A Different Kind of Courage by Gretel Wachtel and Claudia Strachan
Mainstream, £10.99
Gretel Wachtel knew “that not much of the city would be left, but we were still shocked by what we saw. Everywhere, houses burned or smouldered, gutted. The streets, covered in bricks and debris, were deserted. A sickly smell hovered in the air. Here and there, we saw twisted black beams, some in the rubble and some on the streets. Karchen inspected one of these, bending over it. Suddenly he slapped his hand over his mouth, retching and turning away.” They were not beams, they were people. They were the people of Hamburg, a city destroyed in just one night of relentless bombing by the Allies during World War Two.
Gretel, the heroine of this book, lived in Hamburg throughout the war and, miraculously, survived. A Different Kind of Courage is the story of her life and her survival, as told to Claudia Strachan. Gretel settled in England after the war and met Claudia, also from Germany, in the 1990s. Claudia then spent the next nine years researching the historical background to the stories Gretel had told her.
The book takes us through the period of Gretel’s life running up to World War Two, its duration and its aftermath. The author skilfully places Gretel in the context of all the significant events of the time.
Gretel was 24 by the time war broke out. She had already experienced the rise of Nazism, was a witness to Kristallnacht and the persecution of the Jews, including her best friend and her family doctor.
At the Olympic Games in 1936, she witnessed American athlete Jesse Owens beat German Lutz Long in the long
jump. Hitler was in the stadium and Gretel says: “I trained my binoculars on him occasionally. [When Long was losing] Hitler rubs his hands over his trouser legs, wipes his face – almost a sign of emotion, I think sarcastically.”
Claudia portrays Gretel as a wilful heroine who despised Hitler, Nazism as an ideology and all the Aryan propaganda, and who ran her own private war against the Third Reich.
The book opens with Gretel ordered to work in a munitions factory. She had made an unpatriotic, inappropriate remark, was considered a danger to the young and was sent by train with a carriage full of prostitutes to the factory. En route, the train halts and Gretel describes seeing women in striped clothes toiling at the trackside, laying sleepers. They look starving and weary. Silently, Gretel drops her packed lunch out of the window – a woman picks it up and secretes it in her clothes. The other women in the carriage follow her example.
Gretel gathers male accomplices to help her on the way. At the munitions factory, she acts clueless, mixes up the shells and uses her sexuality to get transferred to office work. This gives her access to information about troop and munition movements that she passes on to the underground.
She gets into many scrapes. She helps her Jewish doctor escape, she runs a black market, regularly providing food for people on the run, is close to those involved in the Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler, works an enigma machine and is finally arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a “reception camp”.
Incredibly, Gretel says she knew instinctively when another person felt the same way as she did about Hitler. She did, of course, make many mistakes; one of the worst was to marry a brutal, abusive and domineering man, but she got out of that.
It’s a very well written, fast-moving book; but is far from being one person’s story. It reveals a lot about what life must have been like for ordinary German people during the war. Clauida Strachan’s nine years of research has been put to good effect.
And for Gretel Wachtel there was a happy ending. In fact, the book has all the ingredients for a Hollywood blockbuster. I wonder who they would get to play the lead…
Mary Maguire
