gerta and her papa now live in Wurzburg with Maria Buchner, the renowned Kobratursporano diva and now Gerta's stepmother. Gerta is part of a choir composed of the children of the symphony musicians. Maestra Buchner decides that Gerta should attempt a solo, so she begins to teach her operatic technique.
Shortly after she turns fourteen, Gerta's voice changes, meaning she can no long hit high notes. Life becomes more complicated and puzzling to the sheltered girl. She remembers that "...constellations of yellow-starred people filed out of town -men, women and children carrying bundles of clothes, blankets, books tied together in stacks, weaving through the streets to the train station." Gerta knows they are Jews and believes they are leaving by choice to a safer place. They rarely go out now and the doors are kept locked. Gerta is tutored at home. Many people are wearing yellow stars on their clothing but Gerta doesn't as she's is German. However her papa has only a few students and he is now last chair in his section of the orchestra.
On June 17, Gerta is awakened by pounding on their apartment door. Soldiers enter their apartment, ordering Gerta and her papa out. They quickly pack their bags, and with Gerta carrying her father's viola, leave as Maria watches. They are marched down Hofstrasse to the Residenz Square and then to the Wurzburg Station. There they are packed into cattle cars. In the train, Gerta's father reveals to her that they are Jews, their families having lived in Germany for generations. Gerta's mother was killed when she was four years old in a raid on the Jewish club. With her mother's wedding ring, Gerta's father was able to have their identification papers - the Ahnenpass forged. They became the German Richters instead of the Jewish Rausch's. They moved to Wurzburg and were able to pass as German until someone betrayed them.
Gerta and her father arrive in Theresienstadt where they are separated, he to the musicians building, she to the girls building. What at first looks like a quaint town with lovely buildings is in fact a camp, with filthy, cramped, lice-ridden barracks, little food and many dead and dying. Gerta meets Roza a girl who plays piano and works in the clothing shop. After a year, the camp now very crowded, hosts the Red Cross who are there to make a movie. Before the Red Cross visit, Gerta's papa breaks his leg when he is tripped by a guard. Afterwards they are sent by train to Auschwitz where once again Gerta is separated from her papa who is in terrible pain from his broken leg. Gerta has her head shorn, is tattooed with a number, stripped and forced into striped pants and shirt. She learns the awful truth about her papa, that he has been killed, the smoke from the crematorium stacks, the only thing that left of him and many others.
Part's III, IV and V return to the present year of 1945 as Gerta struggles to recover from her ordeal, and find her own identity amid the loss of everything that once mattered to her. Help comes from the one person who understands what she has suffered, unexpectedly blossoming into a love that both challenges and heals.
Discussion
What The Night Sings is an unforgettable, riveting portrayal of the immediate post-Holocaust years for a young teenage survivor. As Vesper Stamper writes in her Author's Note at the back of the the novel, that despite growing up in a Jewish home in New York City, she had never made the connection between the pogroms in Europe, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel. She found little information on the period between the end of the Holocaust and the creation of the new state of Israel. "I had never connected the two, and I was fascinated by the human stories behind this seldom-discussed era. The fact that survivors, after losing everyone they loved, made the seemingly illogical decision to get married and bring new children into the world -- this seemed to me the absolute bravest act I had ever heard of. At the core of what it means to be human is the ability to choose not just to survive, not just to hope, but to love. A fire rose up in me to tell this story."
What began as a short story, blossomed into a project that saw Stamper personally trace her character Gerta's journey from Wurzburg to Bergen-Belsen by visiting the locations of death camps. This emotional journey left Stamper feeling that through her novel she "could invite others to remember with me."
The main character is Gerta who survives the Holocaust only to find herself facing the profound and frightening question of "Who am I?". When she was forced from her home in Wurzburg as a fourteen-year-old girl along with her father, Gerta did not know she was Jewish. As the situation worsened in Germany Gerta remained unconcerned because as far as she knew she was German. She learns about her Jewish ancestry from her papa on the transport to Thereseinstadt. In an attempt to protect Gerta, her papa had assumed a fake German identity. He gave up all outward signs of his Jewish faith when Gerta is very young, meaning that their Jewish customs and identity were not passed on.
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| One of the many illustrations by Vesper Stamper in What The Night Sings |
In the camp Gerta meets the handsome Michah Gottlieb with whom she is infatuated and who is arranging passage to the Jewish homeland - Eretz Yisrael. Gerta believes that she can go back to Koln but Michah tells her this is impossible. "...Koln is a total ruin. and where exactly do you think the Nazis went. They're back home, sweetheart, getting their jobs back, still in charge, but without the brown shirts. Do you think that once you get out of here, your neighbors will suddenly be in their right minds just because the war is over? That you'll somehow emerge into a sane world?" Michah tells Gerta that they have no future in Europe and that the Jews need their own homeland where they don't have to worry about another pogrom. Gerta insists she is German but Michah counters that this hatred has existed for centuries, for two thousand years. But his reasoning only makes Gerta angry as she asserts, "...I'm not some Zionist. I'm - I'm barely anything at all. And I don't have to be. I don't have to do any of this!"
Gerta's best friend is Lev but Lev with his deep Jewish faith and a lifetime of Jewish customs to draw on, wants to marry Gerta, something Gerta is not ready for. She tells Lev, "Besides, until all this happened, I didn't even know I was Jewish. And my experience of what that means? It's this place. It's fear. It's death. I don't want that life. I don't know a god, I don't know a family, I don't even know myself..." Lev is ready to "rediscover what it means to be Jewish." and is hoping that together they can grow young together. However while Lev's faith is a comfort to him, to Gerta it is not. Gerta struggles with the age-old questions about God, suffering and evil. To Gerta, God "took away everything, everyone we loved..." But Lev challenges her to recognize who really was responsible. "I'm not sure who took them, Gerta...Who? Hitler? The SS?... Or was it our neighbors? The ones who wanted your house or your silver..."
It is Helene who voices Gerta's internal conflict after Gerta the painful truth about her friendship with Michah. When she first meets Helene, Gerta identifies herself as "a musician first" but Helene reminds Gerta that is not who she is. She tells Gerta, "I wonder how many other girls are walking in your shoes. So young, coming of age with no family, no sense of who you are. You keep to yourself, not wanting to lose anything more, not know what's next. Is that right?" Helene invites Gerta to partake of the ritual bathing, in which she will wash away the terrible memories and begin to be healed.
With her voice seemingly ruined, Gerta begins to realize that her life will not be what she thought it would be - that she would someday be a famous mezzo-soprano. Gerta considers her lost voice the price of her survival, "We all paid with some part of ourselves. None of us escaped unbroken." Lev has a different more positive perspective. "We survived with the best part of us still intact" he tells Gerta, meaning that she has her music and he has his father's faith. It is Roza who helps Gerta recover what is really an important part of who she is - her voice. Before the transport, Gerta thought of herself as an aspiring singer. She learned to play her father's viola but it was her singing that she lived for. In the displaced persons camp she cannot sing. Roza tries to understand why and Gerta explains "They took my voice...I have nothing to sing for." Instead she plays her father's viola because she'd "rather have that than try to sing form someplace dry and dead and empty." Roza tells Gerta not to let the Nazis take her voice and that sometimes you have to do things "out of brokenness." With Roza's help Gerta begins to sing again, discovering that her voice is not gone but just different. Although her first attempt to sing publicly in the camp fails, her reconciliation with Maria Buchner whom Gerta wrongly thought betrayed them to the Nazis, sets her on the path to recovering her gift of singing. Maria encourages her to continue, that her voice will ripen as she heals and lives.
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| Gerta, filled with happiness. Illustration by Vesper Stamper. |
The cover of What The Night Sings, features a black butterfly as it passes out the window, turning to a deep blue.The motif of the butterfly can be found throughout the novel as a symbol of Gerta's voice, innocence, hope and freedom. The butterfly comes to her when she's a child, giving her songs to sing but is lost during her suffering in the camps, only to return when she enters the mikvah to cleanse herself of the haunting memories of the Holocaust. In Israel, as she rediscovers herself, her heritage and recovers her voice, the butterfly escapes through the window.
Accompanying the story of Gerta and Lev are the dark, sepia-like illustrations by the novel's author, Vesper Stamper, a gifted artist too. They are done in ink wash, white gouache, and graphite. These moving illustrations enhance the story's themes of war, fear, inner conflict, faith, and identity.
Stamper has included a detailed Author's Note explaining her writing process, a Glossary, a map of Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia and also Palestine, and a list of Resources. Born out of watching the movie Fiddler On The Roof, What The Night Sings is well-researched, deeply touching and very relevant to teenagers who often struggle with finding their path in life. This beautiful novel is a work of art in every sense of the term.
Readers are encouraged to check out Vesper Stamper's website, Vesper Stamper Illustration to see her artwork, books and to learn more about this amazing new author.
Book Details:
What The Night Sings: A Novel by Vesper Stamper
New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2018
266 pp,
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