Book Hangover Thoughts: The Night War

An open letter to Kimberly Brubaker Bradley.

Your work has actually helped me explore pieces of my anxiety I never realized were there before, so Ms. Brubaker Bradbury, if you’re reading this, thank you for your help. I'll explain below.  

Using The Night War as an example as it was the most prominent. To me anyway.

In occupied Europe, Jewish twelve-year-old Miriam manages to escape a roundup, along with her neighbors’ two-year-old, Nora, who she’s very close to.

 The nuns that provide cover for the two in their escape to an unoccupied part of the country arrange to hide them in the last place anyone would look for them. A small, Catholic village in an occupied part of the country, nearer to the border between the occupied and unoccupied territories. Which is clever because anyone stupid enough to believe that propaganda would never think to look there.

Miriam ends up in a Covet boarding school with two other girls and Nora, under the alias of an illegitimate (both definitions of the word work in this case) war orphan, is placed in the care with a French couple who have been trying to start a family, I suppose, technically since she's in the country illegally and they have no idea if her parents are alive, that part is true.

Unfortunately, they obviously can’t use either girl’s real name, so Miriam becomes Marie and Nora’s foster parents call her Monique. Actually, this part doesn’t bother me as much, since both girls are safe and a childless couple gets to foster a sweet little girl for a while. Lots of people who can't have kids foster. This is actually a really smart move since there's nothing suspicious about a childless couple caring for a child in need. Especially since with the war happening, there were plenty of kids who needed the help.

The anxiety triggering element was when Miriam, who is rightfully already worried about how she’s going to keep her promise to protect Nora, discovers that her foster parents plan to raise her Catholic. Seriously? They couldn't have made a fake baptism certificate before leaving her with them?

In order for her to get to Nora and reach a safe zone where Nora has family, Miriam’s friends have to blow her cover by announcing both she and Nora are Jewish, because otherwise, the entire village would hunt Miriam down for stealing a baby from her baptism ceremony, unless the truth came out.

(FUN FACT: any Jewish law can be broken in the event that a person is in critical danger, most mitzvot become inapplicable if they would hinder the ability to save oneself or someone else.)

The reason why one of the other girls had to reveal this is because if Miriam had said it, she and Nora could and likely would be killed and if the nuns had, they’d be arrested. (Until this point, I didn’t even know you could arrest a nun since the church and state government are supposed to be separate).

(Fun Fact: foster parents are NOT allowed to baptize children unless they've legally adopted them, and I looked it up, this was a foster arrangement. Did you know that?

  One of the triggers is that not only do I admittedly feel bad for Nora’s foster parents, since they’d been trying in vain to start a family for months and their yearning got them unknowingly wrapped up in a ploy that while definitely necessary, they were still unaware of. I mean, they probably knew that Nora wouldn't be permanently staying with them since at the time a lot of kids were in similar situations and they probably knew that an illegitimate war orphan might be taken away after said war if any family was found since they didn't formally adopt her, but that was still a pretty harsh way to find out. The foster mother was understandably devastated and wanted to find the two, even though there was no way they could keep Nora now that their cover was blown, but her husband was too enraged. The nuns had told them that Nora was an illegitimate war orphan, but they had also said she was from “good Catholic stock”. 

Another issue is surprisingly subtle, but it’s there. Technically, the “illegitimate” part of the cover story wasn’t a lie.

(FUN FACT: As a noun, illegitimate can mean a baby born out of wedlock, (for those of you unfamiliar with that term, it’s the polite term to use when a couple have a baby before they’re legally married), but as an adjective, “illegitimate” can also mean “not authorized by the law” or “not in accordance with accepted standards or rules”,)

which as this was occupied Europe during World War II, technically, both girls were illegitimately in the country, but it still must have stung to lose someone they got so attached to so abruptly. I just get worried that readers won’t know that and assume the nuns lied entirely. Besides, knowing this piece of trivia accents the reading.

The main issue would be the fact that the foster parents didn’t even mean to cause any trouble. They just thought that they were fostering a baby and wanted to do what they thought would be best for her. They didn’t know that they came dangerously close to religiously converting a baby, which would have unintentionally robbed her of her heritage, they just acted with good intentions and paid for it with the heartbreaking trauma of not only discovering that they’d been living a lie, but also losing their foster child, since once the village knew the girls were Jewish, they didn’t bother to put out any sort of search party. Which is honestly disgraceful. She's still the same baby as she was before!

The ceremony ended with a heartbroken woman crying her eyes out and her furious husband refusing to give her the closure of at least knowing Nora was safe, because as soon as the truth came out, he started to perceive a baby, of all things, as lesser just because of her heritage. I don’t think he really meant that, he’s just fallen for the same trap as a lot of Europeans did back then. They don’t really believe that something is wrong, and subconsciously, they know it, they’ve just convinced themselves that it is because they’re afraid to go against the pressure of societal normalities.

I even looked it up.
Nora was NOT in fact
adopted by her foster parents

In simple terms, that means they refuse to show even the slightest sign that they don’t agree with what an authority figure says because they’re afraid of the consequences if they tell the truth. Everyone does this at some point in their life. It’s like when kids blame their siblings or classmates for something they’ve done themselves, because they don’t want to get in trouble. They do what they know is wrong because they want to protect themselves from being seen as “naughty”, since then they lose say, recess or TV privileges.

I looked it up to see if I was actually overthinking this.

By the way, Ms. Brubaker Bradbury? I have to give you credit for historical accuracy.

(FUN FACT: During World War II, hundreds of Jewish children’s identities actually were hidden so they could pass for Christian and/or Catholic war orphans, and many of them were baptized during that time).

I guess under the circumstances, this was a necessary precaution, since a Catholic and/or Christian family or orphanage not having Baptism paperwork for a child would arouse suspicion, but these kids had to lose part of their identities twice. The second time was because a lot of them, especially the younger ones, had trouble reconnecting to their roots after the war. They seriously couldn't just make fake baptism certificates?

Did you know that Joe Biden was the first President of The United States to issue a formal apology to the Native American people on behalf of the residential school victims? Pope Francis did too. 
That, and actually that exactly is the anxiety trigger and the point I’m trying to address. Throughout history, people have done what they’ve been pressured by society to do, including how they treat people different from them, and later on, they leave their children to pick up the pieces. Sometimes, they’ve even treated children as mindless drones to be “reeducated” to fit their standards. Not going into detail there because then we’ll all have nightmares.