Without a doubt the worst book I have ever read in my life. This is a book, I kid you not, that was so bad, I actually regretted reading it. In a way, I feel sorry for the author (I don’t remember her name), but in a way I am still mad at her to this day.
Red Orchestra is a book about 2 woman who attended college here in America but traveled back to their home country of Germany just prior to the outbreak of World War II. I know when the author found this story, she automatically thought this would be a great story for a book. The truth, however, is much different.
These college students decide to start a resistance group in Germany called “Red Orchestra”. However rather than sabotaging railways, and plotting assassinations of top members of the Nazi party, they decide to, wait for it, print fliers. Yes, that’s the big plan they dream up to fight the Nazis – Fliers. While the rest of Germany slept an uneasy sleep, the members of the dreaded Red Orchestra distributed fliers into people’s mailboxes informing them of what was plainly going on outside their windows.
Unlike the truly heroic French resistance, who admirably fought the Nazi invasion of their homeland, sabotaged railway systems, assassinated Nazis, and exposed sympathizers, The Red Orchestra decided sneaking throughout Berlin, stuffing these fliers in people’s mail slots at night was the best approach at stopping the Nazi party.
This was absolutely the worst book I have read in my life. The author goes on and on over the most mundane of things, for example two complete chapters over the plight of a newspaper reporter who finds himself without a job due to the fact that the Nazi party took over newspaper. People are dying by the thousands, but apparently the reporter who lost his job was much more tragic.
At one point, one of the so-called resistance leaders actually joins the Nazi party in order to keep her teaching job. Wait a minute, I thought these women were part of a resistance movement! What exactly are you resisting? Isn’t the point of a resistance movement resisting? Joining the Nazi party is not resisting, that’s capitulation.
Distribution of Anti-Nazi fliers is not resistance: That is called poking a bear with a stick. You are not harming the Nazi party at all, you are a fly buzzing about someone’s head. You are destined to be swatted: Which is exactly what happened to these two American college students. They were sent to Concentration Camps for their crimes, where they both perished. The fact that these women died for absolutely nothing is a sad story that didn’t need retold.
Somewhere between chapters 10 and 12, I decided I had suffered enough. At one point, one of the students actually complained about the noise coming from the cattle trucks full of Jews rambling through the streets keeping her awake. If someone is so callous that the only thing she has to say about Jews being rounded up and taken to Ghettos, is the fact she can’t sleep, then I don’t need to waste more time reading a book about her.
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