Book Club

This month's book reviews are Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks and Settela’s Last Road by Janna Eliot.

Reviews by Imogen Topliss, Anne Frank Trust Intern

Settela's Last Road

Settela’s Last Road tells the story of a young gypsy girl and her family living in Holland during the Second World War in the1940s. Settela lives in a large community of travellers and leads a happy and free lifestyle. Her happy life begins to crumble around her as she returns from the market to find her father and uncle, along with all the other men in their camp, have been taken by the German police. Settela struggles to understand what is happening in her once peaceful country but she knows that if they are to survive they must escape. However her family are disrupted early one morning by more German policemen and dragged from their beds and caravan into buses. They find themselves in Auschwitz. It is cramped and smelly; there is only dirty water to drink and rotten bread to eat. The German police who guard the camp humiliate the gypsies and treat them like animals; they shave all the women’s’ hair, provide only buckets to use as toilets and make them all wash in large, communal areas. Spirits are broken at the camp as everyone tries to cope in these unpleasant surroundings, but Settela keeps imagining an escape plan and leading her people to safety. Unfortunately there is no escape for Settela and her family.

The story of Settela and her family is written simply but powerfully. It serves as a reminder of the atrocities of the Nazi party and of those who suffered under its discriminations. However Settela’s desire to escape and to live out the rest of her life, finding her father, learning to read, gives the book a confident narrative.

Settela Steinbach was a real gypsy girl who died in Auschwitz. There is a photograph of this girl which inspired Janna Eliot as well as artists and singers. Settela has become an image representing the suffering of the Gypsies and of persecuted children under Nazi rule. Her memory has been preserved through her photograph and teaches us, as does the Diary of Anne Frank, of the Holocaust and the Second World War. 

Birdsong

"Birdsong is a novel about war, struggle, friendships and love- all of these are themes which are relevant to the Diary of Anne Frank. Both Stephen and Anne have important friendships which keep them from losing the sense of reality amongst all the chaos which surrounds them in the wider world.  For Anne this friend is her diary Kitty, whom she confides her fears and her hopes; for Stephen it is a woman he grows to love after the war has ended"

Birdsong follows the story of an Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, and depicts his life against the backdrop of the First World War. Stephen is a young man as he travels to France and begins upon an affair with the intriguing Isabelle Azaire. Yet despite the passion that develops between them their relationship does not last and Stephen is called to join the war. During the subsequent years he fights in the trenches; watching as his battalion killed, his friends die and the life he knew fade into the distant past. But through all this he keeps a diary. Years later his granddaughter Elizabeth, finds these diaries in her mother’s attic and although they are written in an encrypted language she is mesmerised by the possibility of finding out about her grandfather’s life.

I found the novel extremely powerful. The scenes describing the trenches are quite horrendous as you learn how they lived and fought in cramped, dirty conditions, suffered the terrifying shelling and were constantly fearful of the next attack. However it is not all doom and gloom, the storyline between Stephen and Isabelle kept me intrigued throughout the book and I shared the excitement his granddaughter felt upon discovering Stephen’s diaries.

Birdsong is a novel about war, struggle, friendships and love- all of these are themes which are relevant to the Diary of Anne Frank. Both Stephen and Anne have important friendships which keep them from losing the sense of reality amongst all the chaos which surrounds them in the wider world.  For Anne this friend is her diary Kitty, whom she confides her fears and her hopes; for Stephen it is a woman he grows to love after the war has ended.

Birdsong would be suitable for those above 14 years of age.

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