Mischling
It’s 1944 in Poland, and 12-year-old twin sisters Pearl and Stasha Zamorski are sent to Auschwitz, where they become part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele’s Zoo. The sisters, however, are inseparable. They divvy up responsibilities for the past, their memories, the future, and the living; complete each other’s thoughts; and test their unique bonds. However, they endure different experiments at the hands of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. Stasha believes she has been made “deathless” while Pearl has not. When her worst fear is realized and Pearl disappears, Stasha crawls into a barrel, refusing to continue her life without her twin. Just before the Russians liberate Auschwitz, Stasha and another survivor, Filiks, who took on the name of his own dead twin brother, are herded out and soon begin their own mission of survival, driven by their need to find and kill Mengele. As they make their way to Warsaw, they encounter other survivors with their own stories, Nazi sympathizers, Red Army soldiers, and Jewish resistance fighters.
Mischling is a remarkable debut novel of Auschwitz survivors’ strength and triumph. The accounts of Mengele’s experiments are horrific, but the survivors rise above them with their own unique means of endurance that left me thinking about them long after I had stopped reading the scenes. The writing is superb and never failed to amaze me. It is crafted using the lyricism of poetry, which pulls at heartstrings in different, often opposing, ways at the same time. Mischling is a beautiful novel that will resonate with readers long after it is finished. Brava, Affinity Konar.
