Rose Under Fire, Elizabeth Wein

Rose Under Fire is one of those books that stays with you. Wein calls it a companion piece to the NYT bestseller Codename Verity. American Rose Justice, an 18 year old ATA pilot and amateur poet is caught by the Germans in the dying months of WWII and sent to Ravensbrück, the infamous women’s concentration camp deep inside Germany.

As her loved ones struggle to comprehend losing her, Rose struggles to survive. She and her fellow prisoners, closer than family, stripped of their dignity and identity turn to small victories, little acts of rebellion, friendship, trading information for medicine all to maintain their sanity in the face of increasingly desperate attempts to silence the horrors of Ravensbrück by destroying all of the evidence. Can Rose survive? Will she ever fly again? Go home again?

Rose may be fictional but Ravensbrück and the atrocities carried out there are cemented in the history of the Nuremburg trials. A powerful and haunting read.