Here's the summary: "A teenage Jewish girl writes a diary while hiding with her family and two others from the Nazis in a crowded bunker during World War Two."
Yes, that is the same basic plot as the book that other famous WWII diarist wrote.
So why read "Clara's War"?
Because, other than that basic similarity, these are two very different books.
This book made me even angrier than that more famous diary, and made me cry more than once.
And this book, unlike that other, is really an unbelievably heart-wrenching love story... though you don't realize that until the end.
Clara Schwarz is a quiet, introspective 14 year old living with her parents and rambunctious younger sister in an idyllic Polish town where Jews and Christians have lived in harmony for three centuries. Although pogroms and other persecution have happened other places in Poland over the years, Zolkiew has been spared all of this because it was deemed so by King Sobieski three centuries ago. There is a long tradition of tolerance there.
Then the Nazis come.
Although Clara's father knows hundreds of Christian Poles and Germans through the factory that he owns, only two of them offer to hide his family. The first fellow is a poor Pole with no house and six small children to support. Clara's father declines, because the fellow simply doesn't have the resources. The second, Julia, a hard-working but poor ethnic German, was the Schwarz's housekeeper. She says she and her husband and her 17 year old daughter will hide the family. Clara's father is wary, because Julia's husband, Beck, has an infamous reputation around town: a heavy-drinking womanizer with a short fuse and with a bad reputation as an anti-Semite. As the Nazi noose tightens, though, Clara's father feels as if they have no other choice. They dig a shallow earthen bunker beneath Beck's bedroom and move there with 14 other Jews Beck agrees to hide. They don't dig the bunker very deep because they figure that, at most, they might need to live there two or three weeks.
Over the next 2 1/2 years, tragedies and miracles follow one upon the other in breathless succession in such an improbable way that a Hollywood scriptwriter would be laughed at if he submitted such a script. Intrigue, romance, infidelity, cruelty, arson, razor-thin escapes... even a 12-pound carp in a bathtub, stolen directly from the local Nazi Commandant!
But, through all of that human drama, what is most important: an improbable love grows.
In the beginning of the book, Clara is afraid of Beck, with his gruff ways, heavy drinking, Christian holidays, colorful vocabulary and anti-Semitic reputation.
But, by the end of her captivity, she learns that people aren't always what they seem---and that love speaks louder than anything else.
But be warned: In this temporal world of ours, good people sometimes lose, evil sometimes wins, and, unlike a Hollywood script, sometimes everything DOESN'T "work out well in the end."
But in the world of the eternal, all that really lasts is love.
"Clara's War" is an homage to the most righteous man she ever met.
It's now on my list of favorite books.
