#affinity konar

This was a great book that's been on my wish list for a long time. I'm so pleased I finally got round to reading it.

The story follows a set of twins Stash and Pearl who become part of Josef Mengele's Auschwitz Zoo. The story takes you into the lives of Auschwitz, how the "freaks" were treated differently and the horrific experiments and tortures they were exposed too.

Having visited Auschwitz just a couple of years ago I could picture the horror even more clearly.

The story was also a fascinating insight into twins and their strong mental and physical connection.

I really enjoyed this book, the story was captivating, the characters were real and you connected with them. The story felt factual enough but with the welcome tint of fiction. Very readable and it's a book that made me think deeply about how I would or rather wouldn't cope, to feel the pain and shame of knowing what happened and to reflect on how we are treating people today and accepting of similar persecution, degradation and violations of human rights.

Pearl is in charge of: the sad, the good, the past.

Stasha must care for: the funny, the future, the bad.

It's 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood.

As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain.

That winter, at a concert orchestrated by Mengele, Pearl disappears. Stasha grieves for her twin, but clings to the possibility that Pearl remains alive. When the camp is liberated by the Red Army, she and her companion Feliks -- a boy bent on vengeance for his own lost twin -- travel through Poland's devastation. Undeterred by injury, starvation, or the chaos around them, motivated by equal parts danger and hope, they encounter hostile villagers, Jewish resistance fighters, and fellow refugees, their quest enabled by the notion that Mengele may be captured and brought to justice within the ruins of the Warsaw Zoo. As the young survivors discover what has become of the world, they must try to imagine a future within it.

A superbly crafted story, told in a voice as exquisite as it is boundlessly original, Mischling defies every expectation, traversing one of the darkest moments in human history to show us the way toward ethereal beauty, moral reckoning, and soaring hope.