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The Nightingale

#spoiler alert
The Nightingale 
Kristin Hannah 



I was never a good student of history. But later as my reading progressed, I became fascinated by the past events our species went through. I tried to catch up by searching internet and of late with the help of some Netflix documentary series. Novels and movies, albeit being works of fiction, helped me to get  multidimensional lively pictures about such events. Because those deal with emotions and describes how the events affected individual and collective lives of people. All these add up like pieces of jigsaw puzzles. Yet, many more pieces are to be gathered to complete the picture.

When I read The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah the memories of reading Mein Kampf, The Book thief ,Afterlives, Catch 22 and watching 'The Boy in the striped Pyjamas'  came to mind. I read Mein Kampf long back. It was intriguing to see how a hateful political philosophy spread by propoganda and affected the geopolitical scenario of the whole world.
Lives of ordinary people in Germany were badly affected as the lives of people of invaded lands. Catch 22 sarcastically exposed the futility of war and its devastating effects on soldiers. But, when hate spread everything  on its path was charred. 

'The Nightingale' told the story of two sisters in France during World War II. How their lives changed under brutal German invasion. Vianne, the elder initially went through the phase coping with two officers billeting one after the other, at her big ancestral home in an imaginary village in France.  Her only aim was to keep her daughter away from danger and feed her. But as the German atrocities mounted , she found herself conspiring to rescue Jewish children from deportation to notorious concentration camps. She could live with mearge ration, preserves of her garden fruits and stitching dresses out of old blankets but couldn't sit and watch her daughter's classmates being thrown into cattle carts. She couldn't imagine her daughter growing up in a world spewing such hatred.

Isabel the impulsive younger sister jumped into the thick of the French resistance  from the start. She was just twenty years old when she became the 'Nightingale ' who helped downed allied pilots to cross Pyrenees mountains to Spain. By the time she ended up in a concentration camp which squeezed her spirit out of her, she had rescued 19 allied pilots.

Requisitions ( just a convenient term for looting), deprivation, malnutrition devastation- the story of invasion was the same everywhere, be it France or East Africa. But you would be heartbroken by the extent of cruelty and would be tearful multiple times while reading 'The Nightingale '. 

But, there were sparks of humanity here and there like Captain Beck who was billeted in Vianne's home. Such sparks were visible in 'The Book Thief'  and 'Afterlives '. Perhaps that's what one should hold onto. That is what one should let linger in the mind to save it from the devastating darkness of the period.

Preetha Raj


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