It has been a long time since I last wrote a book review, mainly because writing one seems like a lot of work. I still read four books a month, except when I come across a whopper of 900-plus pages. In those rare instances, I count the one book as three. The last one I read was “A Column of Fire” by Ken Follet. This guy never writes anything shorter than 900 pages. He must be writing in his sleep. Follet has an impressive list of titles to his credit and most of them are hits; all of them historical. When he is not writing he is reading in the ancient stacks of medieval libraries to collect facts.
The last time I visited the library to find books, I came across a title that made me pull it off the shelf and put it in my book bag. “The Sunflower House” appealed to my garden instinct but surprised me. Written by Adriana Allegri, the only horticultural element in this book is in the title. The story takes place in WW II, during which I was born. The storyline is about a Nazi scheme to increase the population. They had the Hitler Youth movement for young men which was designed to make boys into little Hitlers, and Heinrich Himler dreamed up another wicked scheme to include girls. Himler chose unmarried girls who passed background checks to insure they were in no way Jewish.
The goal was to house and to indoctrinate girls into believing that their lives were dedicated to Hitler. The idea was to populate the country with pure blooded Aryan citizens. To accomplish his goal, the Sunflower House hosted parties to which only the finest blond-haired, blue-eyed, Aryan blooded soldiers from the SS Corps were invited. Nature took its course and many girls became pregnant after these parties. The children born were cared for by trained nurses and eventually given up for adoption to certified Aryan parents. Kids who did not make the cut were elevated to the third floor. If the third floor kids continued along the path of ill-treated spoiled brats, they were shipped to the laboratories of Heinrich Himler for God knows what. The program was so popular that several more homes were established all around Europe and many thousand children were added to Hitler’s dream. The girls at Sunflower House received medals for their participation. Bearing five kids earned a silver medal, six received gold, and eight received platinum.
The fictional portion of the story involves a nurse and an SS officer. Both of them are one-quarter Jewish, but no one knows it but them. Secretly, they save kids by smuggling them out of the country.
I give this story five stars.
Filed under: Book Review, Fiction | Tagged: Baby Factory, Nazi History | Leave a comment »
