Book Recommendation: Within These Walls of Sorrow by Amanda Barratt
This haunting book will stay with you long after you have put it down. Read the ReviewWithin These Walls of Sorrow lives up to its name. It is not the kind of book you can rip through in an afternoon. It is a book you regularly have to put down in order to weep.
I’m the first to admit that I read for entertainment, for escape. Life itself can be fairly harrowing, so I usually steer clear of fiction that is going to dwell on the depraved parts of our human history, which is surely what the Holocaust was. But I love Amanda’s writing so I happily accepted an advanced copy of this book.
I immediately dipped my toe into the beautifully written, romantic prelude to the book, a few pages about a couple coming home on their wedding night and meeting a neighbour on the stairs.
“But how quickly dreams dissolve into nightmares.
How Quickly.”
At that moment, I knew this book would break my heart.
Within These Walls of Sorrow by Amanda Barratt releases on January 17 2023.
Within These Walls of Sorrow
Within These Walls of Sorrow is about the Apteka Pod Orlem – a pharmacy operated by Poles who wouldn’t abandon their premises in the heart of the Krakow ghetto, choosing instead to risk their lives to serve those within the ghetto walls. Based on a true story, the characters are fictional amalgamations of real people. We see the world through the eyes of a pharmacist, Zosia Lewendowska, and her young Jewish neighbour, who grows into a young woman during the story. We meet the characters in 1938 and stay with them for the next seven years. Seven brutal years.
Like in her book The White Rose Resists, Amanda puts you in the shoes of a witness to history. Readers experience the same shock, disbelief and anger as Zosia, as she witnesses these events and makes heart-rending decisions about how she can best help in the face of the countless atrocities she sees. We experience the hopelessness of Jewish girl Hania Silberman, who’s youth is disrupted by the Nazi occupation and gradually disintegrates as she experiences the organised, yet still somehow arbitrary, cruelty and violence of Nazi hatred for her people.
The subject matter is sometimes difficult to get through, as it should be. These times are hard to write about, but Amanda laces courage, resistance, resilience and redemption throughout the book, proving herself a master. Her research is thorough and meticulous, so as a reader I trust her to honour the Jewish experience while telling a little-known story of Polish resistance.
The story asks tough questions. Primarily, as a person of faith, Jew or Christian, how do you understand the world when the Creator God appears to have looked away from it? How should you respond when brutality and evil infects the whole of your society? Ultimately Zosia’s motif, a saying of her dead husband murdered by the Nazis at the beginning of the occupation, answers:
“There is evil and there is good and there is a space between. We are given free will to choose where we stand. Evil thrives when good men choose the space between.”
This unflinching book will linger with you for days afterwards. Buy from Amazon US, Amazon Australia or find other links at Amanda’s website (where you can also read an excerpt).