22 Dec Skeletons at the Feast
Skeletons at the Feast, WWII Novel by Chris Bohjalian
(2008) During the last months of World War II, an aristocratic German family whose farm borders Poland leaves home and treks west in a desperate effort to escape the advancing Russians. They have heard tales of the brutality of the Soviet Army that is marching toward their prize, Berlin.
This family is not Jewish, but there is a parallel storyline that follows two main Jewish characters as they struggle to stay alive.
My daughter-in-law Amanda gave me this book for Christmas. She has never been particularly interested in reading a book about World War II, she explained, until I began my odyssey. Amanda read this one, loved it, and was shocked when she learned what so many Europeans had to endure. She said she had no idea.
I’m always interested in why an author wants to write about World War II. Chris Bohjalian lives in Vermont and in 1998 read the diary of the grandmother of one of his friends. She had been an East Prussian who raised her family on a beet farm and wrote about what it was like to run a large estate and then leave it all behind and travel west, primarily on foot to stay ahead of the Soviet army. Bohjalian didn’t begin the novel until eight years later when he read Max Hasting’s book Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 and realized how often that nonfiction book mirrored the grandmother’s diary.
Skeletons at the Feast is an extremely well-researched novel. The author studied extensively, even maps of that era so he could identify the towns correctly. Borders have shifted. Names have changed.
Bohjalian explores many of the questions I have. What did Germans families really know about what Hitler and his henchmen were doing? At the end of the book, in a reading group guide he wrote: “Most Germans may not have known about the death camps, but all Germans were aware of the anti-Semitism inflamed by the Nazi Party … People may not have known the details, but some had to have been aware that something horrific and unprecedented was happening.” The East Prussian grandmother, for sure, had no idea there were death camps.
Skeletons at the Feast: A Novel at amazon.com
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