The Dutch Wife: A Novel

By Ellen Keith

Book Overview

Amsterdam, May 1943. As the tulips bloom and the Nazis tighten their grip across the city, the last signs of Dutch resistance are being swept away. Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and deported to different concentration camps in Germany. Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labour camp or--for a chance at survival--to join the camp brothel. On the other side of the barbed wire, SS officer Karl M ller arrives at the camp hoping to live up to his father's expectations of wartime glory. But faced with a brutal routine of overseeing executions and punishments, he longs for an escape. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, this meeting changes their lives forever. Woven into the narrative across space and time is Luciano Wagner's ordeal in 1977 Buenos Aires, during the heat of the Argentine Dirty War. In his struggle to endure military captivity, he searches for ways to resist from a prison cell he may never leave. From the Netherlands to Germany to Argentina, The Dutch Wife braids together the stories of three individuals who share a dark secret and are entangled in two of the most oppressive reigns of terror in modern history. This is a novel about the blurred lines between love and lust, abuse and resistance, and right and wrong, as well as the capacity for ordinary people to persevere and do the unthinkable in extraordinary circumstances.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1443454257
• ISBN13: 9781443454254
• Release Date: April 2018
• Publisher: Patrick Crean Editions
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Good read

At some points it was intense but honestly this was a good read.

If you want despair, women both punished & rewarded for their attractiveness & a happy ending that w

I can't believe how many people gave this book 4 stars. Knowing it was about the concentration camps & the treatment of the prisoners, I knew it wasn't going to be light reading. But the author brought to light the treatment of women hand picked for their beauty who were forced to serve in a way that I had never read about before. While there was some kindness, page after page was depressing. I forced myself to finish the book because I had to know how it ended. If you need another lesson in how those in power can mistreat others, I guess you'll give this more stars than I did. I had to look up how to pronounce Marijke's name. It's muh-ray=kah.