Underground Soldier by Marsha Skrypuch

Thirteen year old Luka Barukovich has escaped from a work camp by hiding in the back of a truck loaded with corpses. Luka has reluctantly left his friend, Lida Ferezuk behind, to whatever her fate will be. He can only hope that one day they will see each other again. Luka had been a slave working in a metal factory making bombs but was wounded in the thigh during an attack on the factory.

Luka intends to walk over the mountains and back to Kyiv where he hopes to reunite with his mother and eventually with his father who is in Siberia. He sets out for the mountains in the distance but while walking through a farmers mucky field, Luka badly cuts his foot. Cold, hungry and not properly dressed for travel, Luka manages to find shelter in the farmer's barn. His luck changes the next day when he is caught by the farmer's wife attempting to steal food from their well stocked pantry.

The farmers, Helmut and Margarete, are Germans who were given the farm by the Nazis when they overran this area. They have two sons, Claus, who is serving at the Eastern Front and Martin, whom they mention nothing about. Luka learns Helmut's farm is near Breslau, in what used to be Poland, but is now part of the Third Reich. All of the Polish people who lived on these farms have been forcibly removed and the Germans moved onto them.

Helmut and Margarete clean Luka up,  treat his wounds, feed him and lock him in one of the bedrooms for the night. Luka wants to escape and continue his journey to Kyiv, but Helmut and Margarete insist that he stay. Weighing the risk of having him stay at the farm against the chances of him dying on the way to Kyiv, they decide he should stay until he has recovered his health. They advise him that with winter coming on he will not likely survive the journey.

Luka stays with them for a time but when their son Martin pays an unexpected visit to the farm, they decide it is too dangerous for Luka to remain. Luka hides while Martin visits but he quickly places Martin's voice as that of Officer Schmidt from the labour camp. If Schmidt finds him, Luka knows he will be shot on sight.

Helmut and Margarete pack a rucksack of food and warm clothing for Luka and take him to the forested area along the Oder River where they drop him off. They tell him to follow the river south to reach the foothills. For Luka this journey will ultimately bring him to safety but it will not be without tragedy. Luka manages to make it to the Polish-Czech border, avoiding the German bandit hunters who kill those hiding in the forest. By mid-December he has reached the mountains and there he encounters the people working in an underground Red Cross hospital. It is here that he learns about the Ukrainian Insurgent Army which is fighting both the Germans and the Russians. Luka decides he wants to be a part of this underground army. But he soon realizes that he is better suited to healing than killing. When the war ends, Luka is persuaded to go to the refugee camps in the hopes that he will be able to find his mother and also Lida.

Discussion

Underground Soldier is the third short novel in Skrypuch's trilogy of novels which includes Stolen Child and Making Bombs For Hitler. These are companion novels which explore events that occurred in Poland, Russia, Germany and the Ukraine. Stolen Child introduces young readers to the horrific Lebensborn program which involved the Nazi's removing children (with "Aryan characteristics") from their non-German parents with the intent of Germanizing them. Five-year-old Larissa Ferezuk is stolen from her family and "adopted" into General Himmel's family and renamed as Gretchen Himmel. However, her sister, eight year old Lida is sent to a labour camp. We read about her situation in the novel, Making Bombs For Hitler. On the way to the labour camp, Lida meets a young man, Luka, who befriends her.  Now in Underground Soldier, we learn of Luka's fate.

Luka is a strong character, determined to find his father and mother and also to be reunited with his friend, Lida. He is loyal to his country and devastated to learn that Kyiv has been destroyed. Eventually he comes to realize that his plan to find his father is probably impossible.  Luka represents all those people, young and old, who survived the war only to learn they are the sole survivors- that their families perished or were incarcerated in Soviet Russia and are likely never to be freed.

In addition to being a well written story, Underground Soldier provides readers with information about certain aspects of the Second World War in Eastern Europe that they might not necessarily know. For example, for people living in Eastern Europe,(Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Ukraine) the Nazi's were but one of two enemies - the other being the Soviets. For people in the western world, the Soviet Union was considered an ally working towards the destruction of the Nazi regime. But both Joseph Stalin, who was the leader of the Soviet Union, and Adolf Hitler of Germany oppressed the people living in Eastern Europe when they came to occupy land in these countries. Liberation from one meant oppression by the other; the Gestapo was simply replaced by the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) when the Russians "liberated" areas held by Nazi Germany and vice versa.

Another interesting fact is how the Soviets treated the survivors of the Nazi-occupied areas of Russia and Eastern Europe. These people were hunted down by the NKVD and sent to camps in Siberia by Stalin who considered them traitors for being captured! Luka was one such person and his youth was no excuse for not being sent to a labour camp. Readers also learn through the characters of Helmut and Margarete how families in occupied countries like Poland lost their farms to Germans who were settled on the land taken away from these people. Often these families were sent to work camps or simply murdered.

A map of the area Luka traveled through would have been a helpful addition so that young readers could more easily place the events in the novel. There is an Author's Note at the back which provides short notes on several important historical events such as the Bykivnia massacre. Bykivnia was a large village in the northeastern part of Kyiv, where over one hundred thousand Ukrainians were massacred from 1937 to 1941.

Skrypuch has crafted yet another excellent novel that deals with a very dark part of history without being too graphic. Historical novels allow us to examine and to think about the past, and hopefully to learn about tolerance and living peacefully with those from different cultures and beliefs.

Book Details:
Underground Soldier by Marsha Skrypuch
Toronto: Scholastic Canada   2014
192 pp.

Making Bombs For Hitler by Marsha Skrypuch

Canadian author Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch continues her historical fiction series for young readers, this time focusing on the little known slave raids conducted by the Nazis during the Second World War.

Making Bombs For Hitler picks up the story of Lida Ferezuk whose kidnapping (in 1943 along with her younger sister, Larissa) by the Brown Sisters was mentioned in Skrypuch's earlier novel, Stolen Child. The narrator in that novel, Nadia Kravchuk, who is really Larissa, has a flashback remembering how she and her older sister were brutally taken from their grandmother's home in the village of Verenchanka, in the Chrenivets'ka region of the Ukraine. Making Bombs For Hitler backtracks, telling Lida's story from 1943 to 1951.

The novel opens with the two frightened girls arriving at a large building along with many other children. There they are sorted into two groups - those who will be slave labourers or Ostarbeiters for the Germans and those who will go into the Lebensborn program. Neither of them know what the two groups are for at that time. While Larissa is designated as Aryan and therefore suitable for the Lebensborn, Lida is shipped out of the Ukraine to Germany to become an Ostarbeiter. She is a mere nine years old.

Not knowing what has become of her younger sister, Lida must now face her fate along with many other young people, all the while worrying what has become of Larissa. Crammed into a cattle car with other Ostarbeiters, she is transported to Germany. She meets Luka Barukovich and fourteen year old Zenia Chornij both of whom are from Kyiv, as well as the very young Olesia Serediuk and Kataryna Pick.

When they arrive at the German factory, Lida quickly learns that to stay alive she must lie about her age and she must prove her usefulness to her German masters. Lida states that she is thirteen years old but when she is sorted into a group of younger children to be sent to the "hospital" she tells the officer that she is a good seamstress. She ends up working in the laundry and mending clothing and bedsheets. The fate of the younger children who are sent to the hospital, is horrifying to Lida. The desperate reality of her situation is finally apparent to her. She is slave working to help the Nazis win the war, and that death might come at any time.

Lida is eventually moved from one factory to another, finally making bombs by hand for the German war machine. This is a task that both frightens her and fills her with shame; she wonders how many people will die as a result of the bombs she makes. When the war finally ends, and Lida and her fellow labourers are liberated, it takes many months for Lida to recover from her ordeal and some time before she learns her sister, Larissa's fate.

Discussion

Making Bombs For Hitler is a well written, informative novel about this little known aspect of World War II. Skrypuch doesn't spare the reader any of the details about what occurred in the camps or the suffering Lida and the other Ostarbeiters endured, but at the same time the book is not gruesome. Instead it is a poignant recounting of a cruel time in which many, many people suffered because of a terrible ideology. Skrypuch is able to convey the horror, the humiliation, and the loss many of these young people faced during the war. For many, their suffering didn't end with the war, as Lida's did. In a cruel twist of fate, many Eastern Workers who were liberated and sent back to the Soviet Union were not welcomed, but instead sent to work camps or murdered because they were considered Nazis.

Lida is a strong character who evokes empathy and sympathy. It's hard to believe that she is so very young, for her voice is that of a wise, but terrified young teen. But Lida also displays courage, intelligence and a remarkable ability to find the beauty and good in small things. It is these qualities that help her and others to survive the degradation and brutality of the camps. When Lida is rewarded for her excellent work in the laundry, she selflessly uses it to help another girl, worse off than herself.

There are many supporting characters in this novel, one of whom is Luka, whom Lida seems to have a great deal of affection for. When he is injured in a bomb blast, Lida risks her life to know whether he is alive or not. And the ending of the novel suggests that these two have a future path to travel together, hopefully in the form of another novel!

The author also uses these supporting characters to portray the dignity some of the labourers brought to the camps despite being viewed as animals or spare parts for the German war machine. Whether it was older workers helping younger, newer workers adjust to camp life or sharing bread, many tried to retain their dignity in spite of the inhuman conditions.

Sensitively written, Making Bombs For Hitler, is highly recommended!

Book Details:
Making Bombs For Hitler by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
Toronto: Scholastic Canada
186 pp.