“Olga”, a story of peace in time of war

In August 1943 , the German troops of the Third Reich have been engaged for almost two years in the Russian campaign . In addition to killing and destroying, Hitler's army is busy deporting thousands of prisoners and female prisoners to be used as slaves in Germany. Among all these unfortunates there is also Olga , only thirteen years old, but already so much suffering in her dull eyes. Arriving in a sorting camp on German soil, she discovers that she has to be a nanny in a family like many others, the Kemps. I am father, mother, three children. The oldest, Hans, is the same age as him but wears the uniform of the Hitler Youth with some complacency. Yet, when Olga is welcomed into the Kemp house to take care of her younger sister, a friendship that is as special as it is unexpected arises between the two boys. A friendship that will have to deal with the violence of war, with the difficulty of understanding each other when one is on adverse fronts, with the racism of a German society in which anyone who is not Aryan is a subhuman, little more than an object of which arrange to your liking. Yet these two young people, these two universes born and raised so far away, cannot help but feel close.

Taken from some war memoirs of the author's family, "Olga" (Rizzoli, 2022, pp. 256, also e-book) represents for Christian Hill , a very Italian writer, German of origin, the occasion for a very current reflection on what it is difficult, but at the same time fundamental, to preserve one's humanity in times of war. And how, in the raging of battles, it is absurd to divide with a clean cut the good from the bad, the just from the criminals, the winners from the losers. The result is a powerful, inspired, moving novel, in which, without making any concessions to revisionism - the Germans were the aggressors and the Russians the attacked in the Second World War - one tries to describe a German society where there were people who, without being heroes of the fight against Hitler had not lost common sense and critical ability.

Hans , then, wears the uniform of the Hitler Youth but will never be able to consider Olga a slave . In turn Olga , despite having seen the horrors committed by the German soldiers, will feel part of the Kemp family .

To bring them even closer will be the sad fate of both being victims of tragedies greater than themselves . Once sent at just over 14 to fight on the Western front, Hans will have to leave his life as a boy forever, as had happened to the young Russian, taken prisoner a few minutes after the German soldiers had killed her father. He will experience first-hand what Olga had known before him: any war dehumanizes and the only possibility is not to make wars.