Fabulous reads – A haunting story, yet inspirational

Mischling, Affinity Konar, Penguin Random House, ISBN: 9781786490841

MISCHLING means “mixed-blood” in German and was the German legal term used in Nazi Germany to denote persons deemed to have both “Aryan” and Jewish ancestry.Author, Affinity Konar has tackled the horrific story of the “Mengele” twins in Auschwitz with great sensitivity rather than sensationally, leaving the dramatic events that unfolded to speak for themselves. The Nazi, Dr Josef Mengele, also known as “The Angel of Death”, was the cruel staff doctor at the Auschwitz death camp where his gruesome experiments on helpless inmates are the stuff of nightmares.

Konar focuses the story on 12-year-old twin sisters, Pearl and Stasha, who arrive at Auschwitz in 1944 with their mother and grandfather, but are separated from them and are taken to barracks where they are subjected to torturous experiments. The point of view changes from twin to twin and the reader gets drawn into this atrocity where children become mere objects to be experimented on.

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At Mengele’s Zoo, the girls find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain.
To cope, Pearl is in charge of: the sad, the good, the past while Stasha must care for: the funny, the future, the bad.

Mengele arranges a concert, and Pearl disappears.
Stasha grieves for her twin, but clings to the possibility that Pearl remains alive.
When the camp is liberated by the Red Army, she and her friend, Feliks, travel through Poland’s devastation.

They are free, but what future awaits these frail, starved, abused children?
They have nothing but a steely will and a spirit of hope.