Grade: A
Summary
Crocker reconstructs the harrowing life story of her father, Frits Evenbly, beginning with a deceptive idyll in the Belgian Congo of the 1930s, where Congolese “houseboys” indulge him with affection. When Frits’s father falls ill, the family is forced to return to the Netherlands for better medical care, only to learn his father suffers from an incurable disease. Facing financial ruin, five-year-old Frits and his younger brother Jan are sent to a children’s home—het kindertehuis— in Nazi-occupied Holland. This was an easy decision made by their distant mother who never wanted children, let alone sons. There, the boys endure a triple-war: the terror of Nazi occupation, the abuse and neglect of the sisters tasked with their care, and the quieter but no less devastating agony of maternal rejection.
Catastophe Through a Child’s Eyes
Crocker’s greatest triumph lies in the way she filters catastrophe through the bewildered consciousness of a child: Frits witnesses a man beaten and executed, sees corpses discarded like refuse, fears being killed by a German soldier over a loaf of bread, and shoulders the responsibility of protecting his younger brother from a world gone feral. Particularly haunting is the sheer accumulation of suffering—Frits’s father’s death, the starvation winter of 1944, Jewish friends and family deported, and the grim image of children huddled in dank potato cellars while Europe collapses around them.
Dry Wit and Copious Evidence
The narrative skillfully balances the imaginative speculation required to fill historical gaps with research from family letters, diaries, and memoirs. Frits’s narration is painfully earnest, occasionally sharpened by a dry wit that keeps the novel from drowning entirely in despair. What sets it apart is how forgiveness is seen not as an erasure of the past but as an act that sets a survivor free from childhood wounds. By the final pages, what lingers is the astonishing persistence of tenderness amid the magnitude of cruelty a child endured.
Takeaway: Poignant child’s-eye view of trauma and recovery during WW2.
Comparable Titles: Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.