Rose Under Fire - Elizabeth Wein

[goodreads]

Title: Rose Under Fire
Author: Elizabeth Wein
Genre: World War II
Rating: 4.5/5
# pages: 368, Audiobook ~12hrs
Date read: June 2013, April 2021

While flying an Allied fighter plane from Paris to England, American ATA pilot and amateur poet, Rose Justice, is captured by the Nazis and sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious women's concentration camp. Trapped in horrific circumstances, Rose finds hope in the impossible through the loyalty, bravery and friendship of her fellow prisoners. But will that be enough to endure the fate that’s in store for her?


... And here I thought "Code Name Verity" packed a punch...

Rose Under Fire is an extremely poignant and important book. I literally sat stunned for a couple of minutes after finishing it (be sure to read the author's afterword!). The horror of RUF is that this is all REAL! Oh sure, there never was a person like Rose Justice - the American who got mistaken for a French political prisoner and thus sent to Ravensbrück... but Ravensbrück itself is real... the war crimes committed against the "rabbits" were real. And that's what makes this book such a devastating read. Rose made the horrors of the concentration camps become real in a way few other books have managed to, because she is such a relate-able heroine, and the shock of going from discounting the rumours of medical experiments in concentration camps as "anti-German propaganda" to seeing for herself the results of those experiments is only all too believable.

The novel is interspersed with Rose's poetry - some of which is too heartbreaking for words.