I listened to The Invisible Bridge...all 30 hours of it....it's not a book to hurry through. I'm kind of glad I listened to it, rather than reading it, because the audio made the story come to life a bit more. It's a dense book, full of emotive lengthy descriptions, but in the end I think that's what gives it texture, brings it to life. It's fiction but based on the author Julie Orringer's family story - those who survived - WWII. She did a great deal of careful research, and the book was seven years in the making.
I've read other books about the Holocaust. But this one, which mainly takes place in Hungary, covers the entire historical span, from the lead up all the way to the end, and then years later to a teenage granddaughter in the states who wants to know the full story of her past. I suspect telling this story was difficult but important to do for Orringer. Some of the story is fiction, but it's very reality based, and I found once the war started, it was really compelling. I got a very real sense of how the people were trying to grasp, and not believing what was happening, as history was unfolding around them. Life in the Hungarian Labor Camps in all its' horrors. But the descriptions are not just of places and events, but emotional reactions. There's one scene in which a man is going to commit suicide, but chooses not to, because then the Nazis would have killed his whole family. The brutality shown one young man who was Jewish AND homosexual. There's a sense of disbelief in the beginning, followed by not believing that life can move on. A tremendous fragility, utter unpredictability.
There is more than one scene describing the intense, complete and necessary focus on survival. The need to shut out everything except how to survive. I am truly in awe of those who managed to survive. I found myself very moved not just by the utter lack of compassion and humanity to those who are different (in this case because of their religion), but also the occasional acts of tremendous humanity, the ones who tried truly bravely to stand up to what they understood to be horribly wrong. I couldn't help thinking, when I had finished the book, that decades later we can still be so lacking in tolerance and understanding, so wary of differences. I think differences make us uncomfortable, and so we shy away. Why not be open minded, and get to know others as long as those differences won't do us personal harm? We are all - regardless of religion, race, sexual orientation, etc. - human beings in the end.