It is February, 1945. After taking her father's car for a joyride with her friend Annemarie Toberentz, sixteen-year-old Inge von Emmerich sneaks the car back home. Kurt, her family's chauffeur offers to clean the mud off it in exchange for two honey cakes. While Herr Gundersen gives seven-year-old Adolf and ten-year-old Erich their violin lessons, Inge enters her father's study. On his desk she sees a file with her name on it, something that puzzles her. When Mama finds her in the study listening to Papa's radio, she slaps her and sends her to her room.
Inge manages to start the car and drives to their home in Berlin, hoping to find her papa. As she enters the road near the house, she passes a truck of Soviet soldiers and doesn't stop for her friend, Annemarie who is in the field running towards her. Their home is in ruins and her papa is not there. While Inge searches for the file with her name in her papa's study, she hears soldiers voices downstairs. She hears Annemarie's voice and when she begins screaming, a terrified Inge hides underneath the large desk in the study. After the soldiers leave, Inge rescues the unconscious Annemarie and drives to her papa's camp. The car breaks down just a kilometer away, so leaves Annemarie in the car unconscious and walks to the camp. There Inge sees the most horrific sight imaginable: piles of human bodies.
At first Inge believes this is the work of the Soviet Communists. She meets a man in faded striped clothing from the camp, whom she believes is a prisoner of the Communists. She asks him about her father but he thinks her father is one of the prisoners. As the former prisoner starts to take Inge to the man in charge, she notices that the soldiers are Russian. She begins to realize that the people in the camp were prisoners of the Nazis. When she asks about a man named von Emmerich, the former prisoner tells her about the doctor and how "He wanted to know what he could make you say make you do. How much you could endure. He made sure you were crazy, before you died." He tells her the prisoners were "lab rats", "unworthy of life" and that everyone running the camp has been arrested....except the doctor. Inge flees the camp, realizing that everything she's been told is a lie.
Inge's papa works in a camp "rehabilitating the enemies of Germany. Teaching them to obey. To be better. To be useful and productive." The next day, Inge's mama pulls her from her League of German Girls meeting, and they drive quickly home. At home, her mama tells Inge, Erich and Adolf to each pack a bag with three changes of clothes and a coat. Inge's mother tells them nothing about what is happening or where they are going. Kurt drives them and Helga is also brought along. They don't go to Berlin near papa's camp, as Inge expected, but instead drive to their summer lodge. And when they arrive, the car is unloaded of boxes and baskets of food, much more than three days worth.
At the summer house everyone is sent to their rooms. In her Mama's room next door, Inge hears the radio but cannot make out what is being broadcast. Kurt leaves during the night but leaves a car key and money for Inge under the door. After a week at the lodge, Inge questions her mama as to whether papa is coming. Her mama tells her that he is busy winning the war, creating a new world for them. Her abusive manner towards Inge leads her to leave the lodge and run to the Kleimann's house next door. Inge rips off some of the boards and spends time playing the piano until the house is hit by a bomb. Terrified she races home to find her mother has murdered Helga, Erich and Adolf and shot herself in the head. On the radio, Inge hears that Hitler is dead and the enemy is in Berlin.
At first Inge believes this is the work of the Soviet Communists. She meets a man in faded striped clothing from the camp, whom she believes is a prisoner of the Communists. She asks him about her father but he thinks her father is one of the prisoners. As the former prisoner starts to take Inge to the man in charge, she notices that the soldiers are Russian. She begins to realize that the people in the camp were prisoners of the Nazis. When she asks about a man named von Emmerich, the former prisoner tells her about the doctor and how "He wanted to know what he could make you say make you do. How much you could endure. He made sure you were crazy, before you died." He tells her the prisoners were "lab rats", "unworthy of life" and that everyone running the camp has been arrested....except the doctor. Inge flees the camp, realizing that everything she's been told is a lie.
August, 1946, sees Eva Gerst and her companion, Brigit Heidelmann watching as their ship pulls into New York harbour. Brigit doesn't speak and is easily upset so Eva leads her back to their cabin to get their suitcases. Both girls have papers sewn into the lining of their skirts. Miss Schaffer, in charge of their group leads the thirty-eight refugees off the ship and into customs.
Eventually Eva and Brigit are met by Elizabeth Whittlesby, who goes by the name of Bets. She is from the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and will help to resettle Eva and Brigit. She takes them to her car where they find a young man named Jacob (Jake) Katz in the back seat. Eva notices that he has "the most extraordinary beautiful hazel-green eyes". Brigit is wary of Jake, but when he begins to play the harmonica, she is distracted and smiles. Eva has noticed they are being watched at the airport and then followed by a man with shiny shoes in a car.
They arrive at Powell House and Eva and Brigit are assigned to the blue room. But when Eva goes to find a phone, she runs into the man with the shiny shoes who's been following them. He warns Eva not to talk about her father to anyone and to hold her end of the bargain, to bring the US government her father. He hands her his card with the name of Mr. Cruickshanks on it. Eva knows this is not his real name. And she also knows her father won't be using his real name either. The United States government wants not only her father but also Anna Ptaszynska who is a killer.
The key to finding her father might just be Dr. Schneider, a doctor at Columbia hospital who had been corresponding with her father over research. Eva believes she must find her father before Cruickshanks and the U.S. government do, or there will be no justice. And justice for herself and for twenty-seven people, whose names she has memorized is what matters most.
The key to finding her father might just be Dr. Schneider, a doctor at Columbia hospital who had been corresponding with her father over research. Eva believes she must find her father before Cruickshanks and the U.S. government do, or there will be no justice. And justice for herself and for twenty-seven people, whose names she has memorized is what matters most.
Discussion
Bluebird is an intriguing historical fiction novel based on Project Bluebird, a top secret program run by the CIA from 1949 to 1950. Not much is known about Project Bluebird except that it was a mind control program devised to determine if special techniques such as hypnosis and certain drugs could be used in interrogation and conditioning. It also sought to understand if it could be used to obtain accurate information from willing and unwilling subjects, and if it were possible to control the physical and mental actions of willing and unwilling subjects. There were many other goals as well, such as how long post-hypnotic suggestion could be retained, can a person's personality be altered and if so, how long will it hold. Cameron offers more detail in her detailed Author's Note at the back of the novel.
Cameron draws her readers in immediately with the alternating narratives of Inge von Emmerich, daughter of a German doctor who works at a camp, set in the final days of World War II as the Soviet army moves into eastern Germany, and that of Eva Gerst set eighteen months later in August, 1946 as she and a fellow German, Brigit Heidelmann are arriving to start a new life in America. Eventually, these two narratives converge, with readers likely coming to understand the connection between Inge and Eva beforehand.
However, the guessing doesn't stop there: readers begin to wonder who Eva and Brigit really are. Eva/Inge is on a mission to find her papa, known as "the doctor" at Sachsenhausen Concentration camp located in Oranienburg, north of Berlin. In the novel when Eva discovers the truth of her papa's work, she is horrified and determined to mete out "justice". As it happens, the Allies discover her identity as the missing doctor's daughter, and she is offered passage to North America to help locate him. Eva's determined to find him not for the Allies, but so that she can kill him.
As the search goes on for her father, Eva begins to learn more about her father's research and why the U.S. and even the Soviets want him. Cruikshanks sums it up for Eva: "Imagine, Fraulein, if the mind was a moldable object. If memories could be plucked out...and replaced. Imagine if we could say a word, and have a captured soldier walk back across the lines and disable his own country's weapons. If an agent never blew their cover, because they were unaware that they were an agent at all? Imagine if a man like Hitler could have been removed years ago with one of his own officials...."
But Eva sees the dangers in such a program. "You could make them 'better', Eva thinks. And who gets to decide who is better and who isn't?" Cruikshanks also believes that Anna Ptaszynska was her father's first and most successful experiment. Who Anna is becomes a source of conflict and personal terror for Eva. At first she believes that Brigit/Annemarie is Anna but then she begins to suspect she might be based on her shadowy memories of events that occurred when she was very young. The files she has stolen from her father's study, seem to confirm this. All of this feeds on the profound conflict Eva is experiencing over her own identity.
Eventually, Eva learns the truth from her father about Anna. He tells her that Cruikshanks would love to have an Anna but that he doesn't need her. "He only thinks he does. The process of splitting the personality, of placing a hypnotic suggestion, bending a mind to a certain will, it's all so....messy. Overcomplicated, inefficient, and the outcomes are impossible to predict. When all you really need to make another person do what you wish is the application of the right leverage...."
Eva discovers that her papa has manipulated people to save himself, but this backfires when he is taken by the Soviets and not the Americans as he had hoped. Eventually, through the efforts of Jake, Eva learns her true identity and discovers that maybe this justice was for herself and her lost family.
As the story progresses, Eva changes from an uninformed teenager living in a Nazi regime to understanding just what that regime was doing to people it deemed were "less". Her life immediately after the war is consumed by revenge and obtaining what she believes is justice. But in America, events play out in a way that sees justice determined differently than what Eva intended. She also begins to fall in love with Jake. When he leaves for a time, Eva feels fear for the future. In the end, Jake's return suggests a happier, better future. Their love offers readers hope, that in spite of the most horrible of events, there can be a life worth living.
Bluebird is another excellent novel by Sharon Cameron: there's a storyline filled with twists, shady characters, mystery and a touch of romance. There have been so many novels written about World War II, but Cameron has found a new aspect to write about which should peak the interest of those readers looking for something a bit different.
Bluebird is another excellent novel by Sharon Cameron: there's a storyline filled with twists, shady characters, mystery and a touch of romance. There have been so many novels written about World War II, but Cameron has found a new aspect to write about which should peak the interest of those readers looking for something a bit different.
For information on Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp: https://www.sachsenhausen-sbg.de/en/history/1936-1945-sachsenhausen-concentration-camp/
Book Details:
Bluebird by Sharon Cameron
New York: Scholastic Press 2021
438 pp.
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