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.

The Winter Horses by Philip Kerr

Set in the vast Ukrainian steppe in 1941, this novel tells the story of a young girl who tries to save the last of a herd of rare horses, known as the Przewalski's horses while outwitting a cruel SS captain.

In the summer of 1941, the Soviet caretakers at the State Steppe Nature Reserve of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic prepare to abandon the reserve with the coming of the German army. The senior manager, Borys Demyanovich Krajnik, advises the elderly caretaker,  Maxim Borisovich Melnik, to abandon the animals. Borys tells Max that when the Germans arrive, they will kill him and he orders him to slaughter all the animals on the reserve. The reserve is home to many exotic animals including ostriches, zebras, llamas and Przewalski horses. The Soviets do not want the animals falling into the hands of the Germans.

Max however has no intention of killing all the animals. The sanctuary at Askaniya-Nova was created by a German, Baron Friedrich Falz-Fein with whom Max had a good friendship. The baron had always treated Max kindly. And the sanctuary which was mostly open grassland covering three hundred square kilometers was there to protect the animals from being hunted. Max who speaks German and who doesn't want to judge all Germans by what's he's heard, believes he will be able to reason with the German soldiers when they arrive. 

When the Germans come to Askaniya-Nova a mere two weeks later, Max meets the cultured, intelligent Captain Grenzmann. He explains how he came to learn German but is insulted by Grenzmann who notes that his aristocratic German doesn't match his impoverished look. When he tries to explain the uniqueness of the Przewalski horses to Grenzmann, Max is astounded to discover that the Germans do not consider the endangered horses to be something that should be saved. This is even more astonishing considering that Grenzmann claims to have been on the 1936 German Olympic Equestrian team. Instead, Grenzmann explains to Max that this is nature's way of saying that this type of horse is not fit enough to survive. Parroting Nazi ideology he states,   "No. I almost imagine they're almost extinct because nature just wants it that way. It's survival of the fittest. You've heard of the phrase? What Charles Darwin says, about natural selection? In the struggle for life, some species, and for that matter, some races are simply stronger than others. So the strong survive, the weak perish." The Przewalski horses are a forbidden breed and are to be destroyed on orders from Berlin.

Meanwhile unknown to Max, hidden in the forest on the Askaniya-Nova reserve is a young Ukrainian Jewish girl, Kalyna (Kalinka), who has fled her village of Dnepropetrovsk. The entire Jewish population of Dnepropetrovsk was murdered including her own family.  Kalinka loves the horses she has found in the forest, she knows they are intelligent, clever and playful. She observes how they are able to communicate with one another through neighs and snorts. One of the horses, a mare leads Kalinka to a small blue cottage. Finding the door unlocked, Kalinka enters and steals some food, as she is so desperately hungry. 

Later on the mare leads her to her stallion and they allowed Kalinka to sleep between them to keep warm. Observing the wild horses, Kalinka comes to realize that the horses make many different kinds of vocalizations and that they seemed high intelligent and even cunning. In particular, she befriends a stallion known as Temujin and his mare, Borte whom seem to sense that like them, Kalinka is a refugee.

Max quickly comes to fear the Germans, as Borys predicted. It wasn't because they shot and ate many of the animals in the reserve. It was that they would return home from a "special police action", their guns splattered with blood and a crazy look. Max learned from the people in the village on the estate that the Germans murdered thousands of people and buried them in mass graves. 

With the war with Russia going poorly and the likelihood that the Germans will now be retreating as the Red Army is only one hundred kilometers away, Grenzmann wonders what to do with the "mongrel sub-horses". Eventually he reveals to Max that he must shoot the Przewalski horses, to "complete the work that nature has started ..." and that it is all "part of our eastern master plan for the destruction of Ukrainian and Asian culture so that you people can be properly Germanized." Max tries without success to convince the German commander to simply leave the horses. He has no idea how to help the horses who are impossible to catch. There are likely two or three herds of ten horses each and Max has only seen one of the stallions, Temujin and his mare Borte from a distance.

Then during the night Max hears the sound of gunfire and races out onto the steppe to see the an SS motorcycle chasing the horses and shooting them. Equally horrified is Kalinka who watches the entire scene with a mixture of horror and terror. After seeing if she can help any of the horses, Kalinka finds the stallion and his mare. Meanwhile Max is horrified to discover that the Germans have butchered the horses and are now eating them. He also learns that the Grenzmann's unit is now encircled by the Red Army and will likely be on the reserve until the spring.

That night Kalinka comes to Max's small cottage, with Temujin and the mare Borte who is bleeding from a shoulder wound. Kalinka begs him to help the wounded mare. Max questions Kalinka as to where she has come from and she tells him that she has been living in the woods by the lake since late summer. He has her take the horses to the stable behind his house. In the stable, Kalinka tells Max the her family along with all the Jewish families were made to gather in the botanical gardens in her city. "Three uncles, three aunts, my brothers, my sisters, my grandparents, my great-grandmother, and all my cousins." As they were being marched to the botanical gardens along Haharina Avenue, someone pulled Kalinka out of the line and into a house and told her to go out the back door and run no matter what she heard. 

Max treats the mare, removing the bullet from her shoulder, gives the horses oats and rice and then carries the exhausted Kalinka to his cottage. Despite the risk to himself, Max invites her to stay as long as she likes, determined that she is not to go back out into the cold. This offer astonishes Kalinka because every person she's met on her three hundred fifty kilometer walk from Dnepropetrovsk has driven her away, sometimes with stones. Max suggests that Kalinka and the two horses stay in the old abandoned waterworks buildings which are quite dry and well hidden.

After Kalinka tells Max how she came to be out in the forest, he tells her his story. In the morning Grenzmann shows up early and asks to have his horse fed. Fortunately Kalinka covers the two Przewalski horses with hay and hides herself in the hayloft and Grenzmann leaves, but not before insisting that Max come for dinner. During the next snowfall, Max sets up Kalinka and the two horses in the old waterworks tanks. 

This seems to be the perfect solution for the tired and cold Kalinka and lonely Max until Grenzmann becomes curious about the abandoned buildings. Despite attempting to dissuade the German from exploring the old waterworks tanks, Grenzmann is determined to see them himself. Realizing Kalinka is in great danger, Max gives her provisions and a compass and instructs her to head southeast towards the Red Army along with Temujin, Borte and his dog Taras. For helping Kalinka and the horses escape Max pays the ultimate price. And for Kalinka, it will take every ounce of strength and wit she has to escape from the fanatical Captain Grenzmann as he and his soldiers pursue her across the steppe.

Discussion

The Winter Horses is a story of deep tragedy and senseless brutality, but it is also a story about self-sacrifice, resiliency, and courage.

The story centers around two main characters,  Maxim Borisovich Melnik and a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl named Kalyna (Kalinka) Shtern and their interaction with a third character who is the villain of the story.  Both Max and Kalinka are heroic figures who have suffered under the Soviet Communists and/or the Nazis.  Kalinka is a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl from the town of Dnepropetrovsk, in the Soviet Ukraine. The town was occupied by German Nazi forces on August 24, 1941. Most of the almost ninety-thousand Jews who lived in the city at this time managed to escape prior to the German occupation. However, while under German occupation, those Jews who remained and those who came into the town from rural areas were robbed, assaulted and murdered. From October 13 to 15 the Nazis murdered over ten thousand Jews on the outskirts of the city. Kalinka is the sole survivor of her family, and has walked over three hundred kilometers to find refuge on the Askaniya-Nova reserve.

Although she is resilient, it is obvious that Kalinka has suffered significant trauma which she herself recognized. She calmly responds to all of Max's questions. "She had thought there would come a time for tears, but ever since her escape, this had not happened. She had now concluded that she might never cry again, the something human inside her had died alongside the rest of her family." Inadvertently being saved, has resulted in Kalinka suffering intense guilt. "...she felt ashamed that she was alive and everyone in her family was not. How could she have done such a thing? This was the thought that haunted her, day and night." Later on when Taras dies from his wounds from the lynx attack at the zoo, Kalinka still finds she cannot grieve. "How could she cry for a dog when she had not cried for her mother and father, her grandparents, her great-grandmother, her brothers and sisters, her aunts and her uncles, her cousins and her neighbors? How could she cry for Taras when she had not cried for Max? Where was grief to be found for a wolfhound when there had been none for them?"  Eventually Kalinka does break down and grieve for those she has lost, her family and her friend Max.

Kalinka is also courageous, as she stands up to the Russian soldiers who want to shoot the two Przewalski horses for food. She manages to convince the soldiers of the importance of the Przewalski horses.

Maxim Borisovich Melnik, is the elderly caretaker on what has come to be known as the State Steppe Nature Reserve of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In fact the reserve was founded by a descendent of German colonists in the south Ukraine, Frederich Falz-Fein in the late 1800's. Max tells Kalinka that he came to the reserve in  1897 from Sevastopol, to Askaniya-Nova working as a groom for the reserve founder, Baron Faiz-Fein's Hanoverian horses. With the arrival of the Przewalski horses in the early 1900's, the baron began to breed these wild horses which until recently had been believed to be extinct. When the Bolshevik's (Communists) came to power in 1917, they confiscated Askaniya-Nova from the family. Max was arrested and tortured by the NKVD but eventually freed. He returned to live at Askaniya-Nova, now a People's Sanctuary Park in 1921, caring for the animals. Max's life has not been an easy one. He was married to a girl, Oxana Oleniva who was a maid to the baroness. She disappeared when the baroness was killed by the communists and he has no idea if she was murdered or taken prisoner. Max, who has had experience with the NKVD, knows the type of man Grenzmann is, but in an attempt to preserve the reserve's animals, he tries to simply get along with Grenzmann.

Their archenemy, Captain Kaspar Grenzmann, is a blonde-haired German, cultured but fanatical about the Nazi doctrine he is tasked to uphold. He claims that all he wants to do in life is "paint pictures, ride horses, listen to Mozart..."  but when he and his German unit arrive at the reserve in 1941, it's clear that his duties as an SS officer are paramount.  Grenzmann identifies himself as an accomplished equestrian who was on the German Equestrian team which medalled in the 1936 Olympics. Max notes that Grenzmann's pen-and-ink drawings of the Hanoverian horses are "among the finest" he has ever seen and yet he wonders how an "...artist of such great sensitivity should be capable of such diabolical cruelty."  The cruelty Max is referring to is the mass murder of people in the village on the reserve. 

When Captain Grenzmann informs Max that all the animals but especially the Przewalski horses must be shot, Max challenges him to consider what he's going to do. Grenzmann states that he is simply following orders from Berlin and that he doesn't have any choice in the matter, but Max tells him it is his ability to choose that makes him human. Otherwise, he is like the horse Molnija, with a saddle on his back and bit in his mouth -  just an animal. However, to Grenzmann, the Przewalski horses are "sub-equine" and part of what needs to be destroyed to make room for Germans to live and thrive - a common theme in Nazi ideology.

Grenzmann insists that Max dine with him and the officers at their house. He knows Max loved the Przewalski horses and it is these same horses which Grenzmann butchered, that will be served up for dinner. In this way, Grenzmann is shown to be a very twisted man, normal looking on the outside but incredibly cruel inside.  At this dinner Max wonders how "men who had murdered so many men, women and children could appear so very normal--that they could laugh and joke and enjoy music like any other men..."  Max also learns that it was Grenzmann's men who had carried out a "special action" in Dnepropetrovsk, killing tens of thousands of people, most likely including Kalinka's family. 

Upon discovering that Max has harboured not only a breeding pair of Przewalski horses, but also a Jewish refugee, Grenzmann doesn't even consider just letting the entire incident go. The Red ARmy is days away and the war with Russia has been lost. Instead, his fanatical adherence to Nazi ideology demands that he not only murder Max, but that he also pursue the Jewish refugee and the horses with the intention of exterminating them. 

Kerr does offer another German character in contrast to the fanatical Grenzmann in that of Joachim Stammer, Captain from the Second Company of the German Field Police in Simferopol. Stammer, who is from Bonn, "...was not and never had been a Nazi" and he had not wanted to fight against Russia. He treats Kalinka with great kindness, taking her and the horses to the abandoned zoo in Simferopol. He also advises her that when the Russians do arrive, she does not tell them she is Jewish, but that she pretend to be Ukrainian Christian. He brings her food, a letter and other supplies before he leaves the city. His kindness shows Kalinka that not all Germans are like the ones who murdered her family and hunted her.

The Winter Horses offers young readers insight into the effects of war on soldiers and civilians through the characters of Kalinka, Max and Grenzmann while showing that people are often resilient and courageous. The novel ends on a hopeful note, although as history tells us, the struggle in Ukraine was one that continued on even after liberation by the Soviets.

Kerr has crafted an engaging story in southern Ukraine set against the famous Askaniya-Nova reserve and the famous and endangered Przewalski horses. The Przewalski horses are endangered horses which were named after Colonel Nikolai Przewalski who spent time studying them. These dun-coloured horses were once found in the Central Asia steppe. Their likeness can be found in European cave art painted some twenty-thousand years ago. Their numbers dwindled drastically and they were on the verge of extinction. However, a committed breeding program has restored their numbers. Przewalski horses  can be found today in Mongolia, China and Russia and where there are now about twenty-five hundred. Since they were never domesticated, they are considered the last true wild breed of horse.

The Winter Horses would have benefited from having a map showing the location of Ukraine, the town of Dnepropetrovsk, the Askaniya-Nova reserve, as well as a map showing Kalinka's journey. This would have been helpful in establishing the setting for the novel's young readers. Otherwise, The Winter Horse is an engaging historical novel that will appeal to middle grade readers, especially those who love animals.

Book Details:

The Winter Horses by Philip Kerr
New York: Alfred A. Knopf        2014
274 pp.