THE CHILDREN'S WAR •
By Monique Charlesworth. Knopf. 367 pp. $24.95
World War II haunts the European imagination differently than it does ours. For Americans, it was the war of soldiers, recently celebrated as "the greatest generation." For Europeans it was equally a war for civilians and, inevitably, children. "All those children," muses the young heroine of this searing novel. "Nobody lets you know what happened to the children. . . . Nobody will tell the story of the children." In The Children's War, Monique Charlesworth tells that story so artfully that she brings an entirely fresh perspective to bear on familiar psychological territory.
It is 1939, and the Nazis are casting their shadow over Europe while relentlessly forcing the Jews out of everyday life in Germany. Caught in this tightening web is a young woman lawyer, Lore, married to a Jewish writer, Otto, whose resistance to the Nazis has sent him often to prison and now driven him underground. Though Lore is Aryan, her Jewish marriage forces her to abandon her profession and livelihood. Under Nazi law, her 13-year-old daughter, Ilse, is labeled Jewish and is being shunned at school. Desperate to save Ilse, her mother sends the girl alone -- a skinny, frightened little redhead -- by train and ship to her uncle in Morocco.
That is but a brief idyll for Ilse, for soon she is on the run. The novel is her journey, through the war and through adolescence -- never secure, constantly in danger. In Paris, she meets her defeated father and has to mother him while longing for her mother. After Ilse is separated again, her physical travels are exciting, often harrowing, but during them a spiritual journey unfolds as this secular child confronts the life-threatening identity of Jew and, desperate for comfort, finds it for a time in the Catholic Church.
Another story parallels hers. Nicolai, a German boy of Ilse's age, lives in an affluent family, dining well, cosseted by servants. His older brother is in the SS, an ardent Nazi, but his father, an intellectual, is not. Forced to join the army, he sends Nicolai ironic notes, feeding the boy's natural skepticism as Hitler's triumphal conquests gradually turn to catastrophe. Nicolai is smart and observant, aware that his mother "completely missed the essence of things," and also aware of her affair with a reserve officer. The boy becomes fascinated by the nursemaid hired for his baby sister. She happens to be Ilse's mother, who has become a maid because it's the only work she can find to make money to rejoin her daughter. With exquisite delicacy, we see Lore's plight through the eyes of a sensitive adolescent feeling the first stirrings of physical attraction. She responds with friendship, and, when Allied bombing creates an inferno in Hamburg, she saves Nicolai's life.
In this richly satisfying and utterly absorbing novel, Charlesworth achieves instant credibility with her command of detail and vivid evocations of place -- Marseilles, Paris, Meknes in Morocco and wartime Hamburg. I admired her economy of expression, for example, as the scared and travel-weary Ilse, waiting to be met at Marseilles's railway station, mingles in her thoughts both the guidebook she has absorbed and the current scene: "Greeks from Asia Minor had landed here twenty six centuries ago, dark men in galleys with long oars. Centuries passed. Another hour went by."
The author enters the consciousness of the children with insight and restraint. Even when forced to assume adult responsibilities, they remain children. Food, usually the lack of it, is constantly on their minds. They understand what their emotional ages let them understand, as the reader feels adult perceptions only gradually dawning in them. A rising sexual awareness flickers in both protagonists, but only flickers -- even as Ilse hides for a time in a Marseilles brothel, with the boots of German soldiers loud on the stairs.
Occasionally their insights feel a little precocious. Nicolai notices Lore in the double pane window of a snowbound inn:
"She was a double reflection in the glass and so was he. Everybody had an inner and an outer self. Everyone led a double life in the real world; as children grew, they built an outer shell for themselves. The inner person was tender and had to be protected. The trick to staying alive seemed to be to make the gap between the outside pane and the inner one as narrow as possible."
Some social critics have argued that our media-saturated society has caused, in Neil Postman's phrase, the disappearance of childhood by exposing children to the adult secrets of aggression and sexuality. Whatever truth we concede to that insight, we are reminded by this novel that children survive far worse than mediated violence. What matter are values instilled by parents (Ilse's mother, Nicolai's father) and the mysterious emergence of individual character. That is Monique Charlesworth's message, as Ilse interprets it. "But who could save her? Only she could. It was the unalterable character a person had that ordained all that would come to pass and nothing could ever be done to change it."
The characters and personalities the author builds for these two children are fascinating and original, as are those of the adults who surround them. By the end of the book, Ilse and Nicolai have become so real that, assuming they survived, one is tempted to imagine them today among those Europeans in their late seventies who, as children, learned lessons about humanity that our children only glimpsed on Sept. 11, 2001. •
Robert MacNeil, former co-anchor of the NewsHour on PBS, is the author of three novels and several nonfiction books. His latest is a memoir, "Looking for My Country: Finding Myself in America."
