In The German Girl, Armando Lucas Correa examines the fate of a thousand Jewish refugees from Germany who were turned away by Cuba, the US and Canada, forced to return to persecution and, in some cases, death.
THE GERMAN GIRL
Armando Lucas Correa
(translated from Spanish by
Nick Caistor, 2016)
Simon and Schuster
By PETER STUPPLES
This is breathless prose. Short sentences. Short chapters. There is an urgency to tell the story. A story that must be told: the fate of the thousand Jewish refugees from Germany who sailed on the SS St Louis in May-June 1939 from Hamburg to Havana, Cuba, only to be turned away, not only from Cuba, but also from the United States and Canada, and forced to return to Europe, many later to perish in Nazi death camps.
Correa uses a deft structure to tell the St Louis story through the eyes of 12-year-old Hannah Rosenthal and, through the first half of the book, her knowing, happy, snappy same-age companion, Leo Martin. One is rich and privileged, the other poor but rich in spirit.
It is clear that they have to leave - and should have left - Germany years before. Hannah's mother uses her wealth and influence to get them berths on the St Louis and what she believes are valid papers for entry into Cuba and on to the United States.
The fever of ever-present danger and the flames of prejudice in the air are accentuated on every page through the haste of the narrative. Hannah and her mother are two of the very few who are permitted to disembark at Havana, but her father and Leo do not make it.
The reader's apprehension is kept at that fever pitch by the interweaving of another story, that of Anna Rosenthal, also 12 years old, who tells the story from her point of view as the great-niece of Hannah. Anna's father, born in Cuba, perished in the fall of the Twin Towers in September 2001, a few months before her birth. Eventually, contact is made with Hannah, Anna's great-aunt, still living in Havana, whom Anna and her mother visit in 2014.
These two stories are deftly interwoven. With the two girls both telling their stories from their own current present, either 1939 or 2014, the reader is gradually permitted to put the pieces together, to learn about a forgotten episode in the Holocaust story.
What gives this novel an added dimension is the thick red thread of prejudice linking all the tales; the reiteration, in different forms and from different directions, that lifelong suffering is brought upon the innocent bystanders, generations of human beings, from the politics of cultural, religious or political intolerance, or out of crude self-interest or simply from fear, a seeming threat to the "purity'' (as Correa phrases it) of their race, their culture or their system of beliefs.
The will to live free of prejudice is the earnest desire of the two 12-year-old heroines, which lifts this novel, for the most part, out of the mainstream of Holocaust fiction into a wider context.
It is of interest that it was written in Spanish by a Cuban living in the US.
Peter Stupples is a former University of Otago associate professor of Russian studies.
