"Have you read A Night Divided by Jennifer A. Nielsen?" a friend said recently in an online book discussion group. "It's this really great middle grade novel about life behind the Berlin Wall." Well. That's something I didn't know much about, and so onto my Goodreads list it went. Turns out my local library had it, and thus I grabbed it to read while I wait for my interlibrary loans to come in.
Gerta is a young German girl whose family is becoming more and more wary of the tense political atmosphere around them. After much discussion, her mother finally agrees with her politically active father that it's time to move, and he and Gerta's brother Dominic head out on a two day trip into Western Germany to secure an apartment and a job. In an amazing stroke of bad luck, the border is closed overnight, leaving Papa and Dominic trapped in the West, and Gerta, her brother Fritz, and Mama trapped in the East, the side controlled by the Soviets.
As Gerta grows, life becomes as gray as the wall. Food shortages are common, books are censored or banned, music from the West (like the Beatles) is forbidden. The Stasi (the brutal East German police force; for more info, check out Wikipedia's article) keep their guns trained on the citizens, and neighbors and friends are quick to inform on each other in order to keep the heat off their own backs. Teachers instruct students on how lucky they are to live in such a wonderful Communist country and how dastardly the West is, how immoral and full of misery. But if East Germany is so wonderful, Gerta ponders, why must they force their citizens to stay there upon pain of death?
Having spotted her father and brother at an observation point on the Western side of the wall, Gerta interprets his dance movements, which used to accompany a song about farming that he sang to her as a child, as him asking her to dig. But where? It takes a secret note passed on by a friend she's no longer sure she can trust to help her locate the site, and with a borrowed shovel, Gerta begins digging her way to freedom.
The best kind of books leave you unaware of the physical act of reading, and Nielsen's novel is one of those, easily forming pictures of gray skies, state-sponsored fear, and the dirt-streaked yet hopeful face of a young girl in the reader's mind. Gerta is a wonderfully strong character, never losing her drive or resolve despite her country's determination to quash all indications of individuality. Her fear of losing her brother to the Stasi, her sadness over the end of a lifelong friendship with Anna, her longing to be reunited with her father and brother, every emotion leaps off the page and turns Gerta's plight into one that could easily be our own today, if we're not more careful.
This is a superb book, one I hope will be on the reading lists of middle schools and junior highs around the country. I knew very, very little about the divide between Western and Eastern Germany before this; I learned a little in grade school, and I vaguely (very vaguely) remember the Berlin Wall coming down, but past that, my history education pretty much stopped once World War II ended. Modern history is definitely something I need to focus on more, and this was a fantastic introduction, both in that it was a fabulously well-written story, and that it drove me to want to learn more.
Are there historical time periods you've realized you don't know much about?
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