Skeleton at the feast

Title: Skeleton at the feast

Author: Chris Bohjalian
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Place: New York
Date: 2008


Skeletons at the Feast is takes place in the last six months of  WWII and follows the evacuation of the Emmerich  family from their family farm in East Prussia to west of Berlin to avoid the advancing Russians, and hope for the best from the Allies. Anna, the Emmerlich's teenage daughter, falls in love with Callum, a Scottish POW and convinces her parents to allow him to remain with their family instead of sending him back to the prison camps. Rolf Emmerich, the father, is called into battle by the German army along with his two eldest sons, and they are not able to accompany the rest of their family on their harrowing trek. This leaves his wife, “Mutti” and her children, Anna and Theo, to travel on their own, following others from their area who are also embarking on a journey west. They are joined by a German Jew Uri, a young Jew posing as a German soldier in order to survive who, escaped from a train heading for Auschwitz. The other character is Cecil, a French Jewish girl being marched from a concentration camp on the east side of German to the heart of the Third Reich.
Uri gets shot before the British come, and Theo dies. Anna, Mutti and Helmut survive from the Emmerich family and Callum is called by the army again but promises Anna that he will come back for her. In the end some Germans realize what their country has done, and are ashamed. They do not want to come back and realize the consequences of what their country has done and how the world will feel about them.


For further information see:
http://www.un.org//holocaustremembrance/ index.shtml
http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/holocaust-fiction
http://library.jccc.edu/guides/literature/holocaust.html