Trial by fire Book

The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies is set in a Welsh village near the end of WWII. Davies splendidly sets his story against the backdrop of WWII without weighing it down with too much action or too many war terms. It is also set against a pastoral countryside so there are very lyrical and elegant passages. There’s also a love story between the Welsh girl and the German POW, but it goes beyond that.

What’s most intriguing about this story is that it is driven by the characters’ actions and development during the war. The story is told in third person subjective so that we get an intimate perspective and alternates between Esther, Rotheram, and Karsten.

Esther is a seventeen-year-old Welsh girl who works at a pub serving the Welsh as well as the English soldiers. She’s curious about the POW camp. Rotheram is a German Jew that left to England on his mother’s insistence and became an interrogator. He is sent to the Welsh village to interrogate a supposed Nazi feigning amnesia. Karsten is a German soldier who surrenders and gets sent to a POW camp at a Welsh village. All three of them change and gain something by the end of the novel despite the many tragedies.

For instance, Esther gains a new definition of patriotism: “Why fatherland and not motherland? She’d wondered. But now she thinks: Why should the love of fathers or mothers be equated to love of country? Couldn’t you love your country by loving your children? Weren’t they your nation, at the last?”
Karsten gains a sense of serenity, “He had felt such peace, he was sure it [the war] must be over, that they’d separate and rise to the bright news of armistice. An end to the war that was neither victory nor defeat, just peace.”

Rotheram comes to terms with his identity— “It had never occurred to Rotheram that he could be unashamed of fleeing, of escaping, of living. Of being Jewish—if that was what he was. And suddenly it felt not only possible but right to not be German or British, to escape all those debts and duties, the shackles of nationalism…The Jews, he knew, had no homeland, yearned for one, and yet as much as he understood it to be a source of their victimization, it seemed at once such a pure freedom to be without a country.”
By Claudia Estrada