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Westward Ho! Backwards through
Prussia
Bohjalian's 'Skeletons at the
Feast' Illustrates the WWII Eastern Front in Moral Shades of
Gray
By Andy Turpin
 WATERTOWN,
Mass. (A.W.)-A beautiful 18-year-old iron-willed Prussian
girl, her strapping Scottish POW lover (reminiscent of a
ginger-haired Sean Connery), an aging aristocratic mother
with her Hitler Youth castoff son, and a death camp survivor
who kills Nazis to steal their identity are all part of the
motley crew cast of characters in author Chris Bohjalian's
lastest novel, Skeletons at the Feast (Shaye Areheart Books,
2008).
The setting is Poland and the Eastern Front in the last days
of World War II amidst a Western Europe in the wake of the
Allied invasion of France and an Eastern Europe in the grip
of military chaos and a wave of refugees fleeing the horrors
of the ever-impending Red Army.
Caught in the tide of war and racing against the Soviet
barbarian hordes determined on taking brutal revenge for the
Battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad out on German and Polish
civilians are the Emmerichs.
The Emmerichs are a noble Prussian family that represents
all that is good, kind, and chivalrous in a once-great
Germany whose legacy has been forever perverted by the Third
Reich and its perpetrated Holocaust. Their quest, like a
Teutonic John Ford Western, is to stay one step ahead of
Ivan and reach the surrender and safety of the American and
British lines encroaching from Berlin and France.
In the literary vein of Joseph Kanon's The Good German and
the tradition of Sam Peckinpah's 1976 controversial
cinematic tale of the Eastern Front Cross of Iron,
Bohjalian's Skeletons at the Feast is a deftly crafted and
empathetically woven novel of survival and hope told from a
German perspective often negated or neglected by other
novelists.
Today few are taught in schools what an abject corner of
hell the Eastern Front was during the Second World War.
Certainly writers like Jerzy Kozinsky and Elie Wiesel have
written about the infernos of the death camps, but
overshadowed in the U.S. are the legitimate fears of death
and gruesome reprisal the civilian populations of Eastern
Europe faced at the hands of the Red Army (especially if you
were at all German).
Prussian and ethnic German enclaves from the banks of the
Volga to the hinterlands of Latvia and Lithuania suffered
rape and tortuous death at the hands of Stalin's legions.
Much of the carnage went underreported due to the Soviet
Union's Allied allegiance during the war.
As recently as last year, former Russian Federation
president Vladimir Putin re-opened old wounds wrought by the
Soviet army upon civilians in the Baltic when he protested
Estonia's removal of a memorial statue (of the Soviet
liberation from Nazi occupation) in the capital city of
Talinn.
Many ethnic Russian communities are wrongfully subject to
abuse and persecution by local Eastern European populations
because of the remembered war crimes of the Red Army during
the World War II and Soviet eras. With the gross exception
of those Holocaust survivor communities, more people in
Eastern Europe seem to remember the atrocities of the
Russian army over those of the Nazis-a disturbing and
morally ambiguous historical sore that festers in many
former Soviet republics and calls out for more stories like
Skeletons at the Feast to be written so that a greater
number of people understand the realities of the Eastern
Front, and that time and place.
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