The lives of three real women are fictionalized in this WWII story that highlights how the horrors of that conflict connected people who would otherwise never have met. A difficult and disturbing read, this is a tale of how war can bring out the best in us – or the worst.

This is a story told through the eyes of three different narrators. We start with New York socialite Caroline Ferriday, a former Broadway actress who is now a volunteer at the French consulate. Things have never been busier for Caroline. The halls and waiting rooms of the consulate are filled with refugees as the troubles in Europe escalate. Her job is to help French citizens visiting or living in America but her passion is raising money for her French Families Fund. A change to the keynote speaker at her capital raising gala from the French Foreign Minister to sexy actor Paul Rodierre proves cataclysmic for her as she slowly falls under the spell of this charming – but married – man.

Thousands of miles away from Caroline, eighteen year old Kasia Kuzmerick watches her childhood blown away in the winds of war. It begins with the burial of her Girl Guides uniform in the backyard; it ends with the arrival of the Nazis. Suddenly there are Brown Shirts everywhere, food disappears from the shelves and the family’s pet hen is killed by an angry SS Officer. When many from the Girl Guides become members of the Gray Ranks, a part of the Polish underground, Kasia eagerly joins them. It is an added bonus that the handsome Pietrik Bokoski, on whom she has a crush, is one of the unit leaders in her area. The Germans have no love for the Polish people, though, and Kasia quickly learns that what the Germans don’t love, they destroy.

Hundreds of miles from Kasia, the woman who will soon be her nemesis is making life decisions. Herta Oberheuser fears that in the new Germany, where motherhood is viewed as the ultimate good, there will be no place for a female doctor. Initially, she is right. Graduation finds her serving as a dermatologist, a profession which apparently is held in disdain and pays very little. She has to work part-time at her uncle’s butcher shop to make ends meet, a job in which she is raped on a regular basis. The scene where the rape “routine” is depicted is both powerful and rather gruesome. The author uses it to good effect and reveals something unique about Herta’s love of medicine through some of the butchering sequences that take place around it. An advertisement for a medical position at a re-education camp looks like a certain way out of her personal hell. Her first day at Ravensbruck is a nightmare but Herta soon becomes comfortable with the horrors she has to perform. In fact, she starts to excel at them.

When Kasia, along with her family and friends, is sent to Ravensbruck, everyone is set on a course which leads to the lives of these three women intersecting in ways they could never have expected.

Let’s talk facts first: Caroline Ferriday was a philanthropist who helped bring Ravensbruck and the atrocities committed there to the attention of the American people. She also helped bring the women upon whom experiments were performed to the United States for reparative surgery. Herta Oberheuser was one of the doctors who performed surgical experiments there and was later imprisoned for the crimes she committed at the camp. Kasia is a character based on Nina Ivanska, an actual Ravensbruck “rabbit”, one of the women who helped bring the crimes being committed there to the attention of the world. You can find out more about them in the author’s notes at the end of the book or online.

Now let’s talk fiction: I found this story to be interesting but ultimately emotionless. Basically I responded to it the way I would a documentary; I could feel sorrow and repugnance for what happened to the characters but it was more mental than visceral. Even when Herta was being raped I didn’t experience much pity since in my first encounters with her she displayed deep scorn and disdain for anyone of Jewish blood.

The characters also seemed disjointed; For example, Caroline’s affair with Paul came across as frivolous rather than intimate. It was mentioned often that the two shared a connection but the couple we were shown didn’t appear to understand each other at all. Contrasted with her work for charity, Paul presented as an unnatural part of her life. Tacked on. Which is true, since the affair was entirely fictional.

I had the same issue with Kasia; there seemed a disconnect between the girl with the crush who was close to her mother and the resistance fighter who put everyone in her family at risk with her activities. Herta, on the other hand, was so evil from start to end, with essentially no shades of gray that I could read her rape with the same clinical dispassion she used to perform terrible experiments on her victims. I understand that the author couldn’t humanize an unrepentant Nazi without causing a great deal of rightfully deserved outrage but I felt she had also backed herself into this corner by choosing to fictionalize real people. Perhaps that was the problem; parts of the story were clearly fact and some of the fictional elements jarred with certain unshakable elements of reality.

The “positive”, if something so frightening and appalling can be called that, is that the book had lots of details on the camp itself and the people who worked there. It captured the complete horror of the war very well – from the European ex-pats in America desperate to find their families to the women suffering terrible cruelties in Ravensbruck. This novel truly depicted what a world at war really means and how difficult it is when no one anywhere feels truly safe.

That said, the solid writing and interesting storyline did not make up for the poor characterization. I often found myself wishing I were reading a nonfiction account of these lives so that I could better understand what was actually happening to them. Which made Lilac Girls a good read but not a great one. Pick this up only if you are truly interested in the subject matter – and willing to have a few nightmares in order to learn about it.