Mischling

Written by Affinity Konar, Mischling is a beautiful descriptive story about a subject that is extremely difficult to accept.  Though some of these subjects are difficult digest and believe they could even could have happened, Konar does an incredible job of showing us it was real and how it affected the people it touched.

The word mischling means hybrid or half breed.  This word was used during the Holocaust by the Third Reich to describe a person of mixed blood.  In this novel Konar focuses on the area later referred to by the survivors as the Zoo.  This is the part of the Auschwitz concentration camp where Josef Mengele houses the children, especially twins, who he uses for scientific experimentation.   The children are given more food and allowed to wear regular clothes, instead of the striped uniforms that adults wear.  He has teachers and classrooms for the children and he wants the children to call him Uncle.  When he studies the children, he offers them candy.  But he was also known as the 'Angel of Death' because the experiments that he performed on these children were horrific.  He would inject them with a variety experimental fluids and operate on them changing their bodies all so he could study the results.

In this novel, Konar takes the reader into the camp through the eyes of Pearl and Stasha Zamorski, twelve year old twins, who in the fall of 1944 are sent to Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather.  As identical twins who share a secret language and can almost read each other's minds and feel each other's pain, they catch Mengele's eye coming out of the cattle car.  The outgoing personalities of  Pearl and Stasha draw attention to themselves by not only the other children in the camp, but also they are focused on by Mengele.  The plot explores the way that twins are connected, that if one twin feels pain the other also can feel a complimentary pain.  When one twin is gone it as if the remaining twin is incomplete.  The prose used in this novel makes the subject matter palatable.

As Pearl and Stasha are introduced to the bunker they will be staying in and the nurses who are assisting Mengele in taking care of the children the reader learns about who the two nurses are, "There in the laboratory, I knew only that we were flanked by two women who seemed to fall into interesting positions in the order of living things.  They looked to entirely without feeling, their soft forms walled with protective layers.  In Nurse Elma, this seemed a natural state; she was an exoskeletal creature, all her bones and thorns mounted on the outside - a perfect, glossy specimen of a crab.  ... Dr. Miri was differently armored - though she was gilded with hard plates, it was poor protection, one that hadn't warded off all the wounds, and like the starfish, she was gifted at regeneration.  When a piece of her met with tragedy, it grew back threefold, and the tissues multiplied themselves into an advanced sort of flesh with its own genius for survival."

So beautifully written that such a harsh subject become palatable and the reader does not want to put it down, hoping that for these twins, Pearl and Stasha, the Holocaust would not have devastating affects.