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Someone Named Eva

Joan M. Wolf

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Mar 05, 2009 Jessica rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical-fiction

A realistic and horrifying look at what happened to Lidice, Czechslovakia, in 1942. Razed to the ground, the men were shot and the women sent to Ravenbruck concentration camp. Those children who looked Aryan were "reconditioned" into good little Nazis, and this is the story of one of them. ...more

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Mar 20, 2010 El rated it really liked it

Shelves: 21st-centurylit, young-adult-n-kids, holocaust, eastern-central-european-lit

A little reality back-story for those of you who don't know the history of Lidice in the Czech Republic. By the late Thirties, when it was still Czechoslovakia, Hitler was in control of the country. He put his favorite wing-man, Reinhard Heydrich, in charge of Czechoslovakia, then called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia under Nazi rule; he was referred to by locals as the "butcher of Prague". Not a nice man, this one. Some resistance fighters swooped in to try to assassinate Heydrich who A little reality back-story for those of you who don't know the history of Lidice in the Czech Republic. By the late Thirties, when it was still Czechoslovakia, Hitler was in control of the country. He put his favorite wing-man, Reinhard Heydrich, in charge of Czechoslovakia, then called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia under Nazi rule; he was referred to by locals as the "butcher of Prague". Not a nice man, this one. Some resistance fighters swooped in to try to assassinate Heydrich who died about a week later from his injuries. This, of course, angered Hitler. His solution was to destroy any village that was found to have assisted the resistance fighters in any way. Lidice happened to be one such village. The retaliation Hitler imposed on them was to shoot any man over the age of 16 by firing squad, put the women in concentration camps, remove any children and place them in German homes in an attempt to Germanize them (thus removing their Czech ancestry), and destroy the entire village.

This children's fiction book is about this. Milada is taken from her family and trained to be a "perfect" German, which includes having her name changed to an appropriate German name - Eva. She tries to retain her memories of her family alive, but by the time she is adopted by a German family she finds it's harder each day to remember what happened before she was taken away. Her adopted father is a high-ranking Nazi officer who works in the Ravensbruck concentration camp not far from their home. Eva comments on the smell in the air, but does not understand until later that the smell is from the actual concentration camp and that it is the smell of the executed.

Quite a powerful children's fiction book, and well worth the read. It's written with children in mind, obviously, but the story itself is an important one, if one can stomach it. Because it is based on a true story, it's heartbreaking and nauseating what this little girl went through. It's a fictitious story, but as the author explains in the Afterword, she encountered people whose own real stories mirrored the one she had written about Eva. ...more

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Apr 11, 2009 RachelAnne rated it liked it

Shelves: historical, youngadult

The heart-wrenching story of Milada, a young Czech girl chosen for her "Aryan" appearance to be re-educated, re-named and molded into a perfect Nazi young woman. Although this novel is fiction, it incorporates Hitler's brutal reprisal against the village of Lidice and is based on the narratives of Czech and Polish children who endured experiences similar to those Milada faced. This is an extremely strong contribution to the already immense body of works about World War II and the Holocaust, in p ...more

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