THE GERMAN GIRL by Armando Lucas Correa

Note: I am not a paid reviewer, and I have purchased this title to read for my personal enjoyment.

A family’s sad fate over three generations is shaped when the Nazis persecute the Jewish people in Berlin before WWII. Through young Hannah’s eyes, we see the “ogres” take away the Rosenthal family’s affluent existence, forcing them to seek a new life outside of Germany. Family history unfolds when in Hannah’s waning years in Cuba she contacts her grand-niece in New York City, and the story toggles back and forth between Hannah’s past and the present. The prose has a pleasing rhythm with minimal sentimentality, which heightens dramatic tension as the walls cave in on the Rosenthal family. Hannah and her parents flee Germany for Cuba, and ultimately America, on ocean liner St. Louis. Mr. Lucas-Correa shines light on a historical political travesty that results in human tragedy when Cuba, America and Canada all refused to let the St. Louis dock and passengers disembark, apparently to appease the Nazis in the months before WWII began. The refusals effectively gave a death sentence to seventy percent of the St. Louis’s passengers. Hannah and her mother are 2 of 28 passengers (out of 937) who are allowed to disembark in Cuba, but their hopes for true liberation prove quixotic. Perhaps at core, the story explores the nature of hope, both in the sense of giving it up and clinging to it, and the reality that meaning for one’s life can come in unexpected ways.