The Mare
Hermine Braunsteiner was a guard at the Ravensbrück and Majdanek concentration camps, where she earned the soubriquet “die stampfende Stüte” – “the stomping mare” – from her habit of killing prisoners by kicking and stamping them to death. After the war she escaped to Vienna. In 1958 she met Russell Ryan, an American. They fell in love, married and moved to New York, where they lived a normal life until, in 1968, New York Times journalist Joseph Lelyveld came to their door.
From these facts and their aftermath Angharad Hampshire has constructed a gripping novel. The action takes place in Austria, briefly in London but mainly in the USA, Germany and Poland. The story is told alternately by Russell and Hermine and moves rapidly between places and times. Hampshire is in complete control of her material, making it easy to follow throughout.
It is an exploration of how a young woman who works hard to support her mother and sisters, and loves birds and the countryside, can so easily turn into a monster. Then, when the war is over, she settles into an apparently normal life in the United States, seemingly with no thoughts of her past: themes which have, of course, been addressed many times in both fact and fiction. The other main theme is the effect of her life on her husband and the wider community in which they live in New York.
There are some graphic descriptions of gratuitous violence and the awful conditions in the camps, which are not for the fainthearted, but the book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the Second World War, the concentration camps, or how anti-Semitism can so easily infect a whole nation.
Angharad Hampshire is a broadcaster, writer and university lecturer. This is her first novel. Let us hope it is not her last. Thoroughly recommended.
