Rainbow Reviews

BOOK BLURB:
Two Surrealist Lesbian artists work their own Underground Resistance movement to undermine the Nazi Occupation of Europe's Channel Islands.

BOOK REVIEW:
I think most individuals born since the end of World War II are familiar with the insidious nature of that war only at a distance. Dates, names, generals, and presidents are tossed at us in world history classes, and we hear monologue from the generation which lived through that infamy. Yet it is seldom that a book brings home to us the real pervasiveness of terror that is the legacy of the Nazi war machine.

War on the Margins I found unforgettable. I turned pages, not reading, but living the experiences of the three strong heroines and the various individuals, of good intent and of greed, scattered in their paths.

The Channel Islands between France and Jersey are not much heard of in historical accounts, yet their natives and residents suffered just as deeply from the Nazi occupation as did the inhabitants of Occupied Denmark and France. Among these are Marlene, daughter of a long-dead Jewish father, who works in the Aliens Office and is exposed firsthand to the rigors of registration of Jews and others deemed “subhuman” by the Nazis, and Surrealist artists and Lesbians, “Claude Cahun” and “Marcel Moore” (Lucille and Suzanne), who wage their own version of Resistance, attempting to undermine the Occupation and to rescue whom they can.

Although the story is not particularly graphic, its details and individual revelations tug at the heartstrings. Each chapter is prefaced with an actual historical document, revealing the progression of the Nazi pincer grip on Jewish residents and the progressive dehumanization of Jewish people, even those who have a very small percentage of Jewish nativity. This is a book the reader will not soon forget, nor will we forget the characters.

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