By Sara Hailstone
Content warning: World War Two, depiction of concentration camps, death.
Hannah is a Jewish woman fleeing Nazi Germany after her husband Isaac is killed in a pogrom and she loses their unborn child. She is also a famous cartoon satirist under a male pseudonym who has ridiculed the Nazis through her artwork, which renders her need to flee Europe more urgent. Mirroring the plight of the rejected passage of the MS St. Louis in 1939, Hannah is turned back from Cuba to Belgium, where she seeks out help and shelter from her estranged childhood cousin Lily. In trying to leave occupied Belgium and prevent any trouble from befalling her cousin, Hannah has no choice but to join the resistance group known as the Sapphire Line and earn the trust of its enigmatic leader, Micheline, to try to secure connections and get herself out.
Based on the real-life leader of resistance group the Comet Line, Andrée de Jongh (who received the George Medal in 1946), Micheline grows the network to hundreds of individuals with her sharp wit and unwavering determination to undermine the Germans. When Hannah is checked for ID during a mission for the line, she shows them Lily’s card as cover—but in doing this, Hannah is the cause of Lily, her husband Nik, and their young son Georgi’s arrest. Imprisoned at the Breendonk camp near Mechelen, the family is soon placed on the list to be deported to Auschwitz. Hannah must do something.
Pam Jenoff pulls the reader through a suspenseful page turner in feeling out what it was like for the men and women who stopped a train full of prisoners en route to Auschwitz. Set during 1942 in Belgium, the novel navigates historical truths of resistance and bravery in situating relatable characters fleeing the Nazi fist through a fictional Sapphire Line. The historic Comet Line, an underground network of safe houses, coded correspondence, and organization in alliance with British intelligence quietly ushered 776 fallen Allied airmen out of occupied Europe. The Sapphire Line is envisioned further as the main characters work against all odds to stop a train leading to the infamous death camp with families trapped inside.
The author of New York Times bestsellers The Lost Girls of Paris and The Woman with the Blue Star, Jenoff shines with this new novel, which will rise to the surface with its strong characterization aligned with a spellbinding and heart-pumping plotline. Based on sound historical research and using creative license to situate compelling characters within historical context, Jenoff brings to light a moment of humanity and grueling reality when ordinary citizens and resistance fighters worked together to fight back against Nazi control.
The strength of Code Name Sapphire lies in engaging characters and their backstories that weave an intricate web between past and present throughout the novel. The plotline is layered with sharp turns that build momentum, picking up speed to throw the reader into the final hours in which they come face-to-face with the challenging decisions that the characters make under immense pressure.
In the end, the characters are not fully likable because of the decisions they commit to survive. Jenoff expertly crafts ethical questions about what people are capable of doing when fighting for their lives. Her characters are flawed; inevitably, they are human, and they are not bent to serve idealized character arcs.
I found that the ethical questions of the novel let the reader face themselves in wondering how they would act under such historical and moral circumstances and in knowing that the distance in reading about the historical imagining is not comparable to having lived through the actuality of the event itself. We don’t fully know what it was like. We don’t fully know how we would act.
The author’s purpose in writing this novel stemmed from a fascination with the fact that the Belgian resistance stopped trains and saved hundreds of people, even though some were caught again. For me as a reader, there is irony in coming across a novel that is set within the same historical circumstances of a book I am writing too, one in which a man whom my grandmother had loved was on one of those trains. Collision of the personal, fictional, and historical makes this novel much more profound for me and perhaps others.
I think, within the calamities of our own lives and present circumstances, we would hope that someone would stop the train and get us off. I think we would want to be brave enough and would not fully know how we would act if pushed to the brink to do whatever it took to get our family off the train.
Thank you to Park Row Books for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!