The War Below
It’s 1950, and “Nadia” has arrived in Halifax as an immigrant into Canada. She is from Europe, but where exactly? She is with a woman she must call “Mother,” and they are going to join a man she must call “Father” who has managed to find a laboring job in Canada. Despite the fact that these two adults are kind and loving to her, Nadia knows they are not her real family.
And it turns out that Nadia is not her real name. This is the story of a young girl who struggles to adapt not only to the strangeness of life in North America, but also to come to terms with whatever lies in her past. She has blocked out most of the horrors, but she experiences short flashbacks that seem both unrelated and impossible. She remembers being chauffeured in an imposing limousine. But why is she terrified of a woman in a brown suit? Could she possibly be German? And worse, it looks as if she might be Himmler’s daughter.
Over a period of months, as Nadia goes about learning North American ways—going to school, to the library, to hang out with friends—the series of flashbacks each reveal a fragment of her previous life. Not until the end do the fragments fit together to form the framework of her past.
I found this novel, written for younger readers, engrossing. Nadia’s fears about her identity and her struggles to conform to new norms create a compelling protagonist who truly is on a hero’s journey. Our knowledge of past sufferings of Eastern European people is generally lacking. Novels such as this fill in a few of those blanks for us. It’s a privilege to glimpse into that world in this multi-layered novel.
