The Dark Room

Rachel Seiffert

I've often wondered what it would be like to live through a war. To live in fear of conquering armies, or to suffer from starvation and disease, or to agonise over the drafting of loved ones into war. Would I still be able to act with integrity and decency or would I succumb to the 'survival of the fittest' mentality, caring only for my own? Would I turn a blind eye to the sufferings of others because I no longer had the capacity to care for others? And what happens after the war? How do you judge your own actions during the time?

The Dark Room deals with similar themes - what people do to live through a war and what they do after a war. The setting is Germany during and after the Second World War. There are three novellas. In the first, a German boy with a weak heart and consequently never gets drafted into the army. How does he deal with his shame and guilt when the sons of the families around him are dying for the Fatherland?

The second story is about a group of young children whose parents are members of the Nazi party. They are on the run from the victorious American army that has come to occupy their village. Afraid that the army will harm her children because of her Nazi association, the mother sends the children off to make their own way to their grandmother hundreds of miles away. How does a teenager keep her four young siblings together for a long, hungry, exhausting trek across the country with the last one just a baby? What will they do for food? Where will they sleep? Which way is their grandmother? Who can they trust?

Finally, the third is about a latter-day German man who slowly finds out what his grandfather did during the war. His grandfather who was always kind, and generous, who held him on his knee. His grandfather was in the war, in the army. Who was he?

The stories were absorbing and illuminated the deprivations of war on people who weren't even on the war front. I found them all to be very affecting. It tells also of the little things that decent people will do to help others even in difficult times as these. It speaks of resilience and grit. It asks questions of our conscience. The prose was spare but beautiful. The style was reminiscent of Girl With a Pearl Earring - its simplicity let the story tell itself. Read it.