Emilia: The darkest days in history of Nazi Germany through a woman's eyes

This book is emotional and jarring! Maybe Ellie's most moving story yet! Told from the perspective of a Jewish woman named Emilia, her and her family are caught in the nightmarish path of the Nazi regime. To protect her family, she submits to a dreadful fate. Enduring sexual abuse and horrific violence, she holds nothing back as she tells her story. Her story is one of many, people on both sides (tormentors and victims) changing the course of history, and devastating so many lives. There were times when I had to set the book and just take it all in. And I love when a book makes me feel so affected. This story was heartbreaking for me, but I felt empowered by Emilia. She is tough and resilient, her love for her family as strong as her will. As usual, Ellie's ability to make her characters feel so real was my favorite part of this book. I felt like I was inside the story, and at times, I didn't want to be because it was traumatizing. Big props to the author for holding nothing back and spinning a well researched tale that left its mark on me. It's dark and it's gritty, and it's a story you will NEVER forget. Emilia will stick with me for a long time. Fans of historical fiction - if you aren't reading Ellie Midwood's books yet, you MUST check them out! Emilia is fantastic, and I also love Ellie's Girl from Berlin and The Austrian books.

Emilia is not a traditional romance novel, historical or otherwise. It is a raw, harrowing, unflinching look into a period of time in history from the perspective of a young women (Emilia, the titular character of the novel), and while there is a romance of a fashion in the very last few chapters of this novel, it is not what you will remember. It is the events that lead up to that denouement, as brutal, gritty, and uncompromising as they are, that will stick with you. If you are looking for a light, simple romantic read, do NOT go here. This novel is so graphic, so merciless, and so inhuman (as befits the time and subject matter), that it took me far longer to finish this novel than others I have read recently. If you have any interest in the Shoah, if you’ve wondered what things may have been like for a young woman having to live in the circumstances of the Holocaust, then pick up this book and read it. But be prepared to have to deal with some arduous, agonizing, and distressing situations which will not be easy to read. Which is as it should be for the subject matter. Emilia is a young Jewish woman whose father does not take the emergence of the Nazi with much seriousness. He is a good German, and believer in his country, and he has faith that nothing will come of things that others are worried about. Through a series of cascading events his faith is proven wrong, and Emilia watches this with growing disgust and disillusionment. Events overtake everyone in her family; a move from Germany to Poland, and then further internment in the ghettos of Warsaw. While difficult, these events are mostly ones of inconvenience, until Emilia is forced into circumstances while there which foreshadow the true depths of the horrors that not only she, but the Jewish people as a whole, are soon to undergo. It is when this initial event takes place that the novel just becomes one of one bleak event following upon another. The situations that Emilia finds herself thrust into, the things she must endure to remain alive, are just unrelenting. I would say the choices that she has to make, but that is unfair. There are no ‘choices’ for her. She is simply thrust into one situation after another, and there is no choice; she must do and endure what is inflicted upon her in order to survive. That may be the single most lasting impression that sticks with you during the 2/3’rds of the book discussed here; it would be easy to judge Emilia (and others) by saying “Well, they made bad / poor choices.” But as the events play themselves out, you realize that choice doesn’t even have a part in what is happening. Emilia has been stripped of the luxury of choice. She is forced to do what she is compelled to, and at its core, the only choice she has is to either live, or die. Since throughout all of this she lives by one mantra – ‘I will survive.’ – the only option left to her is to live. In doing so, she must endure horrific conditions, and acts of depravity from her captors, that the reader, at points, almost has to take on a clinical attitude not to become depressed to the point of not wanting to continue. There is so little to find ‘enjoyable’ in these sections that you may find yourself saying “Do I really want to continue with this?” But that’s the point; there is no sugar-coating what happened in the camps, and there is no sugar-coating the actions of the perpetrators, and what their victims had to endure. If the purpose of this novel has no other, it is to remind us of that, and to give a sense of the strength that it took for a human to live through a world without choice, to endure from one moment to the next with nothing more but the will to survive to the end. It is in the last section of the novel that Emilia achieves her goal – she survives. But that does not mean her challenges are over. Once the war has ended, and she is free of the camp, there are still other circumstances which she must overcome, and all while dealing with the lingering aftereffects of her time within the camps. She manages to do so, and it is during this section where she also finds herself coming to terms with what she has had to endure and overcome, and not letting it define completely the rest of her life. As mentioned before, this book was quite difficult to read, purely from the subject matter alone. This is not a novel to be approached lightly. Emilia is a curious protagonist; she is forced into brutal circumstances, and she endures horrific situations, and she agonizes over what she is having to do to achieve her one overarching goal: to survive. There are several points where she almost succumbs to making the only other choice available to her – to die. That she doesn’t do that, but forces herself ever forward, to suffer through everything that is inflicted upon her, leaves the reader at points questioning whether it is worth it. Is her ultimate end-goal worth what she is being compelled to do? Questions like these force the reader to contemplate – through the luxury and safety of sitting and reading – how one would act if placed in Emilia’s place. These are hard questions, and can leave the reader feeling uncomfortable, especially if one is to be truthful with oneself, and not try and take a moral high ground position from the safety of distance. A book which does this to a reader is often not one that evinces a sense of pleasure in the actual reading. In the case of a novel like this, that isn’t a criticism. The subject matter isn’t such that a reader should be titillated by it, or feel the warm and fuzzy’s after having completed it. A novel of this type is here to remind the readers of just how terrible and brutal people can be to each other, and that while survival can be empowering to read about, the path to that end comes at a price that is awfully and terribly high. If I have a single criticism about this book it would be this; the author has done a fantastic job of putting the reader into this horrific world throughout the book, starting from the beginning and all the way until the last chapters. The very last few chapters of this book do attempt to lift you out of it, to show that redemption and the healing process can take place, even after hellish circumstances. However, because this does come in the last chapters, it suffers from feeling rushed. Experiences and situations are introduced at an almost breakneck speed, and it honestly felt as if the author was trying to achieve two separate goals; to give the reader a sense of a happily ever after, and also tie up any loose ends. While this is definitely achieved, it felt so forced at times that it read quite differently in pace and tone than the rest of the novel, and that was jarring. As I finished the novel I said to myself “I almost wished she’d stopped right after the war.” Again, this is not to say the final chapters are bad (and certainly not at all poorly written or anything of that nature), it’s only that compared to the chapters before them the last ones felt as if the author was speaking faster and faster to get all the last little details in before they typed The End. It seemed like that could have been done a bit sooner (at least to this reader). Is this a good book? Yes, unequivocally. Is it an easy book. No. Not at all. Is it an important book? Yes, especially if you have any interest in the history of what happened during the Holocaust, and if you’ve wondered what Jewish women in particular may have gone through during that period. If any of the latter are things that intrigue you, I highly recommend this novel. If those subjects may disturb you, or anre not the sort of reading you are looking for, I would say give this a pass. It is not going to be an easy read either way, but you will understand some things in an entirely different light.

Emilia: The darkest days in history of Nazi Germany through a woman's eyes By Ellie Midwood It’s the late 1930s and an idealistic Jewish man, father to Emilia, prides himself in being a German and even welcomes the evil new ruler’s appointment to Chancellor. Oskar Brettenheimer believed that Hitler would make Germany strong again. That poor man’s hope was shattered when in 1938 all Jews were targeted and told to report to immigration department and wear a yellow band. Oskar fled with his wife Hanna, three sons (Ariel, Alfred and Martin), and youngest Emilia, to Poland where he opened a Jewelry shop. Once again his life was uprooted when his home was confiscated and Hitler’s Nazis took all his valuable belongings. Fearing they were to become homeless, they discovered their new living location was Krakow. The bad turns gain momentum and don’t let up until Emilia is thrown into a torturous hell of sexual abuse and exploitation. The abuse in the Krakow Ghetto are but a whisper of what is to come: a horrifying manipulative guard named Richter taunts Emilie, takes the last of her families hidden treasures (her mother’s wedding band, etc.) and doesn’t stop when there was nothing more material to for him to rob them of. No, he greedily lays claim of the only thing left, Emilia’s body and innocence. The story continues from one hell to a deeper torture and without retelling the entire plot suffice it to say that this book will stay with the reader till days after the last page is shut. Brilliantly and courageously written, Midwood holds no punches in taking the reader to places where actual survivors deign not to discuss: sexual exploitation and torture of Jewish women by the SS and Nazis. No one involved was left unscathed in this hard to believe based-on-reality story. I applaud the author for tackling a subject that was been verboten in much of contemporary literature about holocaust victims and survivors. It happened, it needs to be discussed, and it needs to be remembered. My hats off to Ellie Midwood for tackling this very difficult subject with much sensitivity and tact.

Emilia: The darkest days in history of Nazi Germany through a woman's eyes By Ellie Midwood is a well-written remembrance of how cruel human beings can be to fellow human beings. The author tells the story of one young Jewish girl abused and made a sexual slave to help herself and her family survive the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. The atrocities happened in more gruesome ways than the author can describe in a short novel. Even a visit to the whitewashed sites of Dachau or Auschwitz cannot describe all of the horrors. Many not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, hard labor, disease, execution, and questionable experiments in the name of medical science. Concrete individual stories like Emilia bring home the reality of these horrors with the hope that atrocities should never be forgotten, but eliminated from the earth. I studied for my Doctorate in Germany in the 1970s and confronted professors, friends, and acquaintances with questions about the “Hitler Times”. Most denied knowledge of what was going on then. Those who were guilty of being a “Nazi youth” quickly changed the subject. I had never met an admitted member of the feared Waffen-SS (Schutzstaffel), but I’m sure their reply would have been the same as the ordinary soldiers, members of the Wehrmacht, “We do not talk about those times.” And then there was my landlord who believed that the present-day crimes and student unrest could have been eliminated, “If only our Adolf were still with us.” And we hear about atrocities with us today – in North Korea, in China, in Muslim countries under ISIS control, to name a few. Ellie Midwood does us a service in giving us an example of the abuse, torture, rape, starvation, and slavery committed by ideologies, greed, and the inhumanity of man during the Second World War. There are also the traumas, the nightmares, the life-long mutilations and injuries left behind, if and when freedom comes. These cruelties are often taken lightly and quickly forgotten, because they happened a long time ago or did not happen near us. The true message of such remembrances is that these atrocities should never happen again. “Nie wieder” (“Never again”) was the slogan after Nazism was defeated. Today it seems like a futile message. Is anyone listening? Thanks to authors like Ellie Midwood the message will be heard.

We would all desperately want to say of Ellie Midwood’s novel “Emilia” that it was dystopian. There is terror, horror, humiliation, the struggle to survive…as in “The Road” or “The Handmaid’s Tale.” But, disturbing as those classics are, at least they are imagined. We can awake from them, like from a terrible nightmare. But we can’t, just as Emilia Brettenheimer cannot. Because the undeniable truth is that in the suburbs of Danzig, Poland, in May of 1941, the Nazis had already begun the long process of exterminating the Jewish people when we meet Emilia, a teenager, and her family. And we wince, fearing with them, what is to come. The story of survival in the Concentration Camps has been told, but Ellie Midwood has given us a window into it from the perspective of a young girl, who must struggle against convention and conscience in the choice between life and death. It isn’t long before we are alongside Emilia, wondering as we turn each page where her story will take her and us. We witness her transformation from child to woman. And soon we are understanding something of what it would take to survive and wondering too if we had the stuff to manage it. I am not sure that a documentary account of such an experience can fully reveal the sense of a human being confronted with such inhumanity in a world without hope or relief. It is one thing to hear of it; quite another to feel each hour of it. It is a testament to great skill that the author managed to so compelling and realistically capture in words what she could only know from others and do so with such precision and authenticity. It is not possible to read “Emilia” and not be moved. For all the horrors of those times and circumstances, this is a story of remarkable courage: a celebration of the resilience of the indomitable human spirit. The reader will come away chastened but uplifted, and very glad of the experience.

I really enjoyed this story. The characters had depth and the storyline was very easy to follow but complex enough to be interesting. I really empathized with Emilia and loved reading about her various challenges and how she overcame them. Without spoiling it, I particularly enjoyed the ending - the exact ending I was hoping for! My only criticism would be that, while the author did a great job showing the emotions and journey of the main character, she would then follow it up by explaining what she already showed. I would have loved to have more of that left up to the interpretation of the reader - to add mystery. But that's a very minor criticism because the book is very well-written, realistic, and covers a very emotional and dramatic subject matter that helps the reader understand more about World War II and the atrocities experienced by the Jews - especially Jewish women. Not a lot of similar stories cover the horrific rape and abuse they must have experienced at the hands of the Nazis.

This book needs some serious grammatical and structural editing. Errors and bad sentence structure are not only confusing, they are distracting to the reader. This story is based on a true story, which is just horrid in itself. But the author did not adequately make the reader (me) feel like I was 'there', witnessing the horror, repulsed by the horror, nor did the author succeed in stimulating any real sympathy for the characters. The book is worth reading because it is based on a true story, but don't expect too much from a literary standpoint.

It takes courage to read this book. And it must have taken even more determination to write it. Ellie Midwood dares to reach back to one of the darkest times in Polish history, and she does it with tremendous respect for the victims. It would be tempting to use their suffering to add impact to the book. Ellie doesn't do that. The book is overwhelming, but never crass. I think the author must be a very sensitive person to have balanced the emotions in the novel in such an excellent way and to avoid unnecessary showiness. The author dives deep into the history of my country and even uses some Polish words to add flavor to the book--I appreciate this, since my language is not easy. Also, since I've walked the places Ellie depicts in her novel, I can tell you that her descriptions are very accurate (but without excessive details). I know Gdansk and the ghetto in Krakow so well. I've been to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, as getting to know the story of the genocide is an important part of our education. And I know the history of my poor country, including the Jews my family is befriended with, as well as the stories of our neighbors and relatives. In primary school, we, I mean the kids, discussed the war. My uncle was battered to death. My grandpa was gassed in Treblinka. My grandma hid in the basement with two babies. Almost every family in this country suffered a loss during World War II... And Ellie captured it all: the terror, the feeling of hopelessness, the eroding moral standards, but also the unbelievable will to survive. I know so many people who made it back from hell and decided to rebuild their lives. I'm very grateful to Ellie for telling our story, so that nobody forgets these crimes against humankind. We should all remember and beware in order not to let this happen again. Thank you, Ellie, for your courageous undertaking.

A storyline that ends well, in the otherwise cruel Nazi Germany. A story about survival and starvation, love and death, that ends well.

"Emilia" is the story of a young German, Jewish woman's struggle for survival in WW2. Our protagonist endures a nightmare existence of rape, starvation and brutality but she is a fighter and her effort to stay alive, whatever the cost, is not in vain. Despite the horrific subject matter, "Emilia" is an engaging read. The author's voice is raw and gritty (no fluffy, purple prose here) and I found her frankness somehow endearing and relatable. The pace of the story is excellent (no need to skim or skip any boring bits) as it transitions beautifully from one scene to the next. Ultimately, I felt that the book was about acceptance and moving on but that's just my interpretation. If you like fiction from this era and can cope with some rather disturbing images, you'll really get into this thought-provoking read.

I suppose the clue is in the title: there was no way that “Emilia: The darkest days in history of Nazi Germany through a woman's eyes” was going to be an easy read, and it wasn’t. And if I needed any more advice, then the dedication — “This story is dedicated to all the victims of sexual slavery in German concentration camps, who had to endure inhumane suffering under the Nazi regime” — was an additional warning. And yet, and yet… it was, eventually, an uplifting read. In the first part of the book, Emilia, a young Jewish girl, finds herself in the concentration camps, forced to rely upon her wits and her body to survive. I knew, of course, that women like Emilia existed and were subjected to extraordinary brutality and Ellie Midwood doesn’t shrink away from describing Emilia’s experience, though succeeding in doing so of necessity rather than gratuitously. (I confess: I skipped some of the grimmer parts.) With liberation, the second part of the book deals with Emilia’s struggle to survive in a new world where she both distrusts and is distrusted, before she eventually finds resolution and peace. If I’m honest, I found that in this section, the writing lacked the raw power that characterised the first part and I even felt it went on a little bit too long — but it was a much easier read. I’ll certainly read more by Ellie Midwood, (though hopefully something a little less graphic), because I enjoyed both the quality of her writing and the insights into the characters of the very different men who encounters and took advantage of Emilia in her journey through horror. I’ve given the book five stars because the first half certainly deserved it, though (as I say above) I did find it tailed off a little later on, and some of the writing was a little slower and less engaging. I can’t, in all honesty, say I enjoyed it — but it was very definitely worth a read.

Wow! What a powerful book. I hate to have to add a few warnings to it because I honestly would love everyone to take the time to read this story. Warning mature subject matter. This book contains scenes of violence, torture, rape, explicit language and hate crimes. If you follow my reviews, you know I don't normally veer towards historical fiction. I decided to take the plunge. I chose an amazing book to wet my feet with. Society has begun to forget the atrocities of the past. This book is a wake up call - we can never let history repeat itself. The reader follows Emilia an innocent german born jewish girl from the age of 19 through her life in concentration camps. What happens to her isn't for the faint hearted. Her sheer will to survive is compelling and drove me to read the entire novel in one sitting. I particularly like the way the book continues after the fall of Hitler and the tables are turned. Hate brings out the worst in everyone. I'm not an expert in this time period, but there are a few lines which may not ring authentic, they, however, do not interfere with the enjoyment of the writing or the underlying message. Recommended read for all mature audience! A full 5 stars

A well-researched book on this topic that is definitely difficult to write and read about. However I didn't think the kind of happy end was realistic.