The Girl on the Train: Irma Joubert

This was a heartbreaking story about two people who found each other during WWII. Gretl Schmidt and her sister are told by her mother and grandmother to jump from the train they are on and to travel only at night to get to Switzerland to family members. As the story progresses you realize Gretl's remaining family was on a train to Aushwitz. There was an explosion shortly after the girls jumped from the train and soon Gretl's sister, who is dying of tuberculosis, tells Gretl that their mother and grandmother will not be joining them. She dies that morning around the time Gretl sees a man in the woods, Jakob. Jakob is 21 and takes Gretl back to his parents where she lives with them for four years disguising that she is Jewish and German. A little girl in school tells of the burning of Jews in the camps and Gretl starts to have nightmares. Jakob in trying to comfort her, tells her that the explosion was from her family's train being blown up and they couldn't have been burned to death in the camp. He doesn't tell her until later that he set the bombs hoping to derail a Nazi supply train and that the Jewish train was unscheduled and a surprise. Jakob eventually learns to love the little girl, but then his mother says Gretl must go because there are too many mouths to feed. Jakob doesn't know what to do with her, he knows she is extremley intelligent and doesn't want her to have to go to work in a factory. He drops her off at a German orphanage that is trying to get children adopted in South Africa. The seperation is agonizing as Gretl keeps losing those she loves. She is adopted to wonderful, though racist, parents and knows she must never expose who she really is. Life goes on and the nightmares get worse. One day in college she is told she has a visitor. It is Jakob. She finally has someone who loves her even knowing who she is and is able to start their relationship where it left off. Jakob is surprised to find a woman and not the 10 year old girl he dropped off at an orphanage. He falls in love with her. She still thinks of him as a protector and it isn't until she is in a fire and invites him to a college dance that she realizes she has fallen in love with him. A stove explodes when she is home on holiday and Jakob is phoned by her grandfather to come as Gretl is disoriented and asking for him. He learns through her delirium that she lost a baby brother in the ghetto to a fire. Many painful memories that she had buried resurface and her parent learn everything about her past. Her parents feel horrible about all the negative comments they have made about Jewish people. Eventually Gretl and Jakob get married, but the book has a little twist where Gretl mentions she wants to write a book about her life and since it is her book she can have a happy ending. The reader is left wondering if this is the actual ending of the story or the happy ending Gretl wanted people to enjoy.