Pied Piper by Nevil Shute

I started reading Nevil Shute last year because I intended to review one of his books for the 2019 Back to the Classics Challenge. I started with one of his most famous works, A Town Like Alice. Though I never got around to writing a post, I enjoyed it so much I read two more of his books before the end of the year. Though he's most famous now for his books set in Australia, Shute started writing in the 1920s, and more than half his novels were written before he moved there in 1950. 

Published in 1942, Pied Piper is set in 1940. It begins a framing device: an anonymous narrator meets an elderly man one night after dining in his London club. They are forced to stay during an air raid, and the older man relates his tale of a recent escape from the Nazi invasion of France, just after the fall of Dunkirk.

The protagonist, John Howard, is a widower, bereft after the loss of his only son, an RAF pilot. He's unable to help with the war effort due to health issues, and in early spring of 1940, has cabin fever and decides to go on a fishing holiday in France, in a small town near the Swiss border, near the Jura mountains. Howard had hoped to have no reminders of the war, which seems very far away, and is mildly annoyed to find British tourists staying at the same small hotel. Young Sheila and Robbie are on holiday but normally attend school in Geneva, where their father is working for the League of Nations. Gradually Howard befriends the family, and after the fall of Dunkirk, decides it's best to go home to England. The children's parents are alarmed at the speed of the invasion, and beg him to take the children with him back to England, to stay with relatives. 

It seems like a relatively easy task to take a train to Dijon and then to Paris, but Howard underestimates the difficulty of traveling with children, and the rapid escalation of the invasion. The younger child, Sheila, becomes feverish and the party is forced to spend the night in a hotel. Trains stop running, luggage goes missing, and Howard is forced to keep finding alternate routes to get back to England. Meanwhile, thousands of people are attempting to evacuate before the arrival of the Nazis. The small party begins to increase as more and more children join Howard and he attempts to get them all to safety. 

I really liked this book. I do love reading about the lives of ordinary people during the wars. This is also a survival story, which I always enjoy. I liked how Howard comes out of his shell when he makes it his life's purpose to protect the children. I also enjoyed following their route across France as they zigzag toward safety to try and elude the Nazis. There were also some good side characters that helped them. It's always nice to read about the kindness of strangers. 

This was also a really fast read, I think I finished the whole thing in one day. It also reminded me a bit of A Town Called Alice, which also includes wartime refugees on a march, trying to survive, though that one is set in Malaya. I definitely want to read more works by Shute, though some of them are a bit obscure. They're a bit tricky to find in libraries but there are many inexpensive used copies from online retailers.  

I'm counting this as my 20th Century Classic for the Back to the Classics challenge.

Journey Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg

Our library has a cart in the vestibule where people can leave books and take books whenever they want, and I've found some real treasures. Last summer I found a copy of Journey Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg, which I recognized as a recent Persephone reprint (though not a beautiful Persephone copy, sadly). It probably would have lingered on the shelves for years but it came back on my radar when I saw it listed on David Bowie's top 100 book list. I also realized it would fit the Russian classic category in my own challenge. 

I was a little apprehensive to read this book because a memoir about Stalin's reign of terror doesn't sound like the most cheerful of reads, especially during a dreary winter. However, I do love memoirs and survival stories, and this is both. Ginzburg was 30 years old in 1937, a teacher and active Communist Party member. After a co-worker at her university was arrested, Ginzburg was hauled in for questioning and ordered to denounce him. After she refused, she was arrested herself on trumped-up charges and accused of being a Trotskyist.  What follows is a Kafka-esque downward spiral that is so ridiculous and frightening it's almost hard for me to believe, having been raised in a democracy where anyone who's watched a TV police drama understands Miranda rights. 

After a seven-minute trial, Ginzburg was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The book covers the first three years of this nightmare, including two years in prison under terrible conditions, an excruciating journey across the continent to Vladivostok (jammed in a train car with more than 70 other women, with no bathroom and very little water); a boat journey that sounds reminiscent of a slave ship; and finally, a work camp where the already weak prisoners were forced to cut down trees and hack at the frozen ground while underfed and under dressed in the frigid weather. It was like the nine circles of hell, and it doesn't seem like things can get any worse for her -- until they do.

This book was just horrifying, yet fascinating. If I hadn't known it were non-fiction I probably would have returned the book to the donation cart, but I couldn't stop reading. Ginzburg was determine to stay alive just to spite her captors. And though there was cruelty, it was inspiring to read how the prisoners tried to help one another, often in tiny but meaningful ways like sharing a sip of water or a hoarded sugar cube. Even the prison staff sometimes showed humanity and kindness which led her to survive. Somehow, she managed to survive a total of 18 years in the Soviet gulags. 

We were still living in that bitter-sweet world of feeling which our prison life in Yaroslavl had created for us. I felt instinctively that as long as I could be stirred to emotion by the sea breeze, by the brilliance of the stars, and by poetry, I would still be alive, however much my legs might tremble and my back bend under the load of burning stones. It was by preserving all these treasures in our minds that we should resist the onslaught of the horrors around us.

This was a difficult read because of the subject matter -- I could only read a few chapters at a time before I had to put the book down and read something else. But it is well worth reading as a story of survival and hope. 

I'm counting this as my Russian Classic for the Back to the Classics Challenge and also for the European Reading Challenge.