Code Name Verity:

Rating: 5-star

“Paper and ink are the fabric of this novel” - Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity

A British plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France, which has two best friends in it. One is captured and other’s fate is unknown. The story is in form of confessions and notes of the captured prisoner. Every turn of a page brings in an element of surprise and sometimes even a shock. It shows how far someone can go to protect the people they love. It’s a story of friendship, love, loss, and sacrifice. A heartbreaking account of a Prisoner of War.

I picked this book up because it was recommended by many people. I am glad that I made this decision. Halfway through the book, I realized that I couldn’t think of one character without thinking of another. As I turned page after page, I grieved for the lost lives. After some research I found that though the story is fictional, the horrific accounts of torture are real, the lives lost are real!

Rose Under Fire(Code Name Verity #2):

Rating: 5-star

“Hope is treacherous, but how can you live without it?” - Elizabeth Wein, Rose Under Fire

Rose Justice, a pilot in Allied Forces is captured in the year 1944 by a Luftwaffe and transferred to the notorious concentration camp - Ravensbrück. Here she meets other prisoners like her and forms a bond with them. During her struggle for survival, she uncovers the truth of the harrowing experiments done by Nazi’s on the prisoners called The Rabbits.

This book takes us through the cells of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp and the conditions in which the prisoners were kept. We come across death, illness, Nazi experiments on humans, but we also come across love, friendship and most of all - Hope.

After finishing Rose Under Fire, I was overwhelmed with emotions. Half-way through the book, I was sobbing like a baby.

Concentration camp stories always made me think,

“The people who survived must have a positive attitude towards life. Being so close to death must have made them realize how precious every second is, which we (fortunate enough to be born in later years and different circumstances) forget more or less.”

After reading these books I realized that these incidents always leave scars which go much deeper than the scars on the body. I grieved for the people who died horrific deaths, but I also grieved for the people who survived. The people who died were liberated from the pain but the people who survived, who were forced to see their loved ones get tortured in front of their eyes must have lived in unbearable pain. I wonder, if the ghosts of their past, ever left them alone?