Title: "My Enemy's Cradle"

Author: Sara Young

Pages: 365

By RITAGREFF

Citizen Reviewer

The heroine of the novel "My Enemy's Cradle" is Cyrla, who narrates the story. Cyrla is a young Polish girl of 14 when she comes to live with her aunt, uncle and cousin, Anneke, in Holland.

Aunt Mies, her deceased mother's sister, is loving and kind to her. Her uncle, not so kind. Because Cyrla is "half Jewish," he's worried the family will be caught offering their home to her.

Cyrla and Anneke (who is two years older) share their secrets and hopes. The cousins closely resemble each other in looks, but not in personality.

Cyrla thinks about Anneke … "sometimes she was careless with my feelings - not in cruelty but in the innocent way that beautiful girls sometimes have, as if being thoughtful were a skill they had never needed to learn. But when she did think of me, her sweetness, completely unmeasured, would fill me with shame."

Cyrla writes poems. It seems "like something's running away from me, and I have to write it down to corral it." She's a serious and introspective person. Young uses Cyrla's personality to develop some sensitive themes: abandonment, romance, pregnancy without marriage and ethnicity.

As the story begins, Anneke has admitted to her cousin that she has become pregnant. The father is Karl, one of the German soldiers who occupies Holland during World War II. Anneke is excited to tell Karl the news because she thinks he will marry her.

Author Sara Young has created a catchy story line while educating the reader about the Lebensborn Organization. On the surface, these maternity homes seemed humanitarian. We discover the atrocities they hide right along with the narrator as she lives them.

"The birthrate in Germany had plummeted after the First World War - the male population had been decimated, the country was in financial ruin and abortion was available, although illegal. In 1935 Heinrich Himmler set up the Lebensborn Organization, under the umbrella of the Nazi SS Race and Resettlement Office, whose goal was to increase the population of the 'Master Race.'"

Aryan girls and women were encouraged to have as many children as possible whether they were married or not. Maternity homes were set up so that the pregnant woman or girl could live there and give birth in "comfort, secrecy and safety." Later, girls from the occupied countries were sent to the maternity homes if the father was German.

"My Enemy's Cradle" is easy to read, romantic and hard to put down. The author has devised several surprising twists in the story to keep us reading. After finishing the book, I went back to skim it to see if I'd missed any of the foreshadowing clues. To me, the rewards of reading this book are the believable surprises the author has woven into the tale.

Young has skillfully portrayed the feelings of the characters making them seem very real. Because the book is written in the first person, we experience vicariously the feelings of denial that often accompanied rumors of what was going on in the refugee camps.

If you choose to read "My Enemy's Cradle," you have an opportunity to get to know a young girl who struggled to create normalcy in an extreme time. You have an opportunity to draw parallels between the way she solves problems and the way you do. It is an opportunity for the reader to recall that others have survived more serious setbacks than ours.

(Rita Greff grew up the oldest of eight children in a family that valued reading, particularly fiction. She taught fifth and sixth grades for 34 years.)