The Woman Who Split The Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner by Marissa Moss

When Lise Meitner was a young girl she loved math, often sleeping with a math book underneath her pillow. Her father who was from Czechoslovakia and her mother who was from Russia valued education for all of their eight children, including Lise. They lived in Austria where it was easier for Jews to study, work and live. However, higher education was off limits for girls in the late nineteenth century in Europe. Their presence in university was deemed distracting. In 1897, the laws were changed allowing women to enter university provided they passed the high school exit exam. This would be difficult for most young women at this time because they would not have attended high school. 

Lise and her older sister Gisela studied and passed the exam; Gisela went on to medical school while Lise went on to study physics at the University of Vienna in 1901. Most of Lise's classes where taught by Ludwig Boltzmann whose daughter was also studying physics. It was Boltzmann who believed in the existence of atoms (something controversial at the time) who presented to Lise the idea that physics was about seeking out the truth, and he urged her to go to graduate school.

Lise Meitner became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Vienna. Because no one wanted to work with a woman, she built her own lab equipment and began studying the absorption of alpha and beta radiation in different metals. In 1907, at the age of twenty-eight, Lise published her first article on measuring the scattering of alpha particles. After meeting Max Planck, who was studying quantum physics, Lise decided to move to Berlin. The University of Berlin was intimidating to Lise because it had no women students or professors.

There, in 1907, she met Dr. Otto Hahn who was working at the Chemistry Institute. She was given a lab room in the basement and made her own equipment. Lise and Otto Hahn began working together and eventually both were given a new modern lab when the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) opened. 

Lise met Albert Einstein in 1909 when they both lectured at a conference in Austria. Einstein's lectures were on relativity and how mass is a form of energy as defined by the equation E=mc2. Einstein explained later that the inside of an atom held enormous energy. He, like Lise and others believed this energy inside the nucleus of an atom could not be extracted or harnessed. In 1913, Einstein came to work at KWI and Lise was now teaching at the University of Berlin.

During World War I under the direction of Fritz Haher, Otto Hahn helped develop chemical weapons for Germany, gassing Allied troops with chlorine gas and killing thousands of men and maiming many more. Haber "weaponized chlorine" and also developed a means for Germany to make fertilizer and fertilizer-based explosives as well. For Lise, the use of science in warfare was deeply upsetting.

The post-war period in Germany was one of soaring inflation and tough times. Lise continued her research into beta and gamma radiation, studying the "decay chain of radioactive substances". She continued to publish scientific papers with Otto Hahn. Together they showed that decay could be used to date the Earth and Sun. It was an exciting time in radioactive research: the cyclotron was being developed to study particle behaviour and Lise was using a cloud chamber to map the movement of particles.

In 1920, Lise became a professor at the University of Berlin. At this time she began a close friendship with Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe after he came to lecture in Berlin and she in Copenhagen. In 1924 Lise won the Prussian Academy of Science's Silver Liebniz Medal. In 1925 she won the Vienna Academy of Science's Ignaz Lieben Prize and in 1929 she and Otto Hahn were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. However, the 1920's saw the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany, especially against Jewish scientists like Einstein. There was a belief that there was a pure Aryan science and that the science of Jewish scientists was fraudulent.

January,1933 saw Hitler become the Chancellor of the Third Reich. It became illegal for Jews to work in government, universities and research institutions, so Einstein resigned from the KWI and the Berlin Academy of Sciences and remained in the United States. Many Jewish German scientists quit, leaving the country for Britain and the United States, but Lise Meitner was not one of them. Although she couldn't teach or attending meetings, she still had her lab. 

By 1938, Lise was the only remaining Jewish scientist at KWI and she was finally asked to leave by Otto Hahn who was being threatened with the loss of government funding. Lise lost her KWI apartment and eventually found herself trapped in Germany. With the help of an entire network of scientists, Lise fled Germany, on the efforts of Dutch physicists Dirk Coster and Adriaan Fokker and her editor Paul Rosbaud, to the Netherlands. She eventually moved to Stockholm, Sweden.

In  the mid-1930's,  scientists were bombarding elements with neutrons and creating what were thought to be new heavier isotopes which they called transuranics. After not having collaborated with Lise for many years, Otto Hahn and his new partner Fritz Straussman sought her out to help them understand their results. In 1938, when Lise met Otto in Copenhagen, they discussed the strange results of his recent experiments. Instead of seeing new heavier transuranics, Otto was creating lighter elements. He simply did not understand what was happening on an atomic level and he needed Lise's help. In 1939, he wrote up and published a paper with his results, concluding that all transuranics research needed to be reinterpreted. But Lise, contemplating his results, soon understood that something much more important was happening - the uranium atom was being split! It was this discovery that would change the war and the course of history. Unfortunately Lise Meitner would not be acknowledged for her discovery.

Discussion

Anyone who has studied chemistry and physics in high school and university will be familiar with the names and contributions of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, James Franck, Fritz Haber and Otto Hahn. What is almost certain, is that these same students never heard of Lise Meitner, a woman physicist and a Austrian Jew who discovered nuclear fission.  The Woman Who Split the Atom tells Lise's story, her contributions to nuclear physics, her daring escape from Germany and her struggle to be recognized for her scientific contributions.

Marissa Moss has written an engaging, informative account of Lise Meitner's life and scientific contributions to nuclear physics. It is the story of a life set against the backdrop of gender and racial discrimination amid two World Wars.

Author Marissa Moss captures the determination and courage that Lise Meitner exhibited throughout her life, succeeding in spite of enormous obstacles encountered as a result of discrimination. Initially she faced many barriers simply because she was female. Women were finally allowed to attend university in 1907 but they had to pass a high school exit exam, despite the fact that girls could not attend high school  Lise passed this exam. Once she graduated, Lise couldn't get hired as a physicist and lost a good job writing for an encyclopedia because she was a woman. So she had to use her initial rather than her full first name to disguise her gender. 

Even though women were finally allowed onto the campus of the University of Belin in 1908, Lise found the atmosphere intimidating and hostile at the mostly male school. She was given a lab, in a basement without pay or position, and had to make her own lab equipment. Despite all of these obstacles, Lise's hard work and determination eventually saw her develop an international reputation for her research on radioactivity. She published many articles and earned the respect of many of her male scientist-peers. 

When she finally achieved an academic position in Berlin, a new obstacle surfaced: her Jewish ancestry. But Meitner was reluctant to flee to safety until the last minute, because it meant giving up all that she had achieved as a woman physicist. It would mean starting all over. Because she had overcome many of the barriers due to her sex, she felt she could also overcome the barriers due to being Jewish. She was wrong.

However, an even greater challenge awaited Meitner. In 1938, Lise Meitner was able to explain Otto Hahn's unusual experimental results as the splitting of the atom, a process she called nuclear fission.  Lise and Otto Hahn published a paper in 1939 describing nuclear fission and were nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1941, 1942 and 1943. In 1945, Otto Hahn was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize  for nuclear fission. He refused to acknowledge that it was Meitner who understood the atomic process that was occurring in his experiments. This lack of credit continues to this day, with the continued erasure of Lise Meitner as the scientist who explained the process of nuclear fission.

In her Author's Note, Moss writes, "By focusing on Meitner's work, as she did herself, I found the story that needed to be told: how a brilliant woman was marginalized first because of her gender, then because of her ethnicity, and ultimately by her gender again when the Nobel Prize went to a man who had no concept at all of nuclear fission, rather than to the woman who had described exactly what happened." Moss's book is an attempt to give Meitner back her place in history as the discoverer of nuclear fission. 

Her erasure was foreshadowed by the events surrounding the discovery of a new isotope called protactinium in which "...Meitner did the experiments, discussed the results with Hahn, wrote up their findings, and published them." Hahn received credit for this discovery and was awarded the Emil Fischer Medal. Meitner received a copy of the medal and no recognition for her research. She would be nominated at total of FORTY-EIGHT times for the Nobel Prize. She never won.

There are forty short chapters in The Woman Who Split the Atom, each beginning with an comic illustration of an event to be highlighted in the chapter. Moss describes Lise Meitner's struggles to be accepted into the male dominated world of science, and to have her work acknowledged, something that was denied repeatedly. Moss also describes Lise Meitner's belief that science should be used for the good of mankind. This belief was severely challenged through two world wars that saw scientists develop chemical warfare in World War I and the atom bomb in World War II. In the latter war, it was Lise's discovery of nuclear fission the led to the development of the bomb. She would work towards developing  atomic energy and to challenging German scientists who refused to acknowledge their complicity in the Holocaust.

The Woman Who Split the Atom is fascinating reading, drawing on the considerable research done by Marissa Moss. It is highly recommended for those interested in history and science, especially the discovery of atomic energy. Moss includes a detailed Afterword which is a sort of Epilogue demonstrating that the record regarding the discovery of nuclear fission remains incomplete and inaccurate without the acknowledgement of Lise Meitner's contribution. This thorough and detailed biography includes an Author's Note, a Timeline of Meitner's Life and Achievements, Glossary of Select Terms in Physics, Profiles of Scientists Mentioned, Notes with sources of quotes, a Select Bibliography and an Index. 

Book Details:

The Woman Who Split The Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner by Marissa Moss
New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers     2022
258 pp.

But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust edited by Charlotte Schallie

In this poignant graphic novel memoir, three stories of four children who survived the horrors of the Holocaust are told first in graphic novel form, then in their own words.

In the first story, A Kind of  Resistance, David Schaffer's story is told through the illustrations of Miriam Libicki. David was born in 1931 in Vama, Bucovina which was part of Romania at that time. Their trouble began in 1939 when David was no longer able to attend public school. His teacher, Mr. Twardovski came to his home to tell his parents this so that he would not have to shame David in front of his classmates.

In 1940, David and his family had to leave their family home, taking only what they could carry. The Romanian government ordered Jews out of the rural areas and into the cities. They were sent to Gura Humorului and placed in a ghetto, before being sent to a train station to be "evacuated". Accompanying them was David's maternal great-grandmother who was carried on a kind of stretcher because she was unable to walk.

They were taken to Ataki located on the Dniester River, and sent to a rundown house with no doors or windows and blood on the walls. After this the Jews were taken across the Dniester River and were ordered to walk in convoys by the Romanian soldiers. It was here that David's family had to leave behind his great-grandmother to die, alone. 

 

At Kopaigord, the Jews were left by the army. David's father discovered that it was not safe for them to remain, so at nightfall David and his parents walked off into the woods. By November 1941 the had arrived in a small village, Ivashkovtsi which was occupied by Romanian soldiers. As they fled through the woods, they were joined by the Landau family consisting of Marcus and Nellie and their two daughters, Annie and Fritzi and their grandmother. 

 

Together David's family and the Landau family were helped by a Ukrainian family who allowed them to stay in their summer kitchen. They would stay in this area, sometimes hiding in the woods, sometimes hiding underground as German soldiers searched the woods, until the area was liberated by the Soviets in 1944. Then they began their journey back to their home in Romania.

In the second story, Thirteen Secrets, Nico and Rolf Kamp's story is told through the artwork of Gilad Seliktar.  Rolf begins the story by telling Gilad they lived in Amersfoort with their parents, Fritz and Inge. They were originally from Germany however they also spoke Dutch. Their father owned a factory in Holland and often went there for business. Rolf's brother Nico was three years youngers and when he was very young, he had a girlfriend named Betty. Rolf and Nico's grandparents lived only ten blocks from them.

Things began to change in 1940 with planes flying overhead. Eventually Rolf had to leave school and go to a new Jewish school and Nico to a Jewish kindergarten. Then they had to start wearing the Jewish star on their clothing.

They were taken to their first hiding place in June, 1942. Nico was five years old. Their mother removed the Jewish stars that were sewn onto all their clothing before they left. Rolf and Nico were taken to the Amersfoort train station by a "very nice gentleman". Their first hideout was with a young couple that they called aunt and uncle and they were given new names: Rolf became Rudolf and Nico became Klaas. Unfortunately, when Nico divulged their secret about being Jewish amongst strangers, the underground was contacted and the two boys were moved to a farm in Leusden.  After this it was to a farm in Stoutenberg, then to hide in a chicken coop. In the spring of 1944, Nico and Rolf were taken in by the Traa family in Achterveld, where seventeen people ended up being hidden by the end of the war. Nico's memories were somewhat different from his brother's but in the end they were reunited with their mother who had survived Auschwitz and Libau.

 

In the third story, But I Live, illustrated by Barbara Yelin, tells the experiences of Emmie Arbel who nows lives in  Kiryat Tiv'on, Israel.  Emmie was born in Holland and had two brothers Menachem and Rudi. When she was four-years-old, two policemen came to their house and took the family to Westerbrook transit camp. Emmie remembers the constant fear of being deported to other camps. Her father was taken away first, then Emmie, her mother, Rudi and her older brother were taken to Ravensbruck. Emmie remembers how the women at Westerbrook were so oddly dressed with their blue and white striped clothing, the women crying at night and the constant hunger. At Ravensbruck, Emmie remembers them being ordered to take off all their clothes and having her hair cut. 

Like the other prisoners, Emmie was made to stand for hours, even while her own mother fainted. To help her mother would mean death. Gradually the memories of life in Holland faded away. A few days after liberation, Emmie and Rudi watched their mother die. Emmie knew her mother had to eat but that she had given her food so that Emmie could live.

After the war, Emmie and Rudi traveled to Sweden where she spent some time in the hospital recovering from tuberculosis. In the foster home, she set fire to the curtains, wanting to burn down the house. In 1946, Emmie and Rudi returned to Holland and were they were adopted by a Jewish family along with their brother Menachem. Eventually they moved to Israel.

Discussion 

But I Live is a memoir of four Jewish children who survived the Holocaust. There are three parts to this book: the first part is their story told in illustrated form, the second part is comprised of essays placing the child survivor's experiences within the context of the war, and the third is their story in their own words. There is also a section written by the graphic artists about this project.

In the first part, described above, each survivor tells a graphic artist about their experiences and these are portrayed in the accompanying artwork. David's story focuses on his family working together to survive in hiding in the woods. Nico and Rolf's story highlights how the underground managed to save children by hiding them in various safe houses throughout the war. Emmie's story is about a very young child experiencing the horrors of the concentration camp system and the many things that still trigger flashbacks and unpleasant memories.

 

In the second part each essay attempts to explain some aspect of the survivors' experiences within the larger context of the events of World War II. For example, in the essay The Holocaust in Transnistria by Alexander Korb, David's experiences are explained within the larger context of the history of this region. Korb explains how David's family was able to beat the odds and survive because the Holocaust in Romania as "neither controlled nor guarded by the Germans....The less systematic manner of persecution, horrific as it was, provided the Romanian Jews with higher chances of survival, because there were ways to fight back and to disobey the rules. The survival of David's family makes that perfectly clear." 

These essays also attempt to explain how recent history may have impacted the experiences the child survivors had. For example, Transnistria belonged to the Soviet Union after World War I and anti-Semitism was not tolerated so there was no association between the Jews and Soviet occupation like there was in other parts of Eastern Europe. And one possible reason that David's family was helped by the local Ukrainian population is that having survived the Holodomor, the man-made famine caused by Stalin, Ukrainians knew what it meant to starve so they helped the hiding Jews.

In Surviving In Hiding From the Nazis by Dienke Hondius, Rolf and Nico Kamp's story is clarified as they were very young when war engulfed them. Neither remember much about where they lived or their early life. Hondius speculates on who exactly helped hid the Kamp children and explores what it was like to be in hiding, coping with sudden extreme dangers and having to act very quickly. This piece also mentions the trauma continued during the post-war period as survivors returned home to find all their possessions gone, either destroyed or stolen. Although the remained silent for many decades, the child survivors have, in the last few years found their voice to tell their stories.

 

In Andrea Low's essay, Surviving Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen As A Child, the horrific experience of being a very young child in the concentration camp system is explored. Low describes the extent of the German camp system, which was continually being added to throughout the war and the catastrophic conditions that little Emmie would have had to endure, including being surrounded constantly by people dying and the prospect of death.

The third part of this collaborative effort has David Schaeffer, Nico and Rolf Kamp and Emmie Arbel also relate, in their own words, their experiences as child survivors of the Holocaust and fills in some of the details not explored in the illustrated versions of their stories.

But I Live is an intimate look at the experiences of four child survivors of the Holocaust, allowing readers to experience their stories visually through the graphic novel medium, to learn about a specific aspect of each story from a historical perspective and then to read about these experiences from the survivors themselves. Perhaps the most moving of all the stories is that of Emmie, whose experiences at Ravensbruck continue to haunt her, even in her old age. The other three survivors, David, Nico and Rolf did not experience the concentration camps. Emmie's experiences were so traumatizing that simple acts like her daughter cutting her hair short or eating a yoghurt brought back triggering memories of the camp. She doesn't like crowds and needs to have her back to a wall in a restaurant.

But I Live is the fruit of a "collaborative research project that brought together Holocaust survivors, graphic artists, Holocaust and Human Rights educations professionals, historians, student teachers, high school teachers, librarians, and archivists over the course of three years.The three graphic novelists were invited to meet with four Holocaust child survivors...asking them to jointly explore storylines, settings, and themes." From their Afterword, the graphic artists write, "As each survivor holds unique knowledge not only of the mass atrocity itself but also of the process of sharing and shaping their life memories, it became imperative for the artists to anchor their visual narratives in the voices of the four child survivors. Thus, when we read But I Live, we hear the voices of the survivors as they are visually reimagined..." The artists indicate that working with the survivors using an "art-based approach"  helped them recall new memories and facilitated the relationship between the artist and the child survivor. 

But I Live is informative, deeply moving and an important addition to Holocaust literature and is highly recommended for high school students. It demonstrates the varied experience of the Holocaust and retains these experiences and lessons for future generations. The goal is that something like the Holocaust never happen again. As Emmie Arbel offers, "My words are especially meant for you, the younger generation: Accept people who are different. And spread good in the world, not bad." Amen.

Book Details:

But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust by Charlotte Schallie
Toronto: New Jewish Press    2022
189 pp.

Unbreakable. The Spies Who Cracked the Nazi's Secret Code by Rebecca E. F. Barone

Unbreakable tells the remarkable story of how the British, French and Polish worked to break the Enigma code, helping the Allies to win World War II.

The story opens in Warsaw, Poland in 1929.  A "heavy package with a German postmark" arrived at the Polish customs office. Almost immediately, an urgent request came in from the German embassy to return the package which should never have been sent to Poland as it was intended for a German recipient. His curiosity piqued, the Polish customs officer opened the package and found what at first glance looked to be a typewriter. However, there was no ribbon, no carriage to hold paper like a regular typewriter. There were keys which when pressed lit up one of the small circular windows arranged in rows at the top. The Polish customs officer called the Polish cipher agency and two men arrived to examine the machine. Over the weekend they took the machine apart, examined it and reassembled it. It was repackaged and returned to Germany, the delay being that it was the weekend.

Two years later on November 1, 1931, Hans-Thilo Schmidt met up with Rodolphe Lemoine, in the Grand Hotel in Verviers, Belgium. Schmidt was an assistant to the head of the Germain cipher office while Lemoine was the top recruiter and handler for the Deuxieme Bureau of the French military intelligence. Germany had developed a new cipher that no one in the world was able to break. They were using a machine called the Enigma to create the code and it was unbreakable.  Schmidt told Lemoine that he had access to all the information pertaining to Enigma and could give it to France, for a price. When Schmidt began bringing information to France, Captain Gustave Bertrand, a senior officer and a code breaker became involved. The initial information Schmidt brought was not helpful to either the French or the British in solving the Enigma problem. 

Undaunted, Bertrand travelled to Warsaw, Poland in December, 1931 to meet with Major Gwido Langer, head of the Polish cipher office, in the hopes the Polish and French might work together. Bertrand gave Langer the Enigma manuals and instructions that Schmidt had passed along. Langer was ecstatic because up to this point they had been unable to crack Enigma and he had high hopes this new information would help.

 

The Enigma was complex machine in which an electrical signal passed from the keyboard to a plugboard connected to pairs of letters and then to three (or more) rotors and onto a reflecting drum which sent the signal back through the rotors, plugboard to a window at the top of the machine with a letter. Each letter in a message when through this encryption. In order to decode the message, the settings in the Enigma machine of the receiver had to be the same as those of the sender's Enigma. The daily indicator settings for the rotors consisted of three letters, one for each rotor that gave the starting angle for each rotor were sent TWICE at the beginning of the message, unencrypted. These daily settings were called the key.

Meanwhile in Germany in November, 1932 political events were beginning to move quickly. Adolf Hitler had been arrested for the Munich Beer Hall Putsch years ago in 1924 on charges of high treason. He was given a lenient nine month sentence during which time he wrote his infamous Mein Kampf. In this book, Hitler outlined his plans to recover Germany's glory and eliminate the Jews and Polish people whom he considered "inferior races". Germany's problems were all due to the presence of Jews in the country and the world. In the following years, Hitler began to spread his message throughout Germany, that certain races and religions were responsible for the dire economic situation in the country. His political power grew until the Nazis held almost a third of the seats in the German government.

In November, 1932, in Warsaw, Poland, Langer's cipher staff were unsuccessful so he decided to try a new approach: he hired electronics expert Antoni Palluth, one of the two men who had examined the missing Enigma in 1929 and built a replica. He brought along Maksymilian Ciezki, head of the German section of the Polish cipher office. These two men brought in three young mathematicians, Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki. Langer's approach changed from linguistics to mathematics and it paid off. 

Working on his own, Rejewski initially had no success using variables and developing mathematical equations that explained how changes to the rotors or the plugboard affected one another. But then Schmidt gave Bertrand "...a photocopy of two tables of the keys for September and October, 1932". Bertrand passed these on to Langer who gave them to Ciezki and then to Rejewski.  At first it seemed like these did not help either, but then Rejewski decided to make a different guess about the Enigma keyboard which was arranged similar to that of a typewriter except adapted for the German language. Instead he wondered if the letters on the typewriter keys were arranged in alphabetical order. When he did this, all his equations worked and the Poles were able to read the German Enigma! It was January, 1933.

But the Polish ciphers had their work cut out for them. With Germany preparing for war, German military and civilian groups, each called a "net", were now using Enigma to send messages. Each net began using different keys and the Polish cipher team had to break each key for each net every day. This exhausting work went on for five years at Saxon Palace in Warsaw. As tensions increased between Germany and Poland, Langer decided to move the cipher team to the Kabaty Woods, ten miles outside of Warsaw to a new built complex called "the Gale". The code breaking continued but was so tedious that Rejewski developed a machine called a bomba, with switches and rotors "that could run through all the combinations from a known rotor starting point."

In Germany the situation continued to worsen.  In March, 1938, Lemoine was picked up the Gestapo and released, German troops crossed into Austria in the Anschluss, the Annexation of Austria, and in September 1938, the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia was annexed by Germany. Then in December, 1938, the Germans increased the number of rotors used in Enigma making determining the keys very difficult. 

The English and French still did not know the Polish had been able to read Enigma and their efforts were unsuccessful. Their meeting in Paris, France with the Polish revealed nothing. After Germany invaded Prague Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Slovakia, Alastair Denniston (head of British codebreaking) and Alfred Dillwyn Knox met with Bertrand, Langer and the Polish cipher team. There they learned that the Poles had broken Enigma years earlier and they obtained a replica of Enigma.

With the British, French and Polish codebreakers struggling to catch up and find a way to break open Enigma, open war began with the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. As British codebreakers took up the task of deciphering Enigma, the British navy also set about obtaining any information they could from captured weather boats and sinking U-boats. The race was on to defeat Enigma and win the war.

Discussion

 

Unbreakable is the riveting account of the race by the Allies to unlock the German's Enigma coding machine. Barone masterfully guides her readers through this complex story that involves so many people, some of whom lost their lives to the cause.

Barone pieces together the contributions many Polish, French and British made in the race to break Enigma. Barone, in her Epilogue writes, 

"Breaking the naval Enigma was a testament to teamwork. There was not one hero, not even on team of heroes. The Enigma story played out over the course of more than a decade, with action spread throughout almost a dozen countries: Polish cryptologists worked early and long to crack the Enigma cipher; French and German spies and agents provided intelligence; British codebreakers took up the puzzle; naval ships and sailors seized codebooks from the U-boats; intercept stations relayed messages; and Wrens at the bombes actually ran the machines."

Her cast of characters includes not just the codebreakers like the Polish team of Rejewski, Zygalski, Rozycki, Langer, Ciezki and Palluth, and the British team of Alan Turing who developed the "cryptological bombe", Harry Hinsley, Hugh Alexander, and Gordon Welchman who devised a way to configure the wiring of Turing's bombe, and Joan Clarke. Many others took risks that sometimes cost them their lives. There were the over sixteen hundred "Wrens" (Women's Royal Navy Service) whose task was to operate and maintain the more than two hundred bombes, a physically challenging task that could easily cause a short circuit. There was Gunner "Florrie" Foord who rescued a bag containing "cribs"  and plugboard settings that allowed Turing to set his bombe to work solving the naval Enigma. And there was First Lieutenant Tony Fasson and sailor Colin Grazier who rescued codebooks from the sinking U-boat U-559 at the expense of their lives, codebooks that ultimately broke the naval Enigma. 

Unbreakable manages to explain the workings of Enigma and how it was deciphered in a way that is understandable and engaging to readers. It was a complicated machine and breaking it was not a one step task, but involved many attempts and innovations by the codebreakers.  The story is broken up into four parts, with short chapters, focusing on a single topic with some black and white photographs. Some chapters focus on events while others on specific individuals such as Joan Clarke.

Barone includes an Epilogue in which she informs readers as to the fate of some of the individuals she focused on, a detailed Timeline of events beginning in 1929, and extensive Bibliography for further research. There are also Endnotes providing sources to quotes used throughout the text.

Unbreakable is a fascinating account of the efforts of codebreakers, military men, and spies to crack Enigma which was considered unbreakable by the Germans. 

Book Details:

Unbreakable: The Spies Who Cracked the Nazi's Secret Code by Rebecca E.F. Barone
New York: Henry Holt and Company   2022

260 pp.

The Silent Unseen by Amanda McCrina

Sixteen-year-old Maria Kaminska is being held prison in the NKVD headquarters in Lwow, Poland. She has been captured with no identification papers, and a German pistol, a Walther. The Soviets have been in Lwow, only for twenty-four hours and they are still clearing the area of Germans. 

Comrade Colonel F. Volkov, 64th Rifle Division, NKVD questions Maria as to why she is in Lwow. She tells him she was a slave labourer for two and a half years at the Opel automotive plant in Russelsheim, Germany. She escaped during the bombing of the plant by the Americans, travelled by rail to Tarnow and is trying to get back home to Brod in Wolyn Province.

Volkov writes Maria a pass, but advises her to go back to Przemysl and register with the Red Cross to locate her surviving family. Volkov warns Maria that a Red Army pass is a death sentence if she encounters the UPA or the Polish resistance. Maria doesn't know who the UPA are, but there had been Polish resistance in the forest outside Brod in 1939 when the Soviets first invaded.

In Lviv, Poland, seventeen-year-old Kostyantyn (Kostya) Vitaliyovych Lasko has been in a bar drinking vodka, waiting to meet his contact. He is working as a courier for the UPA. He's dressed in a stolen Red Army uniform with papers that say he is Valerik Fialko, Second Battalion, 100th Rifle Division. He doesn't know what his contact looks like as the coded message came to Commander Shukheyvch's headquarters in Volyn, and he's getting nervous having been here so long.

His contact turns out to be Nataliya, a blonde-haired woman who is a UPA mole in the Red Army front. She tells him there's a cache under the bench across the square but she also gives him a coded message for Marko, commander of the L'viv UPA group. 

 

However, instead of first taking the message to Marko, Kostya meets up with his twenty-two-year old cousin, Kyrylo Romaniuk, a squad leader in the UPA. He tells his cousin who the contact was and the location of the cache. But when Kyrylo asks Kostya to decode the message meant for Marco, he angrily refuses, asks to leave the group and threatens to tell Marko that he's intercepting his messages. For this Kyrylo briefly has Kostya locked up but releases him to return to Marko and warns him that if he tells Marko about the messages he will kill Kostya's mother and his sister Lesya.

When Kostya finally arrives at Marco's headquarters in the crypt of a church, he is questioned and beaten as Marco knows he is taking the messages to Kyrylo. Aleksey Solovey offers to take care of Kostya and his cousin Kyrylo, outside of the city. Kostya is handcuffed, his mouth stuffed with a handkerchief and Solovey and Andriy drive him north of Lviv to an isolated farmhouse. There a Polish woman, Mrs. Kijeck tends to Kostya's smashed-in face.

Solovey gives her photographs of the train station where the Red Army is putting the Polish resistance prisoners, in exchange for bags of medical supplies. For Kostya, he obtains a change of clothes, a gun and a map and tell him to avoid the roads.

Meanwhile, Maria manages to reach her village of Brod on the Slonowka River. The river cuts the village into two parts: the western part is Blizszy Brod, the eastern part is Dalszy Brod. Enroute, Maria has encounters four NKVD patrols who allow her to pass with Volkov's pass. They tell her there is no Brod and that she should return to Lwow. When Maria comes to her family's farm, nothing remains but the ancient stock barn where she spends the night.

In the morning, another NKVD patrol arrives, this time with a young peasant boy as a prisoner. From the hayloft, Maria watches as the NKVD lieutenant shoots the boy in the left knee and when he attempts to shoot him again, Maria shoots the lieutenant and four other NKVD soldiers dead. One escapes. As it turns out, Maria has saved Kostya's life.

He tells her the NKVD are hunting UPA and explains to her who the UPA are and that he is former UPA. It is evident he can't travel so the next morning Maria travels into Dalszy Brok seeking help for Kostya. There she encounters the Polish Resistance who disarm her and tell her that in retaliation for the deaths of five NKVD, Dalszy Brod was raided, everyone machine gunned and the homes burned. Maria attempts to explain that she is responsible for the NKVD deaths. It is at this point that she is reunited with her brother Tomek, whom she believed was dead. Tomek tells Maria that he managed to escape to England via France and that he parachuted back into France as a trained special-operations agent for the English. She learns he is what is called "Silent Unseen" whose orders come directly from the war ministry in London.

In the Polish bunker, Tomez and his group drug and interrogate Kostya. Tomez's goal is to force a meeting with Kostya's cousin, Kyrylo also known as Lys, and to attempt to get the UPA to agree to a ceasefire and to work together with the Polish Resistance against the NKVD. This seems very wrong to Maria because the UPA killed their parents. Nevertheless, Tomek believes this is their only chance to rid Poland of the Soviets whom he believes do not just want to defeat the Nazis but occupy the country as well. He tells Maria that he plans to take the message himself to Kyrylo. 

 

However, this plan goes awry when Tomek goes missing. Maria believes that Kostya is the only person who can lead her to his cousin Kyrylo and locate Tomek. But finding Tomek will test their loyalties and draw them deeper into danger.

 

Discussion

 

The Silent Unseen is a well written historical fiction novel that focuses on a small area in eastern Poland near the end of World War II. The war has seen alliances flip as eastern Poland was first invaded by the Soviets (the Germans took the western half of the country) in 1939, then "liberated" by Nazi Germany during Operation Barbarossa and is now being invaded again by the Soviet Red Army as they push the Nazis back. During the German occupation, the Polish Resistance and the Ukrainian nationalists (the UPA) who wanted an independent Ukraine incorporating part of southeastern Poland, fought the Germans and each other. The Silent Unseen is set as the Soviets over-run eastern Poland, hunting down not just Nazi soldiers but both Polish resistance and the UPA. 

 

The title, The Silent Unseen is the name given to special operatives who where Polish soldiers who were parachuted into Poland and who worked to subvert the Germans, the Ukrainians and the Soviets in Poland. With the invasion of Poland in 1939 by Germany and the Soviet Union, the Republic of Poland  government fled into exile in Great Britain, the Polish navy escaped to Britain and thousands of Polish soldiers escaped to France and then to Britain via Hungary or Romania. Some of those soldiers became what were called Cichociemni - a term that meant "the silent unseen." They were volunteers who  simply disappeared overnight from their units in Britain, entering specialized training to become operatives in German-occupied Poland.  They were trained by the British SOE (Special Operations Executive) and the officers of the Polish Special Unit and usually worked in groups of between two and six men. They were trained as radio operators, sappers, intelligence agents, and were taught survival skills, hand to hand combat, and the use of explosives. Not only were the Cichociemni parachuted into Poland but drops containing much needed supplies for the Polish underground were also made.

In her Author's Note at the back, McCrina indicates that the character Tomek Kaminski is based on the real life Cichociemni, Marian Golebiewski, a Polish soldier who commanded units of the Polish resistance in the Volhynia region. He was willing to work with the Ukrainians against the invading Soviets, sometimes against the wishes of the Polish government in Britain.

McCrina has crafted another exciting story told in alternating chapters by two young people whose families and lives have been utterly destroyed by war. A young Polish woman, Maria Kaminska is one narrator. She had been captured and sent to Germany to work as a slave in a factory. Before this she and her parents were informed that brother Tomek who was a soldier in the Polish army had been killed. When she returns to her village of Brod, she finds her family's farm destroyed and the graves of her parents. 

The second narrator is a young Ukrainian boy, Kostya Lasko, also from Brod. Kostya has been working as a courier for the Ukrainian nationalists but wants out from the UPA after almost being murdered for being discovered to be a "rat". He had been forced by his cousin, the brutal Kyrlyo Romaniuk, to provide access to the coded messages from UPA command. Kostya's papa is already dead, the Germans took his sister Lyudya, but he believes his mother Klara and his sister Lesya have likely been murdered.

Eventually Maria and Kostya's paths cross when Kostya is taken prisoner by the NKVD in Brod and Maria steps in to save his life. However, Maria being Polish and Kostya being Ukrainian means neither trusts the other, reflecting the distrust and conflict between the Ukrainian and Polish peoples in the region. In Brod, the two encounter Maria's brother Tomek, who it turns out is not dead but a special agent, a Cichociemni, or silent unseen. 

A major strength of The Silent Unseen is the author's ability to portray how the two main characters, one Polish, one Ukrainian, view each other, how the war has changed everything. Their relationship is a reflection of what has been happening in Poland over the duration of the war: mutual distrust between the Polish and Ukrainian population. This distrust is so great, that the two groups even have difficulty cooperating in the face of a more serious, mutual enemy - the Soviet Union.

As Tomek sets out on his mission to try to unite the warring UPA and Polish resistance against the Soviets, Maria and Kostya themselves are caught in a web of distrust. An example of this is when Tomek doesn't return from his mission to seek out Kostya's cousin, Kyrlyo. Maria thinks, "He was dead, and the boy knew it. The boy had been working for Marko all along. This whole thing was a trick, an elaborate trick, and Tomek fell for it. I fell for it. We were both going to die for it."

Even though Maria saved Kostya's life he doesn't trust her and the feeling is mutual. For Maria, she considers her relationship "...purely utilitarian. He did this, therefore I did that, he did that, therefore I did this. Kindness --genuine, unthinking selfless kindness -- just left me suspicious." 

When the two set out to find Tomek, Maria takes Kostya along because her brother went to see Kostya's cousin, Kyrlyo. She lies to him, telling him that his mother and sister are being held prisoner and that if he doesn't co-operate they will die. Their mutual distrust plays out numerous times on the journey. When Maria goes to find water and gets lost and is long in returning, Kostya believes the only reason she returned  "...she remembered she needed  him after all -- because he was useful. It was only ever because he was useful. She had saved his life in that barn because he was useful, and she was dragging him along with her now because he was useful."

They are helped on their journey by a farmer Marek and his wife Agata. When Maria sees the food that Agata has packed for them in the musette bag,  this act of kindness after so much cruelty and death catches her off guard. "I hated that it caught me off guard -- people helping because they wanted to, not because they had to or because they were expecting something in return. I hated that I always assumed there was some hidden motive, some angle. I hated that my first instinct was to ask why -- why would somebody do that? Why would she? Why would Marek? Why would Lew?"

Maria also recognizes how war has changed her and her country. When she and Kostya arrive at what used to be Kyrlyo's safe house, they are initially taken in by a neighbour, Inna. When Maria sees a photograph of Inna's husband, Mykhaylo a Ukrainian in a Polish uniform she is stunned. "Mykhaylo and Inna were both Ukrainian names. It was so jarring now - after Blizsy Brod, after Gora - to think of a Ukrainian in Polish uniform. But of course five years ago it wouldn't have been jarring. It was perhaps too simple, even five years ago, to think we were all just Polish by virtue of being from Poland. Even I, relatively privileged and sheltered, could have told you that was too simple. Even then I knew that in some schools and universities Jewish students were made to sit on separate benches in the classrooms and lecture halls; even then I knew that in Wolyn Province ethnic Ukrainians had been forced off their land all through the twenties and thirties to make way for ethnic Poles. But despite that, despite everything, we were all Polish. There were Jews in Polish uniform. There were Ukrainians in Polish uniform. It had taken this war to tear us apart in ways that seemed irreparable."

 

Ironically, Inna whom both Maria and Kostya trust, gives them away to the NKVD, but fortunately it is to double agent Nataliya who likely saves their lives in arranging them to be set free.

In the end, Maria and Kostya begin to learn to trust one another. This budding of trust happens in during the wagon ride on the way to Lwow when Maria cannot bear to be hidden in the dark in the false part of the farmers cart. Kostya holds her hand, providing a measure of comfort to her. 

As the novel builds to its thrilling climax, the arrival of Kostya's badly wounded cousin at the safe house on Marka Street, places Maria in mortal danger as a double agent with the NKVD seeks revenge. Despite his damaged knee, Kostya risks his life helping Tomek save Maria, a risk Maria recognizes and is thankful for. The author leaves her readers with some semblance of hope in the beginnings of trust between two young people.

The Silent Unseen is a novel filled with violence, brutality and murder and is therefore recommended for older teens. While all war is brutal, the Second World War was particularly terrible in Poland which suffered from both the Soviet and Nazi invasions, as well fighting between Polish and Ukrainian nationalists. McCrina does an excellent job of portraying what this meant to the average Polish and Ukrainian family - the loss of parents, the disappearance of loved family members and the complete destruction of family homes and villages.

 

The author has included a List of Military and Paramilitary Forces, a much needed List of Characters and an Author's Note that explains the origins of her novel. A map detailing the setting of the story is also included although the author notes that her villages of Brod and Gora are fictional.

 

A very well-written historical fiction novel about a little known aspect of the war in Eastern Europe.

 

Book Details:

The Silent Unseen by Amanda McCrina
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers    2022
301 pp.