Rose Under Fire

I just finished Rose Under Fire, the newest offering by Elizabeth Wein.  It was outstanding – which I would have expected, given the accolades heaped on Wein’s previous novel, Code Name Verity (which you can be sure I’ll be reading soon).  But I’m also not going to lie, Rose Under Fire was a tough, tough read.  This wasn’t surprising, given that the majority of the book is set in the Ravensbrück concentration camp during World War II.  In fact, I put off reading the book (until after its publication date, thus negating the usefulness of an Advanced Reading Copy…oops) because of this.  I don’t usually deal well with depressing reads or watches, and it was hard to make myself start, despite expecting the book to be great.

But once I did start, it was hard to put Rose Under Fire down.  Rose is a young (18) American pilot, and thanks to some family connections, she has moved to England to be an Air Transport Auxilary (ATA) civilian pilot, ferrying planes back and forth.  Rose is idealistic, a bit naïve, but tough and smart and very kind and kind-hearted.  She is devoted to the war effort, and dreams of being a fighter pilot.  When her uncle once again works to help her and she gets a chance to ferry a plane to France, she jumps on it.  But on her way back, she ends up captured by German planes and she and her jet are taken to Germany, where she is sent to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp.

This is where the story really gets tough to read, but also where the real power of Wein’s

Ravensbrück barracks

writing and character development shine through.  Things are tough for Rose from the beginning, but it is not until she is placed in the barracks with Polish prisoners that she – and the readers – witness the full extent of Nazi brutality.  Rose’s fellow prisoners are Russian, French, and Polish.  And the Polish women are part of a “special transport” who, before the death they have been condemned to, have been experimented on by Nazi doctors in horrifying ways.  They call themselves “Rabbits,” since they are being used in experiments like animals, and they are fierce and tenacious about finding ways to tell the world what has happened to them.  And here is where we get to the heart of why it was so hard for me to read Rose Under Fire – while the characters we meet through Rose are fictional, Ravensbrück and the Rabbits are not.  Everything we readers hear about in Rose Under Fire actually happened to real people, and that was the hardest – but also most powerful – part of reading about it.  So we as an audience, like Rose, are both involved in the story (through Rose’s first-person narration) and witnesses to a much larger story.

Rose herself is a masterpiece of character development.  Throughout the story she changes and matures drastically because of her traumatic experiences, but the Rose from the beginning of the book still shines through.  She still identifies as a pilot.  She still writes poetry.  She still cares enough to throw herself into resistance efforts in the camp and try to protect her “family” there.  And towards the end of the book, we see her continue to grow as a character in the aftermath of her experiences.

To me, that is one of the things that elevates this book above some of the other WWII literature I’ve read – what we see of Rose after Ravensbrück.  The story, beginning when she is captured, is written as Rose’s account of what’s happened to her after-the-fact.  It is woven in with her experiences with freedom.  We see how she is afraid to leave her room for weeks, how she can barely eat, how she jumps at loud sounds like ringing phones.  We also see how she recovers, slowly.  And in the last part of the book, we see Rose a year and a half later – living well, recovering, but still deeply scarred by what she has been through and seen.

Ravensbrück monument in Père Lachaise cemetery

There is so much more I could say about Rose Under Fire – it’s a truly fantastic book and despite the emotional toll of reading it, I could hardly put it down.  But I could not finish this review without mentioning Roza, one of Rose’s closest friends in Ravensbruck.  Roza is a Rabbit, and by the end, the book is as much her story as Rose’s.  She is wonderful and devastating to read about at the same time, an endearing, flawed, realistic, heroic character, and easily one of my favorite characters I’ve read about recently.

Rose Under Fire is technically a young adult book, but I cannot recommend it enough for teens or adults, especially if you have an interest in historical fiction.  And even if, like me, you might have a hard time reading a book like this, you should read it anyways.  It’s worth it.