Review: The Kommandant's Girl by Pam Jenoff

"Krakow, the City of Kings, was no longer mine. I had become a foreigner in the place I had always called home."

September 1939. Overnight, Jewish nineteen-year-old Emma Bau's world is turned upside down when Germany invades Poland. And after only six weeks of marriage, her husband Jacob, a member of the Resistance, is forced to flee.

Escaping the ghetto, Emma assumes a new, Christian identity and finds work at Nazi headquarters. As secretary to the charismatic Kommandant Richwalder, Emma vows to use her unique position to gather intelligence for the Resistance, by any means necessary.

Poignant, affecting and gripping, Kommandant's Girl is the beautifully written story of one woman's struggle to survive one of the darkest periods in human history.

Audiobook
Series: The Kommandant's Girl #1
Genre: Historical Fiction

Kristine's Thoughts:

I listened to Kommandant's Girl on audibook. I decided to give it a try after listening to The Orphan's Tale and really liking it.

I enjoyed this story but I had a lot of mixed emotions as I listened to it. First of all, Emma/Anna came across as quite young and naive and I suppose she was. She was young and married only briefly before her husband had to go into hiding with the resistance. However, I did feel that there were numerous times that she put herself and others at risk without much thought during a scary and dangerous time for the Jewish population. There were many times that I got annoyed at her character.

The fact that Emma and Jacob were married only a short time and he wasn't an active part of the story made it hard to connect to their love story and see Jacob as the love of her life. When the Kommandant was introduced I could see the turn the story was going to take and I thought it was quite interesting. It was difficult to accept how easily Anna agreed to help the resistance because of what it meant that she had to do but I enjoyed the complexity of their relationship. He was the enemy and although he was partly a product of the times, he was no angel. I enjoyed the complicated relationship and the fact that Anna was developing feelings for the enemy while married to someone else. It made for some interesting reading and was the material that book clubs could spend hours discussing and dissecting.

In the end I enjoyed this story and will be reading or listening to The Diplomat's Wife next. I do feel like I would have enjoyed the book more if I read it instead of listened to it because I was not a fan of the narrator. I found her voice annoying and I think it may have affected how much I got lost in the story and my overall rating of the book.

About the Author

Pam is the author of several novels, including her most recent The Orphan's Tale, an instant New York Times bestseller. Pam was born in Maryland and raised outside Philadelphia. She attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge University in England. Upon receiving her master’s in history from Cambridge, she accepted an appointment as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army. The position provided a unique opportunity to witness and participate in operations at the most senior levels of government, including helping the families of the Pan Am Flight 103 victims secure their memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, observing recovery efforts at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing and attending ceremonies to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of World War II at sites such as Bastogne and Corregidor.

Following her work at the Pentagon, Jenoff moved to the State Department. In 1996 she was assigned to the U.S. Consulate in Krakow, Poland. It was during this period that Pam developed her expertise in Polish-Jewish relations and the Holocaust. Working on matters such as preservation of Auschwitz and the restitution of Jewish property in Poland, Jenoff developed close relations with the surviving Jewish community.

Having left the Foreign Service in 1998 to attend law school at the University of Pennsylvania, Jenoff is now employed as an attorney in Philadelphia.

Pam is the author of The Kommandant's Girl, which was an international bestseller and nominated for a Quill award, as well as The Diplomat's Wife and Almost Home.

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