Teaser Tuesday: Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of A Daily Rhythm.
To play along just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein.

Rose Under Fire –
Disney Hyperion

It is just incredible that you can notice something like this when your face is so cold you can’t feel it any more, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and stay on course. And still the sky is beautiful.
— Part 1, Chapter 3

I have scars that show and scars that don’t.
— Part 3, Chapter 2.2

My first Elizabeth Wein book was Code Name Verity which totally blindsided me and then utterly destroyed me with feelings. So going in for this companion, I already expected this to wreck me again ... and it did, just not in the way I thought I had prepared myself for. I admired the bravery and friendship in Verity, which was very much about individual resistance and personal acts of fighting and I don’t know what else to say ... if you haven’t read Verity, I am urging you to do so. And after you’ve recovered, come back for Rose.
This book perfectly highlights the desperate fight for hope and survival and showcases the little victories among so much fear and loss on the bigger scale of prisoner groups within the organised industrial mass murder. It shows the brutality and efficiency of Nazi prisoner warfare from the very limited but still gruesome point of view of a prisoner who fared comparatively well, all things considered. And still it made my heart ache how humans could do this to other humans ... and possibly still can, who knows what’s going on behind certain front lines, it makes me sick and (like Rose) so mad that people can become so inhuman. With just a very few carefully selected words Elizabeth Wein manages to make the characters in her books come to live in all their devastating, seemingly hopeless beauty and devastating cruelty alike. I sobbed for a character I had known for only a few paragraphs when it became clear that she wouldn’t survive, not just because I liked her, but also because it illustrates the unfairness and randomness of these deaths.
This year, there are a lot of ceremonies and memorial events for the liberation of the concentration camps and the end of World War II in general and while I don’t feel responsible for a war and crimes a generation older than my grandparents caused, I still think that it is important to remember and to bear witness. I think Rose or Verity would be a amazing school reads (or just important literature anyway, considering how school reading lists are selected), but sadly enough no German publisher has picked them up ... possibly for fear of there being too much aviation talk and condemnation of Germans in it, even if neither is the case.
I was lucky to be able to visit a reading by an Auschwitz survivor and to experience this amazing person still alive. Because the reality is that these people are dying of old age, but books like this can help to ensure that what they had to endure will never be forgotten. And hopefully also help that something like this will never happen again.

What are you reading this week? Let’s hear from you in the comments.