The Last Brother

OK this is definitely a book I do not think I would have ever found on the shelves or picked up to read....  and yet it was a very interesting book.

Sometimes it is fun to follow a book challenge.  This time by my local librarian to read a variety of books in exchange for raffle tickets to win prizes.  I always love a challenge and so I dive in.  Reading books outside my comfort zone and books that I would not have noticed otherwise.

This is one such book.  It was already hidden away in the stacks, no longer a new book. It had escaped my lists and books I hope to read piles.

Written by Nathacha Appanah and translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan, this is another of those little stories from World War II.  This novel sheds light on a fascinating and little known, unexplored part of the history of the war .  The author, a French Mauritian, from the African island of Mauritius tells the story of how the war came to this quite island.

Telling the story from his perspective now of a man of seventy, Raj recalls as a boy growing up first on at the edge of a sugar plantation, in the village of Mapou.  He was the middle son of a violent father and a loving though defenseless mother.  His father works in the cane fields as a laborer and the family lives in a camp next to the plantation.  When the camp is destroyed during a horrendous  rain storm the family moves across the island to Beau-Bassin.  There Raj's father a bitter angry man gets work as a guard in a prison.  That is all the family knows.  Raj asks his mother later in life if she knew who was being held in the prison but she says she really did not know. 

Raj has been brought up so secluded that he does not at the age of ten know that the prisoners here are Jews.  He also does not even know that there is a world war going on.  He will not put all the pieces together until he is an adult.  All he knows is that his father is a very violent batterer. 
He brings his father lunch at work int he afternoons.  Raj climbs a tree and sees a boy his age behind the wire fence.

One day after a brutal beating Raj ends up int he prison hospital.  There he meets the young boy he has been watching, David.  When a storm hits the island, in the confusion and chaos Raj and David try to make their escape. 

It is so interesting to read about how the ship, Atlantic, carrying 1,500 Jewish exiles, landed at Port-Louis after being turned away from entry into Palestine.  Among the passengers on board were Poles, Austrians and Czechs.  Of the 1,500 Jewish passengers, 127 of died during their interment at Mauritius, then a British colony.  They are buried at Saint- Martin cemetery.