A review by Ethan A. Bayer
Cordelia Edvardson's life in the "squirrel nest" is a compilation of myths whose ultimate purpose is to escape the external reality of living in Germany, but also to escape the true nature of herself. These fairytales serve her well as survival tactics in the camps, but eventually they fail, and she must confront reality in all its horror.
Cordelia is constantly being forced into roles that force her to leave herself behind. This starts from a very early age, when she assumes the position of her mother's sole companion-"her salvation and her sacrificial lamb" (p.4). She is urged to give up her childish urges and fancies, and instead to dress in an air of stability and maturity so she can be her mother's rock. The mother in turn gives her a stability, however false it proved to be, with the stories she created.
When her stepfather enters the picture, Cordelia is replaced; instead, she is placed in the role which is essentially hers-that of a child. She is deeply hurt, in part because she is no longer necessary for her mother's happiness, but largely because she is marked by the role that she truly is. She believes there is something inherently, "incurably wrong" (p.29) and dirty about her, and so she escapes her core by affecting different characters on the outside.
Her mother and stepfather play some highly secretive and bizarre games, which Cordelia watches in awe. By marrying Cordelia's mother, the stepfather has chosen to be shunned by his family, and so he constructs a reality for himself that is so outlandish that it detaches the family from the rest of the world and it's moral and cultural codes. He sucks Cordelia into his fantasy through games with her, such as playing "lion" (p.21) and calling her his "silly Barbie" (p.23).
One persona that Cordelia proudly yet solemnly assumes is that of Proserpine. Between the visits to the Gestapo headquarters and to the hall where she stayed with the other Jewish children, she learns to cherish the brief times she has in the sanctuary of the squirrel nest. Recognizing, like Proserpine, that her time there is transient, she prepares herself emotionally for the returns to her own underworld and, eventually, to the camps themselves.
She is then yanked from the warm comfort of the squirrel nest and taken, alone, to the concentration camp. Here there is no mother to foster a mystical view of reality, no walls to contain their idealistic world, so Cordelia is left to her own faculties to survive. This is the first time when she is presented with the bitter, biting reality of her situation. There is pressure from all sides to look her reality, and her true self, in the face, but she finds modes of resisting such pressures. For a time she defines herself by her pneumonia, which she uses as a "cloak of invisibility" (p.60). On long death marches she paints over the harsh staccato orders with a beautiful poem; by submerging herself in her Catholicism and its fragrant and unearthly rituals, she distances herself from the other inmates-people who would perhaps function as mirrors that would reveal Cordelia's base condition and fears to her.
Even these survival tactics eventually collapse under the weight of the brutality of the camps. Cordelia runs from herself in every direction, putting on masks and costumes so she will not recognize herself, but herself catches up to her. The hunger and pain inflicted by animal-like conditions forces Cordelia to constantly attend to the needs of her body-she is enslaved by them. No amount of fairytales or poems can block out the piercing agony of hunger or the burn of the cold wind forever. These afflictions ground Cordelia into her own self, cause her to be aware of every finger and every toe, and escape from herself becomes impossible. Her eyes are forced to gaze into the deepest recesses of her soul, and what she sees is a "great, gray void" (p.66).
When this Proserpine emerges from her cruelest visit to the underworld, something has changed. She no longer loses herself in fairytales or twists her life into a mythical story. She screams at the top of her lungs, " 'I don't want to forget'" (p.83) her life in the camps, because no matter how revolting and horrendous it was, it made her see herself, and she was forced to claim ownership on what she saw. She can finally lose the ornate garb that she used to conceal her soul, the tight corsets of myth that choked her true voice, and rejoice in the fact that "I am here!" (p.90). Because, in the end, Cordelia realizes that being scarred and free is better than being falsely pristine in chains.