Review: When We Were Ashes by Andrew Boden
Goose Lane Editions (2024)
Boden's debut novel takes on the difficult subject of Hitler's Aktion T4 program with a strikingly written take on this tragedy. I have reviewed it for The British Columbia Review.
This article was originally published in the BC Review on September 10, 2024.
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Years ago when I was learning piano, one of my favourite pieces to play was Eric Satie’s 1888 Gymnopédie No. 3. It always struck me as a beautiful and sad piece that evokes intense emotion, hinting at the possibility of cautious hope. The notes of the Gymnopédies infuse Burnaby resident Andrew Boden’s debut novel When We Were Ashes, a powerful and haunting story of children in Germany in 1940 who were subject to forced euthanasia, and the adults who helped to carry out this policy.
In this novel, Boden (The Secret History of My Hometown) tackles a heavy topic indeed. The Aktion T4 program in Nazi Germany began in 1939, a systematic campaign to murder people with physical, mental, and psychiatric disabilities. It began with children, and between 1939 and 1945 thousands of children were killed. Against this horrific backdrop, Boden brings us alongside characters who live inside this unthinkable reality.
At a hospital in Stuttgart, Germany in 1940, 13-year-old Rainor Schacht is largely nonverbal, but his outer appearance and silent demeanour belies a rich interior life that engages the reader from the first page. His narrative shines, bringing a poignant whimsy to the page immediately. At the beginning, he tells us about the janitor’s ritual. It’s a simple weekly task that brings joy to the children, yet speaks volumes of the institutional existence that they were subject to:
In a dual-timeline narrative, we again meet Rainor in 1953, living in Stuttgart in a “home for broken unemployables. Shell-shocked veterans mostly.” He is determined to search for Emmi. He wonders what became of her after the war years and hopes desperately that she might be alive. To aid him, he acquired the coded diaries of Hans Berger, the bus driver who transported children in 1940 from legitimate hospitals to the euthanasia sites and whom Rainor remembers well. The diaries may contain clues to Emmi’s fate.
Berger’s adult viewpoint lays bare the heavy burden of collaborator’s guilt and adds a moral dimension that tied me up in knots. The tortured Berger sees the dogs of war all around him; he calls the sound that he can hear in some people’s voices the Hound. It emanates from those who have been transformed by the fervency of the regime. It scares him deeply, especially when he starts to hear the Hound’s timbre in the voice of his own son, ensconced in the Hitler Youth. Berger is not one of “them” but does bad things, two truths he struggles to reconcile. He spends time with his co-worker Bonse on the transport bus:
But the ferociously beautiful is paired with an equally ferocious horror, so closely linked that it puts the reader in an untenable emotional bind. Boden repeatedly returns to the notion of holding two truths at once. How an adult can see and not see the truth about their actions. How a child can know and not know the fate they are sentenced to. The cognitive dissonance is stunning for the characters in the story, and for the reader. Bus driver Berger is tortured because he chooses, at times, to fully admit his truth:
Years ago when I was learning piano, one of my favourite pieces to play was Eric Satie’s 1888 Gymnopédie No. 3. It always struck me as a beautiful and sad piece that evokes intense emotion, hinting at the possibility of cautious hope. The notes of the Gymnopédies infuse Burnaby resident Andrew Boden’s debut novel When We Were Ashes, a powerful and haunting story of children in Germany in 1940 who were subject to forced euthanasia, and the adults who helped to carry out this policy.
In this novel, Boden (The Secret History of My Hometown) tackles a heavy topic indeed. The Aktion T4 program in Nazi Germany began in 1939, a systematic campaign to murder people with physical, mental, and psychiatric disabilities. It began with children, and between 1939 and 1945 thousands of children were killed. Against this horrific backdrop, Boden brings us alongside characters who live inside this unthinkable reality.
At a hospital in Stuttgart, Germany in 1940, 13-year-old Rainor Schacht is largely nonverbal, but his outer appearance and silent demeanour belies a rich interior life that engages the reader from the first page. His narrative shines, bringing a poignant whimsy to the page immediately. At the beginning, he tells us about the janitor’s ritual. It’s a simple weekly task that brings joy to the children, yet speaks volumes of the institutional existence that they were subject to:
Opa Louis called our hospital ward the asylum and sometimes the farm. He cleaned stalls on the farm, he joked with Nurse Hilde. He scrubbed them for his mythical beasts–his centaurs, his satyrs, his cyclops. He loved all twenty-five of us with our blind eyes, mute tongues and corkscrew limbs–our hourly fits sent from an offended god. Each Tuesday morning, Opa Louis played the Gymnopédies on his gramophone and tossed Swiss chocolates on the floor, and in the time we scrambled to grab them, he’d stripped the cots of our dirty linen. We thought of rain falling on moonlit streets of Paris until the record had finished for the third time and Opa Louis had creased the corners on the last bed.Rainor’s teenage love is fellow patient Emmi, a 15-year-old girl who believes that her insides are made of cogs and gears that a man adjusts at night. “He was rebuilding her … into a good German girl, the kind of girl that Emmi had always wanted to be. Allowed to join the League of German Girls. Allowed to be in the pages of Das Deutsche Mädel. Allowed to marry an SS man.” Emmi’s delusions and incorrigibility have compelled her caring father to nevertheless deliver her into institutional care. Rainor and Emmi act as surrogate parents for the younger and more disabled children on the ward, particularly when they are transported one morning to a more sinister hospital: Trutzburg, where Emmi is certain she will be cured. Rainor is not so certain.
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| Author Andrew Boden (photo: Wayne Hoecherl) |
Berger’s adult viewpoint lays bare the heavy burden of collaborator’s guilt and adds a moral dimension that tied me up in knots. The tortured Berger sees the dogs of war all around him; he calls the sound that he can hear in some people’s voices the Hound. It emanates from those who have been transformed by the fervency of the regime. It scares him deeply, especially when he starts to hear the Hound’s timbre in the voice of his own son, ensconced in the Hitler Youth. Berger is not one of “them” but does bad things, two truths he struggles to reconcile. He spends time with his co-worker Bonse on the transport bus:
No, no, now I am here, I am here with Bonse–humanity. Humanity. The word had no meaning anymore. The Hound was everywhere.
“Tonight, we can rest in our beds, right Berger? Tomorrow, Munich and a new load.”
A new load? That phrase made me nauseous again. I’d hauled truck parts by lorry for four years and now we thought of children in the same way that I’d thought of the axles of a Krupp Protze. Things to be moved from A to B. That was the great leap of this regime: concealing opiates in ordinary sentences so that there was nothing a German wouldn’t do. I just had to swallow more sentences and then get behind the wheel and press the accelerator. Pray in parentheses when no one was listening. Pray that I’d be forgiven for needing the four hundred extra marks, so that the Bergers survived the war.Boden has infused this story with a fairytale quality, and the text is bathed in the ethereal: the sound of the Gymnopédies and the visions that Rainor conjures with a bit of magical realism. With a flick of his hands, Rainor dreams images of falling snow or daisies into existence to comfort the ward’s children. The beauty in Boden’s literary prose imbues these children with the utmost dignity.
But the ferociously beautiful is paired with an equally ferocious horror, so closely linked that it puts the reader in an untenable emotional bind. Boden repeatedly returns to the notion of holding two truths at once. How an adult can see and not see the truth about their actions. How a child can know and not know the fate they are sentenced to. The cognitive dissonance is stunning for the characters in the story, and for the reader. Bus driver Berger is tortured because he chooses, at times, to fully admit his truth:
I looked up at the small, high castle that was now a hospital. The roof was thick with snow, the shutters open to the morning light, the building and grounds silent but for the twenty-five children being led inside by the nurses. Their footprints through the fresh snow went from my bus to the hospital.
Berger, you do this.
When We Were Ashes invites reflection, and it calls for a degree of emotional fortitude. The subject matter is difficult. I felt the weight of this wartime world that had turned upside-down, wrestling with the disbelief some of the characters experienced living under a regime that asked the unimaginable of its citizens. I ached for children that were supposed to be protected by the adults around them, and instead were marginalized and killed.
I wondered how Boden could possibly resolve these conflicts as the novel moved towards its conclusion. Berger tries to make amends through his actions. There are no excuses for him here, but there is an attempt to understand him with compassion.
It is Rainor who holds the key to this story. He embodies the duality of this novel: the “damaged” child deemed useless to a murderous regime concerned with productivity and eugenics, yet a whole and vital person who demands to be seen. Sometimes longing to give in to despair, he fights for a better future even when it seems there is no hope at hand. The revelations come slowly as the novel winds towards its conclusion—and Boden renders a satisfying one.
Near the end, Rainor visits a family who helped him when he was a young boy, bringing a recording of the Gymnopédies as an offering. As the record plays, he recalls, “That beautiful music was all the love and sorrow of everything that had happened in the short time I’d been alive.” When We Were Ashes is a powerful novel, flawlessly executed and emotionally resonant. It is haunting, and its words have stayed with me long after I closed the book. Boden’s triumph is to marry the unthinkable cruelty of a world gone mad with a firmly rooted sense of human dignity that uplifts the human spirit.
I wondered how Boden could possibly resolve these conflicts as the novel moved towards its conclusion. Berger tries to make amends through his actions. There are no excuses for him here, but there is an attempt to understand him with compassion.
It is Rainor who holds the key to this story. He embodies the duality of this novel: the “damaged” child deemed useless to a murderous regime concerned with productivity and eugenics, yet a whole and vital person who demands to be seen. Sometimes longing to give in to despair, he fights for a better future even when it seems there is no hope at hand. The revelations come slowly as the novel winds towards its conclusion—and Boden renders a satisfying one.
Near the end, Rainor visits a family who helped him when he was a young boy, bringing a recording of the Gymnopédies as an offering. As the record plays, he recalls, “That beautiful music was all the love and sorrow of everything that had happened in the short time I’d been alive.” When We Were Ashes is a powerful novel, flawlessly executed and emotionally resonant. It is haunting, and its words have stayed with me long after I closed the book. Boden’s triumph is to marry the unthinkable cruelty of a world gone mad with a firmly rooted sense of human dignity that uplifts the human spirit.
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