Victoria's War
Catherine A Hamilton’s debut novel, Victoria’s War (2020), is a moving and informative historical fiction. Victoria’s War opens as Germany invades Poland, shattering the life of its titular character. In an instant, Victoria goes from a young woman mentally preparing to leave home for university (her bag is already packed!), to a young woman grieving her previous life, her family members, and her homeland as the Third Reich upends everything in an instant. Hamilton’s novel follows Victoria across Europe as she, like so many Poles, is forced into slavery and shipped the Germany to support her enemy’s war effort. Victoria’s War is historically rich with powerful, complex characters of varied backgrounds—Polish slaves, Nazi Gestapo, disabled Germans, and everyday German business owners—who all struggle to survive the Nazi state and its brutality.
Like other powerful WWII novels, Victoria’s War finds kindred spirits on all sides of the War and highlights the humanity of all its players, even those who many would brand evil. Victoria finds an unlikely friend, even sister of sorts, in the beautiful character of deaf artist, Etta. Victoria’s War weaves through Victoria and Etta’s lives with alternating first-person perspective making this book all the more powerful and heartbreaking. Yet, even in the midst of so much needless death and destruction, Hamilton’s novel manages to emphasize the human and the hopeful.
While I am sure that I had read some line in a high school history text book about the Nazi’s forced labor of countless Polish nationals throughout WWII, it wasn’t until I read The Guernsey Island Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society quite a few years ago that I fully came to terms with this aspect of Nazi Germany’s fiendishness. Hamilton’s novel brings fictionalizes a diverse array of Polish and German characters to life in startling and memorable ways. Victoria’s War also spotlights the horrors of Nazi Germany’s euthanasia program; infamous for its presence in the concentration camps, Hamilton turns her reader’s gaze to its lesser discussed applications on the German Home Front. As Hamilton’s afterword succinctly explains:
"Operation T4, claimed the lives of approximately two million people at six ‘medical’ facilities in Nazi Germany, including the 70,283 patients who lost their lives at Hadamar” (255). The Nazi state was indeed a brutal one, and Victoria’s War exposes the treachery to those they invaded as well as to their own. There are scenes in Victoria’s War that will certainly haunt the reader as Hamilton’s beautiful prose capture some of the horrors of Nazi Germany, but somehow amidst all the darkness this novel emerges as a beacon of light.
Historical fiction like Victoria’s War educate readers about the atrocities of twentieth-century Europe and the horrors of WWII. Hamilton’s characters on all sides of the war effort are dynamic and empathetic; somehow, even the characters whose actions revolt and upset the reader, also accrue our pity. And it is this blurring of the lines between good and bad, tormenter and victim, that I so appreciated about Victoria’s War. Hamilton’s novel exposes the misery that Nazi Germany imposed upon not only the occupied nations, but on their own people as well. The highly-organized labor camps and euthanasia programs that the Nazi’s implemented in Germany and across Europe, shattered the lives of Europeans of all national and ethnic backgrounds. Victoria’s War reminds its 21st-century readers of both the darkness of WWII, but also the light that many brave people on all sides of the war fought to keep alive.
Bibliography:
Hamilton, Catherine A. Victoria’s War. Plain View Press: 2020.
Character illustrations by artist Jennifer Yowsa.
