Max by Sarah Cohen-Scali

Max is born on April 20, 1936, the same day as Adolf Hitler. He chooses that day as it will bring him the blessings of the Germanic gods.Max sees himself as the firstborn of the master Aryan race; he wants to be supple, lean, swift, hard and tough. He wants to hate rather than love. His mother, Frau Inge who is tall, blond and blue-eyed applied to be a Schwester (Sister) and underwent a series of detailed physical examinations. She had to prove she had no Jewish blood in her ancestry. His father was an SS officer who was paired with her.

Max is born in Steinhoring Home, on the outskirts of Munich. His birth, like those of the other babies in the Lebensborn program, is kept secret. Steinhoring was an asylum for mentally ill people but they were "relocated" - exterminated and the home was renovated. At birth Max too undergoes a detailed physical examination by SS-Oberfuhrer Gregor Ebner who, after taking numerous measurements, classifies him as being of the Nordic Aryan race. Max's mother is not allowed to hold him until he has passed the examination.

Max's mother, Frau Inge struggles after his birth as she is encouraged not to use endearing terms and he is often taken away from her. Max notes that there is a sort of "magic cord" between him and his mother that allows him to sense what she is feeling. A week after his birth, Max is christened by Adolf Hitler in a ceremony attended by Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler, Max Sollmann (director of the Lebensborn program), the Fuhrer's personal doctor, Dr. Karl Brandt and his wife Anni Rehborn, Dr. Ebner, along with the mothers from Steinhoring and other Lebensborn homes. Max's mother receives an autographed photograph of them with Hitler and Max is given the new name of Konrad von Kebnersol, a mix of Dr. Ebner's and Herr Sollmann's names.

Life at Steinhoring is unsettling. Max becomes upset when he witnesses babies being removed from the home by Josefa during the nights. One night after being tenderly hugged by his mother, Max hears his mother being escorted from the home, screaming and crying. This event results in Max becoming sickly as the "magic cord" that existed between him and his mother is no longer there. He also discovers that some of the babies in the nursery have been taken to Ward 15 in the Steinhof Institute in Vienna where they undergo experimentation and are ultimately euthanized. These children, who suffer from minor defects such as harelip (cleft palate), asthma and deafness are called "rabbits". This terrifies Max to the point that he decides to banish all memories of his mother and to force himself to accept the wet nurse.

The process of adopting the babies begins, and while other babies from the nursery are adopted, Max is repeatedly not chosen. One night he is kidnapped from the nursery by a woman who has escaped from a prison camp. This woman, Magda, saw her newborn baby, Maciej shot. Max remains with her for five days as she slowly starves to death. He is rescued in terrible condition. In an attempt to rehabilitate him emotionally as part of an experiment, Max is left alone and not comforted. "Even when I yelled my head off -- my arms outstretched so they'd open the door, so they'd come and hold me, cuddle me, comfort me -- no one ever came. "

Max Sollmann

As Max grows into early childhood, Germany goes to war. Max becomes "the perfect sample product" of the Lebensborn program. The mothers who come to Steinhoring looking to adopt want to cuddle him but are not allowed to do so. When he is four years old, Max is taken to  Poznan Poland where he is used as a lure to help the Nazis steal Polish children. Working with the "Brown Sisters", Max entices other children his age to tell him about their families and where they live. During the nights the SS soldiers visit the children's homes and kidnap them. Eventually Max is sent out with a Polish concentration inmate, Bibiana. The two are very successful and Max begins to bond with her as she holds his hand, hugs him and plays games with him. But when Max tells her that his mother is German and his father is the Fuhrer, Bibiana revolts and she is killed. This deeply upsets Max who struggles to eat and begins rocking himself. But things only go from bad to worse for Max as he is exposed to more and more depraved situations.

Max watches the SS soldiers have sex with the German prostitutes and rape the Polish women. He hides in the back of a truck and watches the SS soldiers kidnap Polish children from their homes. Soon he is recruited to take part in the hunt for blond, blue-eyed Polish children whom the SS can kidnap. After leading a group of children safely back to their mothers, Max cruelly reports them to the soldiers. At a party in his honour, the German prostitutes expose themselves to him and Max gets dangerously drunk on the left over liquor. At age six he is sent to Kalish, the SS Gaukinder Home which is the central district home of the Polish Lebensborn. There he sneaks out during the night to view both the boys and girls as they undergo the Nazi selection process by the doctors at the school. He also witnesses the murder of a boy he befriends. But when a Polish Jewish boy, Lucjan who is renamed Lukas by Dr. Ebner, arrives at the Lebensborn school, Max is about to discover everything he's been taught about people, life and the Third Reich is very different from reality.

Discussion

Max is a disturbingly explicit account of the Nazi's successful program to breed racially pure "Aryan" children for the Third Reich.  Known as the Lebensborn program, it was created in 1935 to increase Germany's declining population. However, only those who were considered  of Aryan descent, or "racially valuable" were recruited to the program. This eugenics program was committed to produce racially superior Germans. As the war dragged on and Germany experienced more and more casualties  the Lebensborn program resorted to the kidnapping of children from Nazi-occupied countries who appeared to be Aryan.

All the horrific details of the Lebensborn program are revealed in this novel through the use of omniscient first person narration of a child. The narration begins when Max is an unborn baby about to be born in 1936 through the war until the fall of Berlin in 1945. Max comes into the world, a die-hard Nazi, determined to fulfill his mission in life as a model Aryan. He's even willing to offer his life at birth should he not meet the Aryan standards. Fortunately for him, he passes and is allowed to be reunited with his mother. Soon Max experiences repeated traumas along with intense Nazi indoctrination that begin to shape him into a cold, calculating child. Can there be any kernel of love and compassion inside such a child? This is the question Cohen-Scali sets out to explore in her novel.

Baptism of Lebensborn child

Max's trauma begins immediately after birth and continues throughout his life. He is measured and examined for defects and soon his mother is removed from his life. This is "scary" for Max who simply wants to lie next to his mother and nurse. 

As babies with defects are removed from the nursery for experimentation, Max has nightmares and fears he will also be taken away and experimented on. When he is kidnapped from the Steinhoring nursery just before his first birthday in 1937 and is rescued five days later in serious condition, Max receives no comfort and is placed in quarantine - "I had to stay alone all day, locked in a room at the back of the building, so my crying wasn't heard." 

When Bibiana, is executed for rebelling against the kidnapping of Polish children, Max gets a "tummy ache" that won't go away. He stays alone and begins rocking himself. He experiences anger over Bibiana's rebellion and even dresses in the rags he used when with Bibiana because they retain some of her smell. 

After helping a few Polish children escape, Max experiences anger that these children have mothers who love them. Instead of helping them, Max decides that one of the boys "must become German" and turns them in. After Max's friend Wolfgang is murdered in cold blood in front of him for not saluting a German officer, he is unable to sleep, has nightmares and begins wetting the bed. Max is six years old when this happens. Without comfort, he uses the distraction of watching young girls being stripped and examined for the program at Kalish. In Berlin he witnesses more shootings, rapes and the murder of his friend.

All of these events, each shocking in its own right, show Max as a victim who struggles to protect himself by denying what's happening and by attempting to take some kind of control over his life. Despite his fear, and believing he is the vanguard of an Aryan nation destined to take over the world, Max views himself as a leader for his peers whom he refers to as his "buddies". He wants to be seen as "made of Krupp's steel." - a reference to the high quality steel produced in Germany by Krupp. As a result, he views any action that enhances the Aryan nation as acceptable in spite of his fear or even natural revulsion. 

After babies are removed from the nursery for experimentation, Max comes to believe this is acceptable for the success of the Third Reich. "I understand now that my buddies' sacrifice was essential in guaranteeing that the Reich's medical science is the finest in the world. Markus, Edith, Klaus, and all the "rabbits" from the other Homes can be proud because they will be contributing to great discoveries: vaccines against tuberculosis and typhus (diseases spread by Jews and Gypsies), medications to heal the wounds of our soldiers at the front...I know now that we make up a chain, every link of which, even the smallest is vital. The weak die so the strong can become invincible." 

The breaking of the bond between himself and his mother initially upsets Max but he comes to view this as making him stronger. "...no more magic cord! It no longer exists. I've cut the umbilical cord once and for all. My memory of Mother is fading...I can't remember her smell anymore, or the feeling of pressing against the soft pillow of her breasts. Soon I'll have forgotten she existed. Besides, I'm going to erase the word mother from my vocabulary."  As Max becomes the linchpin in the kidnapping of elite Polish children in order to Germanize them for the Third Reich, he believes this is necessary, "Such a brilliant idea! A bit like a blood transfusion. New blood for Germany, while weakening the enemy."

However, Max's view of the world is changed by his interactions with Lukas, a Polish Jew who physically is the Aryan ideal. This is a complete puzzle to Max who has been indoctrinated into the belief that all Jews look a certain way. Lukas tells Max that his mother was a beautiful, intelligent Polish woman who was educated and spoke French and German fluently. He was saved from the Jewish ghetto when his parents sent him away to be hidden by a non-Jewish Polish woman. Lukas's life was saved, his father and brother perished in the Jewish ghetto and his mother was sent to Treblinka. Lukas's story confuses Max, who begins to question what he's been told. "Perhaps Lukas's family didn't deserve it? Perhaps an exception should have been made for them? Perhaps there are good Jews? How do you know? At this point in my thinking, I admit that I'm lost..."

Max 's doubt is increased during biology class which is devoted to learning how to identify Jews based on physical characteristics. Lukas who is Jewish has none of the "identifying" characteristics. "But on the other hand, something wasn't quite right. If you wrote Lukas's statistics into the chart the teacher had given us at the beginning of the class, his would be identical to the Aryan measurements. Moreover, Lukas had the green racial fitness certificate. I wanted to tell the teacher everything, that Lukas was Jewish and Aryan -- so he could explain the contradiction to me, once and for all."  At the Napola Max is forced to another realization; "I'm surprised how, Polish or German, Aryan or not, we aren't that different. For the most part, my buddies here are just like the ones I had in Kalish. They have the same faults, especially the six-year-olds. It's hard for them to get up at 6:00 on the dot to go running...Hard to get dressed in a rush...Hard not to fall asleep in class."

Max believes his contact with Lukas is "de-Aryanizing" him. And yet when Lukas is sent to a munitions factory, Max experiences distress both over his absence and the fact that Germany is losing the war, leading him to begin cutting himself. When Lukas returns he is depressed, chain smokes and won't eat. Max cares for Lukas and learns the source of Lukas's turmoil when he tells him about the "Final Solution". "The events of the past few months have shown me that they don't tell us everything at the Napola. Information is filtered, altered. The things Lukas told me before he left for his training, things I refused to believe, have been proven to be true." All of this only deepens the conflict within Max and he begins to understand that he has been a part of something terrible.He decides to keep his bargain with Lukas and to tell his story in the orphanage in Bavaria.

Max is a very different historical novel, written from a unique perspective. Well worth the time if the reader is not familiar with the Lebensborn program. The character Max is fictional, however Lukas is based on Salomon Perel, who was able to pass himself off as Aryan and who survived the war. Max Sollmann, Gregor Ebner, and Johanna Sander were all real life people. The Author's Note at the back details more about these people and the Lebensborn program, as well as providing readers with follow-up material. Prospective readers should know that this book contains explicit sexual content. Because of the graphic violence and sexual content this novel it is recommended only for older teens and adults.

Image credits:

Gregor Ebner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Ebner#/media/File:Gregor_Ebner1.jpg

Max Sollman: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Sollmann#/media/Datei:Max_Sollmann_1.JPG

Baptism of Lebensborn child: https://library.mcmaster.ca/archives/virtualmuseum/mod5-1.html

Book Details:

Max by Sarah Cohen-Scali (translation from the French by Penny Hueston)
New York: Roaring Book Press 2017
421 pp. 

Auslander by Paul Dowswell

This novel tells the fictional story of a young boy, Piotr Bruck, who is taken by the Nazis to Berlin to become a reclaimed German. While Piotr may have the ideal Aryan features, he soon learns his heart and mind do not subscribe to the Aryan ideals of race.

The novel opens with Piotr undergoing a terrifying physical exam in Warsaw where he is singled out because of his ideal Aryan features of blonde hair and blue eyes. In flashback, the reader learns that thirteen year old Piotr lived with his mother and father on their farm outside of Warsaw. For a time after the Germans invaded Poland, they believed they were safe, even though their farm was situated between the Russians and Germans. But when Russian and Germany begin to carve up Poland, his parents were killed and Piotr was driven from his home by German troops. Homeless and hungry, Piotr ends up in an orphanage in Warsaw.

Returning to the present, Piotr is taken from the orphanage along with many other boys and after a physical exam in which his features are measured and examined, he is grouped together boys who are to be sent back to Germany. His blonde hair and blue eyes and his near perfect German mark him as being of German blood -volksdeutsche. He along with others judged to be volkdsdeutsche are taken by Doctor Fischer of the Race and Settlement Office who runs this eugenics program, to be Germanized.

Piotr is sent to the Lebensborn hostel in Landsberg to await adoption by a German family. Meanwhile, Doctor Fischer contacts Professor Franz Kaltenbach who lives in Berlin with his wife, Liese, and their three daughters, twenty year old Elsbeth, thirteen year old Traudl and eight year old Charlotte. He encourages the Kaltenbachs to take Piotr into their home to raise him as a German citizen despite Kaltenbach's reservations about Piotr's Polish ancestry. Kaltenbach's reluctance is based on his work for the Nazi party.

Kaltenbach works at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Dahlem-Dorft, Berlin where he has been nvolved in a number of tasks that dealt with eugenics and racial purity. He had to determine the racial purity of the children from the Ostarbeiters (Eastern workers from Poland) as well as confirm the authenticity of the Ancestral Passports of candidates for the SS. Kaltenbach achieved his post at the Institute after the ethnic cleansing of all Jewish academics.

When Piotr returns home to Berlin with the Kaltenbachs, he is renamed Peter and is expected to hold the same views as his foster family regarding Jews and Slavs as well as politically support the Nazis.Peter is uncertain as to what to believe because his parents were divided on supporting the Nazis.  At first it seems that Peter and the Professor will have as good relationship as they share an interest in aircraft. Excited to finally have a safe place to live, Peter joins the Hitler-Jugend, attends school and even begins to see a girl in his neighbourhood, Anna Reiter. Peter even dreams of one day becoming a Luftwaffe pilot.

But Peter's comfort zone is challenged by the reality of life in Berlin when he sees Polish boys, the Ostarbeiters,  being overworked and starved, when he finds he cannot accept the German's blind faith in Hitler and when the Nazis ban anything different from what the party deems acceptable. Torn between his disgust at what the Nazis are doing and his fear of working against, Peter must decide make a choice - one that could cost ultimately cost him his life.

Discussion

Told from the third person omniscient point of view, Auslander provides a unique look a life in Berlin during the Second World War. Although most of the narration is from Peter's point of view, Dowswell also includes the perspectives of many other characters in the novel including Anna, Ula and Otto Reiter, Gerhart Segur and Franz Kaltenbach. It is precisely the use of different narrators that gives this novel its balanced approach. There are German characters who are "one hundred percenters" - those who completely believe in the Nazi propaganda such as Professor Kaltenbach and his wife. The Reiters represent those Germans who did not agree with the Nazi racial policies and who worked to mitigate the suffering of the Jews and those who were part of the resistance. Also portrayed are those such as Elsbeth who originally supported the Nazis but when the learned the truth of what they were doing, tried desperately to extricate themselves. And then of course there were many German citizens such as Segur who were terrorized by the Nazis into betraying neighbours and friends.

The fanaticism of the Nazis is well portrayed in the novel and Dowswell includes parts of speeches and texts used by the Nazis to foment hatred against Jews and other ethnic groups deemed undesirable and to promote war. Dowswell captures the time period brilliantly, showing how beautiful and sophisticated Berlin was in 1941 and yet how poisoned its people were with the rabid ideology of genetics and race. This was initially deceiving to someone like Peter who did not yet recognize the iron grip the Nazis had on life in Germany. As the tide in the war begins to turn, the rationalization of German citizens and their reluctance to doubt the Nazis is demonstrated. Even the bombing of Berlin doesn't seem to sway them.

One of the major themes in the novel is that of identity. Because Peter has lost his parents, he dearly wants to fit into German society. It is a classic search for identity but one which is even more poignant because of his circumstances. Peter is not allowed to be himself, nor to express his own views about what is happening. Instead, whether he agrees or not with Nazi policy, he must conform to the Nazi way of thinking or risk being sent to a work camp or perhaps worse. Gradually, as Peter's eyes are opened to what the Nazis are doing to ordinary people simply because they are different, Peter comes to understand the price of conformity both personally and for the country. Despite being very conflicted he begins to resist in subtle secret ways that lead to him becoming part of the resistance and risking everything.

This novel is well written and thrilling from beginning to end with a likable male protagonist - something not found in many historical fiction novels. The author based the character of Ula Reiter on two German women who heroically defied the Nazi regime in Berlin during the war. He also explains the origins of some of the ideas, speeches and events portrayed in the novel in a note at the back of the novel. This is historical fiction at it's very best - effectively providing readers with a sense of what life was like during this terrible conflict.
Highly recommended.

Book Details:
Auslander by Paul Dowswell
London: Bloomsbury            2009
295 pp.

The Extra by Kathryn Lasky

The Extra is a historical novel that explores the fate of one young Gypsy woman and her family during the Second World War. Specifically, this novel deals with the mass round up, sterilization and genocide of the Romani people of Eastern Europe by the Nazis. The novel accomplishes this by focusing on the select few who were chosen to be extras in a film made by Hitler's favourite filmmaker and Nazi sympathizer, Leni Riefenstahl. This is a novel that ends on a positive note but the reader will be overwhelmed by the tragedy of those who lost their lives and over those whose lives were irrevocably changed by the Nazi eugenics program.

The novel opens in 1940 by introducing the reader to Lilian (Lilo) Friwald who lives a comfortable life in Vienna, Austria with her father, Fernand, who is a master clockmaker, and her mother, Bluma, who makes exquisite lace. The Friwalds are Sinti, or gypsies who have just been fingerprinted. They are hopeful that nothing else will happen to them, but one day Lilo and her parents are forcibly removed from their home and sent to Rossauer Lande, a holding camp for gypsies. While at the holding camp, Lilo learns that at Ravensbruck, the Romani women and girls are being forcibly sterilized. Lilo is horrified. "It was as if the future had been erased, any hope for a future obliterated. Being in this barbed-wire cage was nothing compared with the utter darkness of the black wall of sterility, of a childless world, of a family that simply ended forever and ever. The Friwalds would be extinct."

After five days, the Friwalds are separated and Lilo and her mother are sent along with hundreds of other "Ziegeuner" to Buchenwald. At Buchenwald, Lilo learns that the Nazi's are forcibly sterilizing the Romani women, whom they consider to be inferior. Lilo is saved from this fate through the actions of a woman whom she calls the "Good Matron". During this time, Lilo meets a boy who has been in five camps already and who knows how to "organize" food and supplies. Django helps Lilo and her mother survive the brutal conditions and get selected for transport to Maxglan.

It is at Maxglan that Lilo, her mother and Django encounter the famous actress, Leni Riefenstahl, who is looking to recruit gypsies for her Spanish folk opera, Tiefland. All three are selected along with twenty others and are sent to Krun where they are housed in a barn. Conditions are better than at the work camp, and the three settle into working as extras on the film.

From this point on the novel traces Lilo's experiences as a gypsy film slave on through to the end of the war in 1945 as she attempts to ensure she is chosen to work on each stage of the filming in order to avoid being sent east to the death camps. Her life over the next few years is harsh, a mixture of both triumph and tragedy.

Discussion

Kathryn Lasky based her Lilo character on a real gypsy teenager, Anna Blach, whom Riefenstahl used as a stand-in for her during the riding scenes. Blach was eventually sent to Auschwitz but survived.

Lasky's novel will help readers learn about another group the Nazi's targeted for their "final solution". The Roma and Sinti were considered "useless breeders", an inferior race by the Nazi's and as such were targeted for medical experimentation and genocide. It is estimated that 500,000 gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War.

Lilo and the other Romani characters are portrayed realistically, and the author excels in showing them as human beings with the same dreams and hopes in life as the rest of us, as well as the same weaknesses and fears. Their care and concern for one another while they are in the camps is contrasted to the predatory and sometimes animalistic character of Riefenstahl and some of the camp guards. However, Lasky is careful not to demonize all those caught in the Nazi war machine or those living in Austria and Germany. Django who is a gypsy boy that Lilo eventually falls in love with is a well developed impact character who helps Lilo grow through most of the novel.

Lasky's ability to effectively capture the time period and to create a series of believable characters make this novel a treat for historical fiction fans.

To learn more about the genocide of the Romani peoples check out the U.S. Holocaust Museum website.

Book Details:
The Extra by Kathryn Lasky
Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press     2013
314 pp.