The Lost Daughters of Ukraine - Erin Litteken

 The Lost  Daughters of Ukraine - Erin Litteken

Release Date : April 14, 2023

She read

Inspired by the author’s family history, this book follows the lives of three women of Ukraine during World War II: Vika, Lilya, and Halya, along with a number of supporting characters.  It is an excellent companion piece to Litteken’s The Memory Keeper of Kyiv which was about the Holodomor (“death by hunger”)  in the late 1920s-30s when Stalin and the Soviets stripped the country of its food and terrorized its residents. 

First the Soviets demanded their food, executed people at will and conscripted men into the Red Army. As the Nazi’s invaded, the Soviets followed a scorched earth policy, destroying all in their path. It is now the 1941 and the people of Ukraine are at the mercy of the Nazis. Initially thought to be liberators, freeing them from the Soviets, they brought more horror, taking the Ukrainian’s food, stealing their children and young adults to work in factories, sending some younger Aryan looking children to Germany to be adopted, burning their villages, slaughtering innocents.   

Litteken is a good story teller and she portrays the horrors without being overly graphic. Despite all the terror, there is love, hope and resilience. A repeating and somewhat uplifting theme is the legend and importance of the kalyna bush, a symbol of Ukraine - with white representing hope, red, the bloodshed of Ukrainians defending their homeland and green for continual renewal and new generations.

One indication of a good book is that it makes you feel something.  Reading this book made me feel anger about what has happened in the past and what is going on in Ukraine now. How can one country have been subject to so much terror over such a long period of time and still exhibit resilience? Man’s inhumanity to man never ceases to astonish me.

This was a tough, but very important read.

Thanks to #netgalley and #boldwoodbooks for the ARC.

*****