Book Review: The Pear Tree

The Pear Tree. K. M. Sandrick. Green Ivy Publishing, Illinois, August 29, 2017, Trade Paperback and E-book, 315 pages.

Reviewed by Christine Cassello.

The Pear Tree is a debut novel by K. M. Sandrick, who has written award-winning medical and science articles. This is historical fiction chronicling the destruction of the Czech town of Lidice, which was blamed for harboring assassins of a chief Nazi official. The novel is told from the perspectives of four characters: Chessie Sabel, who was separated from her son and sent to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp; Klaudie Cizek, who was also sent to Ravensbruck; Milan Tichy, who joins the Czech Resistance and searches for his mother; and Ondrej Sabel, a young boy who later becomes Oskar Wolffe.

Ondrej becomes fascinated with Nazi soldiers arriving in Lidice and tries to emulate them. It becomes his ambition to be such a soldier, and when he is taken from his mother, adopted into a German family, and renamed Oskar Wolffe, he refuses to identify with his Czech roots. Even when the Nazis surrender and the war is over, he has no desire to reunite with his mother.

I always felt I learned more history from reading historical novels than textbooks, and I certainly feel that way about this book. I discovered things that weren’t taught in history lessons, including how non-Jews as well as Jews suffered under the Germans. I never knew about the destruction of entire villages and towns, the men murdered and thrown into mass graves, the women sent to workhouses, or the women with Germanic features sent to whorehouses to be impregnated by Nazis in an effort to develop the “Master Race.” Children like Ondrej were put into German homes and indoctrinated in German thinking and lifestyles. Women and children who could not be indoctrinated and were unfit to work were killed in gas vans. 

Sandrick gives careful treatment to factual events and people. At the start, she lists historical characters and provides a sentence or two about the roles each plays in events she writes about. Her fictional characters give the reader a sense of what her real characters endured, how they felt, and the ways their lives changed as a result of the Nazi occupation. She occasionally uses Czech and German terms and language to add authenticity and provides a glossary at the story’s conclusion.

The book is sad, but Sandrick doesn’t leave us horrified or grief-stricken. Her story covers the end of the war and tells of new connections made by those who lost family members. Two characters join efforts to learn the outcome of a baby born to a woman at Ravensbruck who died in childbirth, creating the opportunity for a sequel, which I hope Ms. Sandrick will write.