The Women in the Castle

by Jessica Shattuck
This story takes place during WWII in Germany.  It tells the story of a woman whose husband and friends were part of a group that opposed Hitler and attempted to assassinate him.  The men were caught and murdered.

The book describes the hardships people in Germany suffered during the war.  For safety and to live off the land the woman takes her children to an old family castle in the countryside.  This is a location many parties were held in the past.  She had made a promise to a boyhood friend, a man she loved, that she would look after his wife.  She goes looking for the wife and her son.  She finds the wife has basically become a sex slave for a German SS officer.  By force of will she is able to extracate the woman from that situation.  She finds the woman's son in an "orphanage".  She also befriends the wife of a Polish man who came to their house and confirmed attrocities that were being committed.  This man too had been killed.  She finds the man's wife and her two sons in a DP camp.

While they are on the farm the Americans invade Germany and take German soldiers as POW's.  They offer her a German officer as a worker to help around the farm.  She is happy to have his help until she learns of attrocities that were committed by his unit.  She tells the Americans she does not want him to come back.  What she doesn't know is that the wife of her friend has fallen in love with the German soldier and they eventually plan to marry.  The woman is horrified she feels the young woman is betraying her husband by wanting to marry the German soldier so she intervenes by talking to the German soldier and he decides to call off the wedding.

The young woman is so distraught by the interference, she feels she is intitled to love and that the German people should have the right to start over.  She leaves her friend, goes to live with family and commits suicide.

The other woman becomes a housekeeper for a local famer and eventually they marry.  She is shocked when her first husband shows up and wants back in her life.  We learn that she is not who she says she was.  She had stollen a dead woman's identity papers.  She and her first husband were acturally Nazi supporters running camps to train boys in Nazi theory.

The woman, Marianne, is shocked that the woman has lied and cuts off contact with her.  Marianne is a strong woman but a bit too sure of herself and how only she knows what is right.  In the end of her life she has come to regret that she interfered between the young couple and that maybe she shouldn't have been so harsh on the other woman.  The story explores what we might do if threatened and what people might do reluctantly just to survive.  For eg. the soldier knew what his troop was going to do and got and admin job so he didn't actually do the killing, but does that make him any less guilty?

It was interesting to read a story about what was going on in Germany during the war.  It was a very well written, engaging story.