What the Night Sings

This is a Holocaust - or rather a post-Holocaust - story; it starts in Bergen-Belsen on the day in which Gerta, the 16 year old narrator of the story, is liberated by British soldiers. Apart from some flashbacks, which give the background to Gerta's earlier childhood before she and her father were

Show More

deported, most of the action takes place in the Displaced Persons camp where Gerta spends the year following the end of the war. She had been old enough, before the war, to know how she expected her life to pan out, only to have it brutally disrupted and eventually to lose any expectation of living at all. Gerta's first battle therefore was to rekindle an interest in a future that had rematerialized, but seemed unreal and unknowable; in a sense, she has to reconstruct her own self-image, which had been virtually obliterated by her experiences.

Before the war, Gerta was a musically gifted child living with her father, a viola player and his non-Jewish companion who, as well as being Gerta's step-mother, is her singing teacher. Though she also played the viola, her true love - and her anticipated future life - was singing. Her father had deliberately focused Gerta on her music and her singing, to such an extent that she was barely aware of what was going on in Germany or of being Jewish - until the day that she and her father are rounded up and deported to Theresienstadt. After a year in this prison town, father and daughter are moved to Auschwitz; Gerta is separated from her father on arrival at the concentration camp and never sees him again; but she manages to hang on to his viola, which becomes a kind of talisman for her throughout her time in the camp.

In the DP camp, having recovered physically, Gerta is involved with two young men - both survivors - who have very different ideas about their own futures. Each of them tries hard to convince her to follow his path; Gerta is attracted to both in different ways, but she is too uncertain about herself to commit to either of them or their intended paths. She is trying to cope with new realities - of having a future, of what being Jewish means to her, and - with her voice having changed - of no longer being a singer. Eventually she does resolve these issues and embarks on a new life.

In an epilogue, the author explains how Gerta's experiences - in a more cruel and extreme form - reflect on a trauma that she herself suffered. Because of a permanent injury caused by a car accident, she was not able to pursue the musical career that she had been set on from childhood. She had to "reinvent" herself, and find new outlets for her creativity; this book, which is lavishly illustrated, is the first result of her efforts to reach the public domain.

The book is published by an imprint of Random House children's books and has many illustrations, all of which might lead one to believe that it is intended for children; however, although it is a straightforward easy read without any literary pretensions, it spares no detail in its descriptions of Nazi brutality and the suffering of its victims. I would not call it a children's book - certainly not for young children - but as a moving first-person account of a young woman's experiences, it could definitely be an accessible introduction to Holocaust literature for a teenager.

Show Less