The Dutch Wife

By: Ellen Keith

Narrated by: Abby Craden, Eric Jason Martin, Charlie Thurston

Amsterdam, May 1943. As the tulips bloom and the Nazis tighten their grip across the city, the last signs of Dutch resistance are being swept away. Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and deported to different concentration camps in Germany. Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labour camp or—for a chance at survival—to join the camp brothel.

On the other side of the barbed wire, SS officer Karl Müller arrives at the camp hoping to live up to his father’s expectations of wartime glory. But faced with a brutal routine of overseeing executions and punishments, he longs for an escape. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, this meeting changes their lives forever.

Woven into the narrative across space and time is Luciano Wagner’s ordeal in 1977 Buenos Aires, during the heat of the Argentine Dirty War. In his struggle to endure military captivity, he searches for ways to resist from a prison cell he may never leave.

From the Netherlands to Germany to Argentina, The Dutch Wife braids together the stories of three individuals who share a dark secret and are entangled in two of the most oppressive reigns of terror in modern history. This is a novel about the blurred lines between love and lust, abuse and resistance, and right and wrong, as well as the capacity for ordinary people to persevere and do the unthinkable in extraordinary circumstances.

I had goosebumps at the end

Just finished listening to this for the Book Club I am in. A look at the forgotten casualties of war and the far reaching repercussions. What would you choose to do in order to survive in untenable circumstances. Prisons within and without and freedom. I had goosebumps at the ending.

Very mixed.

The stories during the war were vivid and compelling, with brilliant performances by Abby Craden and Eric J. Martin. The book was let down by the story set in the 1970s. I felt it shouldn’t have been included.