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A review by candacesiegle_greedyreader
Love & Treasure by Ayelet Waldman
5.0
In May, 1945, a train rolled into the station in Werfen, Austria and was seized by American authorities. It has already meandered across central Europe, been seized by the French, and stopped occasionally to unload containers onto trucks. What arrived at Werfen was a 42-car train filled with belongings looted from Hungarian Jews, including jewelry, art, furniture, china, crystal, and cash.
Ayelet Waldman puts a young Jewish officer named Jack Wiseman as the American in charge of guarding and taking inventory of these belongings, the owners of which had mostly perished in Auschwitz. He falls for a Hungarian concentration camp survivor, a relationship made even more affecting by the fact that he is counting the personal belongings of people from her town, perhaps even her family.
Jack leaves his granddaughter a necklace taken from the train, and she wants to return it to a member of the family it was taken from. Natalie’s attempt to do this highlights the problems in finding out what belonged to who—a major US reason for not returning the riches to the families of their original owners. Who was still alive? Where were they?
This is my first go-round with Ayelet Waldman and I enjoyed it from start to finish. She’s a good stylist and the story is fascinating. I suspect that the number of hits on sites for “Hungarian Gold Train” are going to soar after this novel comes out.
Amazing, isn’t it? We can still be shocked by what happened in Europe during those five years of war. Heartwrenching is that the Hungarian Jews almost escaped the Final Solution—they were sent to their deaths barely a year before the Nazis surrendered.
Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader
Ayelet Waldman puts a young Jewish officer named Jack Wiseman as the American in charge of guarding and taking inventory of these belongings, the owners of which had mostly perished in Auschwitz. He falls for a Hungarian concentration camp survivor, a relationship made even more affecting by the fact that he is counting the personal belongings of people from her town, perhaps even her family.
Jack leaves his granddaughter a necklace taken from the train, and she wants to return it to a member of the family it was taken from. Natalie’s attempt to do this highlights the problems in finding out what belonged to who—a major US reason for not returning the riches to the families of their original owners. Who was still alive? Where were they?
This is my first go-round with Ayelet Waldman and I enjoyed it from start to finish. She’s a good stylist and the story is fascinating. I suspect that the number of hits on sites for “Hungarian Gold Train” are going to soar after this novel comes out.
Amazing, isn’t it? We can still be shocked by what happened in Europe during those five years of war. Heartwrenching is that the Hungarian Jews almost escaped the Final Solution—they were sent to their deaths barely a year before the Nazis surrendered.
Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader