The Justice She Sought

All Second World War stories of deportation and privation, imprisonment and slave labour, are, in a calamitous way, the same, which is why Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil long after the guns were silenced and the prisoner trains stopped running. Yet all stories of mass transport are also different — as different as the circumstances, the identity of the innocent victims, and their sad, almost always tragic destinies. The journey detailed in Wanda’s War is itself singular, from its horrifying beginning to its redemptive end, from the way it was uncovered to the way it is conveyed. Indeed, Marsha Faubert offers readers a tale of determined excavation and reconstruction: her quest to discover her in-laws’ untold past is an extraordinary undertaking given that the couple led a life of near-miraculous endurance and incalculable loss, followed by the immeasurable luck of finding their feet far from the charnel house of Europe, far from the caprice of tyrants, far...