The Puppet Boy Of Warsaw by Eva Weaver

I really don't like to read books that involve the Holocaust and the second world war, mostly because of their depressing nature, but also because I always think just how many more ways are there looking at it? Are there any other ways that highlight the devastation that was caused? With everything that is happening in Gaza at the moment as well, where the Israeli military and government are continuing to bomb Gaza and Hamas, war is slowly coming to the forefront of every news channel and newspaper.

So for taking all this into consideration, I think this is what attracted me to read this book. To remind myself of the devastation that the Jewish population suffered in WW2, and to try and see if the novel made me look at the war at yet another angle. The book is split into two different time periods where the protagonist is Mika, a Jewish boy in the war in the 1940s and a grandfather telling his story to his now grandson in 2009. If you are educated in all of the facts of the war, then you always feel that impending sense of terror that is beckoning on the Jewish population of Warsaw. And it is not long until Weaver throws us straight into the terror of the Warsaw ghettos, when the Jews were all placed into one area of Warsaw, a space that was far too cramped for the amount of people forced to live there. Weaver cleverly purveys this sense of cramped conditions by letting a lot of the action spill out onto the streets, where all the evil is happening, where all the killing is occurring and where everyone is slowly starving.

Mika soon inherits his grandfathers coat that has a complex pattern of inner pockets allowing him to hide things inside them. This includes his grandfathers puppets and Mika soon becomes enthralled by them, making his own puppets and then slowly his own shows. More people are forced to move into his and his mothers flat, meaning he now rarely has time to himself. We follow Mika putting on shows for chilrdens hopsitals, orphanages as well as birthday parties. Soon his shows attract Nazi attention and he is made to put on shows, forced to down pints of beer and become part of the rough and manly culture. He soon befriends a soldier called Max, but there is such an air of tension between the two that Weaver subtly writes into it that is makes you always feel a sense of danger for Mika, a sense that Max is always just doing what he is told by his Nazi superiors.

The rest of Mika's journey during the war is much as would expect, full of death, full of loss and full of a fight that you never really think they will win. But of course, eventually the allies do win, he is given the chance for freedom, we already know at the start of the book he has made it to the USA. He is one of the lucky ones. There are some truly heart wrenching moments in the book with Mika, especially for me when the Nazis are making a film about life in the ghetto and they make Mika perform one of his shows. To pretend that life is all dandy in the ghettos, when really all the weak ones are being killed off before all the strong ones are shipped off to concentration camps. I got so mad reading it, why did no one help the Jewish people at the time? And then reading the current news straight after, how can a mainly Jewish population in Israel not understand what they are currently doing? I just don't get it.

Images from the Warsaw ghetto

One side of the book that really worked for me was when the book looks at life after the war for Max, the German soldier. Sent off to a prison in Siberia, we follow his complex journey and inner thought processes. Why are the German soldiers taking all the punishments when they were just following orders from people who have gotten away with it? It is an extremely debatable and hard to determine subject that it is almost too hard to call. Should the soldiers have been so severely punished for merely carrying out orders? When you read everything Mika saw and heard, it is hard to reason with Max and his comrades. But his journey for me was all the more fascinating as I have never really thought about what German soldiers went through after the war. All the lies they were fed for no reason, for no purpose. Truly devastating on any sole.

Just some of the three million German POWs in USSR

I apologise for the somber tone to this review. It's just the subject matter at hand. And the topical nature of war at the moment across the world doesn't help. I realise that WW2 and the Gaza/Israeli bombings are two totally different situations, but can people not learn from past situations? From situations that didn't even happen that long ago? From situations that people who are alive today were alive back then? The sheer ignorance of those in power will sometimes never cease to amaze me.

The Puppet Boy Of Warsaw by Eva Waver is published by Phoenix, an imprint of Orion books, in the UK.