During the last year of World War II, 1945, the Russians invaded Germany from the east. Bent upon revenge for the Nazi invasion of their motherland, Russian soldiers were often less than disciplined with respect to civilian rules of war as they beat their way toward Berlin.
Salt to the Sea follows three young refugees thrown together in a flight for their lives: a Polish teenager who has been separated from her family; a young Prussian man who is able enough that he should be fighting in the Nazi army, but who's father was killed by the Nazis, so he is eager to escape a late conscription; and a Lithuanian nurse intent upon assisting all in need, which is to say, nearly everyone. Together with an orphaned German boy and an aging German shoe-poet they scramble through frozen woods in a desperate attempt to reach the sea and an ocean-going vessel that will carry them away from Germany before Russian troops arrive.
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| Wilhelm Gustloff, 1938 |
They reach the Wilhelm Gustloff on the north coast of Prussia along with scores of thousands of other refugees and to the credit of the author, Ruta Sepetys, we find ourselves feeling sympathetic toward individual civilians caught in the throes of war, even when their countries were responsible for the slaughter of millions. Lithuania, Poland, and Germany all but exterminated every last Jew and yet as
Salt to the Sea points out there were victims, too, amongst the non-combatants. There were certainly anti-Nazi Germans, Poles with close Jewish friends, and Lithuanians terrorized by Nazis and Russian occupiers.
Salt to the Sea is young adult fiction but based on true events. It serves as a strong introduction to the disjointedness and uprooting created by warfare -- one need only consider contemporary Syrian refugees, both within and outside Syria. It also reminds us of the suffering of German civilians at the end of the war as they fought to escape Russian and allied forces racing to subdue their Nazi leaders.
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