Details:
- author: Catherine A. Hamilton
- full title: Victoria's War
- narrator: Emily Behr
- genre: historical fiction
- topics: #ww2
- publisher: ListenUp Audiobooks
- publish date: 02.06.2021
- timing: 9:26:02
My Rating of the Audiobook:
- content: 💙💙💙💙.5
- narration: 💙💙💙💙💙
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| Goodreads |
Excerpt from the Book:
Radio changed Victoria Darski's world. It brought swing jazz and blues into her living room. And on the first of September, when she sat on the high-backed sofa and reached for the brass knob on the cabinet radio, it brought news of war.
"This is a special announcement," the commentator said. "German tanks crossed the Polish border in a devastating predawn attack that Hitler launched against Poland."
Victoria sat upright. Her hands trembled as she dug to the bottom of her black leather handbag and pulled out rosary beads, a cotton handkerchief, and a train ticket. Departure: 9. 1. 1939 11:00, the stamp on the ticket read. Her train would leave in two hours to take her to the women's dormitory at the University of Warshaw. She was supposed to start her first semester tomorrow. The announcer was saying that all university classes were suspended indefinitely, but Victoria's suitcases sat packed and waiting in the front hall closet. Can it be true? Victoria crossed one leg and then the other to buckle the straps on her platform shoes. She hurried to tell her parents the horrible news.
My Thoughts:
Victoria's War is a beautiful historical fiction novel about the not-so-beautiful theme: WW2 and the slavery of Polish people. It is well-known that Jews were mistreated, and a lot of them died in WW2. But not only Jews were treated horribly during these years. Victoria's war is a story of Victoria, a young Catholic woman who was sold into slavery, and an artist Etta Tod, a deaf German girl who was badly treated because she was not perfect as German people should be. A lot of books were written on this and similar themes of the horrors of WW2. I read quite a few of them throughout the years, but this was my first one on enslaving Polish Catholic women.
The narration was very good, and I liked the narrator's German accent, which was perfect.
About the Author:
A native Oregonian of Polish descent, Catherine A. Hamilton is an author, freelance writer, and poet. Her debut novel, Victoria's War, is now available: Plain View Press (2020). Her freelance articles and poems have appeared in The Sarasota Herald Tribune, The Oregonian, The Catholic Sentinel, and The Polish American Journal. She authored a chapter in Forgotten Survivors: Polish Christians Remember the Nazi Occupation, edited by Richard C. Lukas.
Hamilton lives in the Northwest with her husband.
