Annie Lyons
Translator: Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador
Publisher: Planet
Original publication year: 2023
There are many novels historically set during the Second World War but The Air Raid Shelter Reading Club avoids its commonplaces. There are no extermination fields here or battles on the front lines. Because there is not, nor are you going to find, a damn Nazi in any of its pages. Still, Annie Lyons manages to make us feel the horror of war very closely.
The ‘Kindertransport’ that changed the lives of Jewish children
This story begins in London, in 1938. Gertie Bingham has been empty for years after the death of her husband. Together with the man who was the great love of her life, she ran a bookstore. It is her profession and her passion, but she now believes that the time has come to retire and leave everything behind. Her life will change when she learns about the existence of the Kindertransport: a United Kingdom initiative in which hundreds of Jewish children fleeing Hitler’s Germany were allowed to arrive. Gertie ended up taking in one of those refugees, Hedy Fischer, a shy 15-year-old teenager.
The ‘Kindertransport’ was a UK initiative to rescue hundreds of Jewish children from Nazi persecution.
The relationship started out cold and difficult, but as the months passed, their relationship began to grow closer, not because of the arrival of World War II, but because of their love for reading. It will be her passion for Jane Eyre, for the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen or John Steinbeck that will unite them forever. That unbreakable bond will be the one that supports everything: from the lack of news about the whereabouts of Hedy’s family in Germany, through the Luftwaffe bombings and ending in that vital anguish caused by a useless conflict that seems to have no end.
Even in these extreme situations, human beings end up finding room to lead as normal a life as possible. Gertie and Hedy set up a book club that helps the residents of their area isolate themselves from the terror of the bombs and distract themselves while Hitler’s army attacks. Reading will unite an entire community in the darkest moments in human history but, above all, it will give them hope.
Books as catharsis
Reading immerses us in new worlds, different from our own, and makes us identify with characters that we do not know when we start reading but that we could almost consider to be our family when we finish the last of its pages. In The Bomb Shelter Book Club, Annie Lyons makes Gertie and Hedy become our relatives.
Despite the harshness of the conflict, this novel manages to be gentle, tender, and calm.
We suffer for them and we suffer with them when the sirens sound warning of an attack, but we are also happy when they manage to survive another day. Despite all the pessimism and all the rawness that emanates from the novel reflecting those terrible years, this work manages to be affable, tender, calm. It is like an oasis in the middle of a storm.
An oasis that truly existed although very few knew about it. The Book Society, a society of writing and book professionals created in 1920, published lists of recommendations and organized many of the requests from book clubs that proliferated during the war throughout the United Kingdom. The initiative was so successful that the number of participants doubled in just a few months.
Light without darkness
Yes, it is a book set in World War II, but from a point in which we are less accustomed to traveling. We leave the horror of Auschwitz or the barbarity of the front to experience what it means to be collateral damage.
The pain of being ripped away from your life and your routine so you don’t know if you will be alive tomorrow. But where there should be horror, there is hope and where there should be death, there is life. And for that alone, this reading is worth it. Because here we come to celebrate the good things about human beings. On the bad side, unfortunately, we are already more than served every day.
2023-10-15 19:56:53
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