Book Alert / My Enemy's Cradle

My Enemy's Cradle by Sara Young, Harcourt '07, $24, 365 pages, ISBN #0151015376.

Not an easy job, creating a master race. If you're Hitler apparatchik Heinrich Himmler, you realize you might meet resistance, so you'll lose some men to bloodshed. How to replace them? Create an organization with a high-sounding name, such as Lebensborn (Wellspring or Fountain of Life). Recruit German teenage girls by the thousands to conceive children. Invade other countries and select "suitably Aryan" girls to do the same. And if that doesn't yield enough, steal children from countries you occupy.

In her chilling new book, children's author Sara Young tells the tale. In a brief interview, she describes its writing:

Q. What led you to write this novel?

A. Several years ago, I took a walk with a friend who was a WWII buff. We were talking about issues of women and war, and he mentioned the Lebensborn Program of Nazi Germany. It was such an enormous program, affecting so many women and children, that I just couldn't believe it wasn't common knowledge. Soon, as a writer, I began to see that a Lebensborn home, specifically one in an occupied country, would be a compelling setting for a novel -- the home itself would act as a crucible for issues of responsibility, motherhood, loss, and what it might mean to carry an enemy's child. I couldn't stop thinking about it until I finally sat down and began to write the novel I wished I could read!

Q. When people think of war crimes, "reproduction" as a war crime does not seem to enter the conversation. Do you think the Lebensborn was a peculiar program of its time, or is this an ongoing crisis that is still happening in today's world with the current wars?

A. It's still going on. More often, the aim is for occupying or attacking forces to impregnate the women in order to alter their enemy's bloodlines and to make the women and resulting children outcasts of their societies. What the Nazis did was the opposite -- the saw the "Aryan"-looking girls of some of the countries they occupied and wanted children from them for their own citizenry, so they wouldn't leave any non-German blood to fight them in 20 years. The Germans had calculated their population and military needs up through 1980....they were very calculating about this.