When The World Was Ours by Liz Kessler

Three best friends forever linked by a moment in time, experience the horrors of the Holocaust. Leo Grunberg, Max Fischer and Elsa Bauer spend Leo's ninth birthday riding on Vienna's famous Ferris wheel, the Riesenrad. It's 1936 and the three are spending the day at the fairgrounds, afterwards eating sachertorte for Leo's birthday. During the Ferris wheel ride, Leo's papa takes a picture of all three friends in the carriage at the top. 

When Papa begins chasing and tickling the three, Leo trips over a lady's outstretched foot. His papa makes Leo apologize, but the lady tells them in broken German that it is nothing to worry about. They learn that couple, Aileen and Eric Stewart are from England. When the ride ends, Papa is still in conversation with the English couple and he offers to pay for another ride. Leo's father learns that Eric Stewart is a dentist who is now late for his conference talk, so he invites the Stewarts to his home for Leo's birthday dinner.

A few weeks later, Max's father takes the three friends swimming at the Amalienbad. When Leo's father comes to the car to say hello, Mr. Fischer is not friendly. Max met Leo and Elsa when they started Volksschule together a few years ago. At that time, Leo's parents had invited the Fischers for dinner hoping to become friends, but that friendship had never really materialized. Despite Max's father's rudeness towards Leo's papa, the boys have fun swimming and diving.

After the swim, Max overhears his parents talking about Leo's father, "Shows you what they're all like, all of them. Making out they're one thing while underneath, they're another thing completely. Liars, the lot of them. Sneaky, nasty, dirty, rotten -- ..." Max doesn't understand why his father would think this of Leo's father whom everyone loves. When he tells his father he's going out to play with Leo and Elsa, his father becomes angry but is stopped by Max's mother from saying anything more. This leaves Max wondering what is so wrong with Leo and Elsa.

One spring day in 1937, Elsa learns from her father Vati and her mother Mutti that they are leaving Vienna and moving to Czechoslovakia. This stunning development shocks Elsa who cannot understand why it is no longer safe for them to remain in Vienna. At the park that day, a tearful Elsa explains to Max that the country is no longer safe for Jews. But Max refuses to believe that being Jewish is dangerous. This news upsets Max terribly and tries not to cry. Instead, he gives Elsa a kiss as he realizes this will be the last time he sees her. When he returns home, Max tells his father that's he's spent time with Leo and Elsa. His father angrily forbids him from seeing them again, telling Max he's not to spend time with Jews.

In early 1938, Elsa and her family have settled into life in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She misses Max and Leo but Vati is working and Mutti seems happy. Then Vati announces that he is joining the army to fight off the Germans who are invading Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, in Vienna, Mr. Schmidt,  the headmaster at Max and Leo's school, informs the students that mornings will now begin with the "Heil Hitler" greeting. He also tells the students whom he's just named and whom are all Jewish, that they will "...be treated like the lesser race you are! You will sit separately in lessons and assembly, at the back of the room."  

Max and the other students are told they are not to interact with the Jewish students because they are "dirty and  inferior" and that they must "...pretend they do not even exist". Max doesn't understand because he knows Leo is not dirty however, he instinctively moves away from his friend. This shocks Leo, who finds himself not allowed into class later on. Even worse, on his way home, Leo comes across his father and several other Jewish men being forced to scrub the pavement by Max's father who is now wearing a uniform with the Nazi swastika on his arm. Leo's father tells him to leave when he moves to help his father who is being kicked by Mr. Fischer. When Max arrives home, he learns that they are moving to Munich where his father is to be a senior SS officer. Although reluctant to leave, Max is hopeful that life in a new city will offer him a chance to start over. But what he doesn't know is that he will change in a way he never thought possible.

As the Nazis invade more countries and war consumes Europe, Max becomes increasingly drawn into the life of a young Nazi and taught to hate Jews. His rise through the Hitler Youth sees him sent to Auschwitz where he is forced to make a fateful choice. Meanwhile, Elsa and her family experience the occupation of Czechoslovakia and eventually are sent to the Jewish ghetto. As their rights and property are gradually stripped away, it isn't long before they are sent to Theresienstadt. Eventually their family is sent to Auschwitz. For Leo and his mother, the chance encounter four years earlier on the Ferris wheel will end up saving their lives. War has separated the three friends but fate will bring two of them together in a tragic way.

Discussion

When The World Was Ours is historical fiction novel about the Holocaust, told from the perspective of three childhood friends, Leo, Elsa and Max who live in Vienna, Austria as Hitler is in power in Germany. The story is crafted around an experience author Liz Kessler's father Harry Kessler had when he was eight years old. As told in her note at the front of the novel, Kessler's father Harry "had nearly scuffed " the dress of a British woman. As in the novel with Leo's family, this moment led to a day together with the British couple, a thank you letter, and ultimately led to a way to escape the ever-tightening noose of the Holocaust. Elsa's story portrays what might have happened had Kessler's father not escaped while Max's narrative explores "...how so many ordinary people could have become part of such a brutal, evil, and horrific regime."

In many ways it is Max's story that is the most tragic because it is a story of a young boy who is taught to hate. Kessler chronicles how a young boy, desperate for fatherly attention and affirmation, is transformed into a diligent Nazi. Max's childhood had been unhappy with memories of his parents arguing over money. He is visible only to his father when he finds something to criticize him for. An outcast at school due to his poverty, his friendship with Leo and Elsa becomes a stabilizing factor in his life. In particular, it is Leo's father, a happy, kind man, who helps Max. So when he hears his father blame the Jews for his own problems, and when the headmaster singles out the Jews at school, Max experiences shame and confusion.

When his family moves to Munich, Max becomes part of the Nazi culture. He strives to do what his father advises, "Don't stand out. Don't speak out. Do exactly what your teachers tell you and copy the other boys if you are unsure." Soon Max not only belongs, but he is a leader. When he's told things that make him uncomfortable, he doesn't question or speak out. "When their teachers told them how important it was to rid themselves of the scourge of the Jewish enemy, how the Jews were filthy, inferior, disgusting creatures, Max kept his face as still and impassive as he possibly could. He didn't tell them his old friends were Jewish."

Despite this, Max remembers the happy times with Elsa and Leo, looks at the photograph  that he has kept hidden. "And then the questions would come. Were Leo and Elsa really the enemy? Were they the people he had to hate? Could there be a mistake of some sort?" Life in Munich is good, but when Max hears things about Jews, he isn't convinced they are true. Soon he begins to doubt that Leo and Elsa were Jews.

Max is able to bury deep inside himself, the memories of that wonderful day in Vienna. When he hears things that he knows to be lies, he stops registering that this might be wrong. But when Max looks at the photograph of that wonderful day so long ago in Vienna he realizes what his current life in the Hitler Youth truly is. "In an instant, nothing of his current life was real. He saw it for what it was: a vain, superficial attempt to fit in. To be loved. To be praised by his father, by his leaders, by Hitler. None of it was a fraction as real as his friendships with Leo and Elsa had been. The only two people who had ever really loved him for himself, with no expectations or demands." But when he destroys the photograph and the letters from Leo that his father has hidden, Max shuts his heart against these thoughts. 

Eventually, Max is forced to confront what he has become, when he is taken to kill his first Jew at Auschwitz, where his father now works. That Jew does what Max couldn't do for himself. She reminds him of who he once was and that it is love, not work that sets you free. But can Max accept that as an answer to the conflict he is experiencing or is this merely just another test to prove he's a good Nazi? Does Max have the courage to stand up for what he knows is the truth: that Jews are not the enemy, that hating and murdering your fellow human beings is wrong and doesn't solve any world problems? Does he have the strength to face the truth of what his life has been?

It's probably unlikely in the real world of the 1930s and 1940s, that a young Max, thoroughly indoctrinated in Nazi ideology, would have given a second thought to what he had been taught and questioned what he was asked to do. Beginning in 1933, the education system in Germany was purged of Jewish teachers and professors and anyone who opposed the Nazi regime. The German education system which had produced a wealth of brilliant scientists, artists, writers and poets, now focused on indoctrinating young people in Nazi ideology including racism, antisemitism, obedience to the state, and devotion to Hitler. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, "The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls were the primary tools that the Nazis used to shape the beliefs, thinking and actions of German youth." Resistance was almost impossible and not tolerated, as members of the White Rose resistance group, a small group of university students would quickly learn.

Nevertheless, When The World Was Ours is a well written novel that encourages young readers to consider these kinds of questions in a world where social media now entices others to ridicule, cancel, dox and hate others for their different beliefs, attitudes, customs and skin colour. By portraying the transformation of Max, Kessler encourages her readers to consider what leads people to hate and how such hate can be countered, so that events like the Holocaust might never again happen.

Book Details:

When The World Was Ours by Liz Kessler
New York: Aladdin   2021
337 pp.