Lilac Girls tells the story of three very different women during World War II. Caroline is a New York socialite who volunteers at the French consulate and works tirelessly to send care packages to orphans in France. In Poland, a teenager named Kasia is caught working for the Resistance and is arrested and sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp exclusively for women where prisoners were subjected to horrific medical experiments. There we are introduced to Herta, a German doctor assigned to work at the concentration camp and who performed many of those experiments.
The lives of these three women are intertwined in this remarkable story that is based on true people and events. While I was aware that medical experiments had been performed on prisoners during the Holocaust, I had never heard of Ravensbrück before reading this book.
This isn’t necessarily a happy book. I definitely did not have a feel-good feeling when I was done reading. There’s a lot of sadness, but I think that just makes the happy events stand out more. I loved the friendships that formed between the prisoners and the little things they did every day to make their time at the camp bearable. Caroline’s role wasn’t fully recognizable at first, but I ended up loving her storyline and the part she eventually plays.
Lilac Girls is a captivating piece of historical fiction. The author includes a note at the end of the book detailing her research process and how she came to write the book. She writes about how she spent time at Caroline’s home in Connecticut and traveled to Poland to interview some of the Ravensbrück survivors. It’s obvious that much research went into this book and I am interested to read what the author comes up with next.
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