Trapped in Hitler’s Web

Trapped in Hitler’s Web is the story of Maria, a Ukrainian girl caught in the horror of World War II. It is a sequel of sorts to Skrypuch’s Don’t Tell the Nazis (previous title Don’t Tell the Enemy>). In that first book (whose focus is on Maria’s sister, Krystia), Maria and her family have assisted a Jewish family, including Maria’s friend Nathan, with whom they are friends. When they can no longer be of help, Maria and Nathan escape to the woods where they hide out amongst a group of resistance fighters working against both the Nazis and the Soviets. When Trapped in Hitler’s Web begins in the fall of 1942, Maria and Nathan believe they cannot last much longer in the woods and are looking for an escape to safety. They see ads posted seeking farm workers. With Nathan’s fake ID, the pair naively sign up. They are loaded onto packed train cars headed to Austria. While Maria ends up on a farm outside of Innsbruck, Nathan is sent to a work crew outside of Salzburg.

Much of the novel then takes place on the farm as Maria adjusts to life under the Reich as a “subhuman” working in slave-like conditions as she tries to navigate the different challenges and threats embodied in the people she meets—from Frau Huber, who runs the farm; Sophie, her Nazi-indoctrinated daughter; to the sadistic Blockleiter who unexpectedly appears to scrutinize and punish both the workers and the farmers.

Maria, separated from her family and from Nathan, clings to the hope that somehow they will all survive the war and be reunited. As she observes the maltreatment and abuse of others worse off than she, Maria realizes that, as bad as her situation is, she is relatively safe and secure, something she dwells upon frequently with guilt when she thinks of the others. And as Maria, herself, notes, over time, she (and we as readers) risks empathizing with some of those who show her kindness, notwithstanding their cruelty at other times.

There is much to admire and appreciate in Trapped in Hitler’s Web. Skrypuch has done a good job of telling another aspect of World War II that may not be as well known: both the double bind that many Ukrainians found themselves in, first occupied by the Soviets and then by the Nazis, and the story of workers either recruited or taken by force to feed the labour requirements of the Nazi war machine. Readers see many scenes of starved, beaten, and humiliated people forced to work the farm and elsewhere while the Germans and Austrians remain mostly indifferent to their suffering.

It is always tricky writing and talking about fiction related to World War II in relation to Jewish survivors. This one, as in many stories, is dependent on the premise of the “good gentile”. As we know, in reality that was sadly the exception and not the rule, a fact that stories like these can obscure. Yet, the book does a good job of detailing the evilly nuanced racial classifications and categories that the Nazis used. And throughout, the author has not elided the violence and terror of the war, with some disturbing references to violence and death without becoming overly graphic or frightening to younger readers.

Towards the end of the novel, there are compelling descriptions of Austrian society breaking down as the war tilts in the Allies’ favour, and of the refugee population growing—of which Maria becomes a member—and the fear and uncertainty of what lies ahead for those people. I particularly loved the author’s description of the hordes of desperate, hungry, and exhausted refugees making their way down the road:

As days passed, the sound of war gradually subsided, and in its place was what sounded like leaves rustling in the wind—only there were no leaves. What we heard was rag-covered feet mechanically shuffling forward. Hundreds of thousands of rag-covered feet. Who could have guessed that shuffling could be so loud?

It was surprising to me that so much of the book ended up being about Maria’s experiences on the farm, exposing readers to different aspects and hierarchies with the German vs. Austrian and civilian vs military populations as a backdrop. Given the focus in the early part of the novel of her and Nathan’s prior history and plans, I kept waiting for them to be reunited and continue with their adventures together. Moreover, the cover and title are suggestive of a typical wartime adventure story which, by and large, this novel is not. Although Maria does have adventures and faces dangers, and, though she and Nathan do reunite briefly, the story does not proceed in the expected way of triumphant fighting against Nazis. That is perhaps to the author’s credit as one of her themes is how war utterly displaces people’s lives, disrupting those story arcs we might otherwise hope to expect.

However, given the story the author does choose to tell, I didn’t sense as much change in Maria as I might have expected of someone in her position. She spends over two years on the farm, being worked brutally hard, with little food and meager shelter. She doesn’t become hard or cynical or, conversely, more wily or daring, or passive and depressed. It’s not that she’s blind or indifferent to her surroundings or to the insults, degradation, and abuses she and others suffer, and she describes being angry or wanting to rebel, but we don’t really see much of a change in her character throughout, other than hopeful. That she remains hopeful is perhaps encouraging, but there doesn’t seem any change to the nature of her hope. By the end of the novel, Maria is a young woman of 14. I was surprised that there was only one reference to her being female and the dangers and threats she might expect to face as a girl isolated on a farm and later as a refugee. Given the author’s willingness to be direct about the other forms of violence Maria encounters, this omission is striking.