Book Club: The Lilac Girls

This month our book club read Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly which is another World War II fiction piece, but heavily based on real characters and events. The book goes between three female characters and their roles played during the time of the war. The first is living in the United States and volunteering at the French consulate helping those entering the country and sending supplies to orphans in France. The second is a Polish girl who works in the Underground but is arrested and sent to a concentration camp. And the third is a German doctor who takes a job working in the same concentration camp.

As you would imagine, with three very different roles, you get to experience three different sides to the goings on of the war. It was really hard sometimes to read of the doctor and the tasks she had been given . . . and the way it became completely normal to her. It was also hard to read what the Polish girl and all the other women in the camp endured.

The Lilac girls is what they called the women who went through experimental surgeries in the camp. In the end, the woman from the US aids in bringing these women to America to receive therapies and reconstructive surgeries when the end finally came. It was a big fundraising/awareness campaign and in the end gave new life to many women.

It is a long read, but really good. Would highly recommend it if you like historical fiction, WWII or if you read another book I wrote about, Radium Girls. Where you are given a lot of history about real people and circumstances that usually don't get shared.

This month our book club read Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly which is another World War II fiction piece, but heavily based on real characters and events. The book goes between three female characters and their roles played during the time of the war. The first is living in the United States and volunteering at the French consulate helping those entering the country and sending supplies to orphans in France. The second is a Polish girl who works in the Underground but is arrested and sent to a concentration camp. And the third is a German doctor who takes a job working in the same concentration camp.

As you would imagine, with three very different roles, you get to experience three different sides to the goings on of the war. It was really hard sometimes to read of the doctor and the tasks she had been given . . . and the way it became completely normal to her. It was also hard to read what the Polish girl and all the other women in the camp endured.

The Lilac girls is what they called the women who went through experimental surgeries in the camp. In the end, the woman from the US aids in bringing these women to America to receive therapies and reconstructive surgeries when the end finally came. It was a big fundraising/awareness campaign and in the end gave new life to many women.

It is a long read, but really good. Would highly recommend it if you like historical fiction, WWII or if you read another book I wrote about, Radium Girls. Where you are given a lot of history about real people and circumstances that usually don't get shared.