The Girl in the Striped Dress: A completely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story

 

Helena steps off the cattle train onto the frozen grounds of Auschwitz. She has twenty-four hours to live. Scheduled to be killed tomorrow, she is not even tattooed with a prison number. As the snow falls around her, she shivers, knowing that she has been sentenced to death for a crime she didn’t commit.

When a gray-clad officer marches towards Helena and pulls her away, she fears the worst. Instead, he tells her that it’s one of the guard’s birthdays and orders her to serenade him.

Inside the SS barracks the air is warm, thick with cigarette smoke and boisterous conversation. After she sings to the guard, Franz, he presses a piece of cake into her hands––the first thing she has eaten in days. On the spot, he orders her life to be saved, forever changing the course of her fate.

What follows is a love story that was forbidden, that should have been impossible, and yet saved both of their lives––and hundreds of others––in more ways than one.

 Amazon 

 

About The Author

Ellie Midwood is a USA Today bestselling and award-winning historical fiction author. She owes her interest in the history of the Second World War to her grandfather, Junior Sergeant in the 2nd Guards Tank Army of the First Belorussian Front, who began telling her about his experiences on the frontline when she was a young girl. Growing up, her interest in history only deepened and transformed from reading about the war to writing about it. After obtaining her BA in Linguistics, Ellie decided to make writing her full-time career and began working on her first full-length historical novel, "The Girl from Berlin." Ellie is continuously enriching her library with new research material and feeds her passion for WWII and Holocaust history by collecting rare memorabilia and documents.

In her free time, Ellie is a health-obsessed yoga enthusiast, neat freak, adventurer, Nazi Germany history expert, polyglot, philosopher, a proud Jew, and a doggie mama. Ellie lives in New York with her fiancé and their Chihuahua named Shark Bait.

Website 

 

My Review

 A fictional story, with so much truth behind it, but how could something like this really happen?
What a wonderful job the author has done with this book, and it should be mandatory reading.
We will never know for sure if one of the prisoners that we come to know was suffering from Stockholm/Auschwitz Syndrome, with a Jewish inmate in a relationship with an SS Officer, and through the words of the author we are there for the Nuremberg trials.
A story of heart wrenching pain, atrocities, forgiveness, love, such a range of emotions, and you will feel them all and more in this book.
I will be looking for more by Ellie Midwood!
I received this book through Net Galley and the Publisher Bookatour and was not required to give a positive review.