Rulka LangerCritiques

I picked up this book at our local Polish Arts Club and couldn't put it down once I started reading it. It's like having the author in your living room telling her story. The pictures in this edition help to cement the images in the text. The decision to leave Poland for the safety of her children is one only a mother could make.
I highly recommend this book as a reminder of the horrors of war.

Originally published in 1942, Aquila Polonica has reprinted this in a stunning new edition. The first thing that jumps out at you is pictures! Lots and lots of pictures, particularly focused on the Siege of Warsaw, which is the focus of the book. In addition, maps and timelines assist in understanding the events before and during WWII.

First off, the female author adds a unique voice to the usually male-dominated subject of wartime. She also explains immediately why her story is different from what a war correspondent for the news might write. Her presence as a mother with an extended family gives her a different viewpoint:

"A war correspondent, when he runs to that gigantic fire (her example), does not leave his own children behind in his hotel room. When caught in an air raid, he doesn't tremble for the life of his own old mother. His brother has not vanished somewhere on the crowded roads...it isn't his own house, the house in which he was born and has lived for years, that has been set on fire by an incendiary. And if he himself goes through the agony of mortal fear, none of his readers will ever know about it."

As a narrator of the horrors, Langer is ideal. For a time before all this occurred, she had lived in the United States and had attended Vassar, and then became a copywriter for an advertising agency. After marrying and having a child, her husband became the Commercial Attache at the Polish Embassy. Eventually he resigned and they went back to Poland, but in 1938 he had another opportunity to work in the US. She remained in Poland, on a temporary basis, planning to rejoin him. However, as WWII heated up, she ended up in a small town with her mother and extended family, hoping to wait out the storm.

The book goes on to detail the fears that residents had, as well as the thread of suspicion that wove through daily life. At one point, when she travelled to try and find a way to get to Warsaw, she was arrested by a band of women with pitchforks who assumed she was a German spy (her missing passport didn't help her case). While many Warsaw residents had fled the city, Langer and her mother actually decided to return there, because the refugees who fled were equally endangered, and the prospect of travelling with small children seemed questionable. They returned to an apartment thoroughly shelled, without windows, and with its contents turned to rubble. Here they tried to reclaim their life and wait out the Siege.

It's this personal aspect that makes the book most involving. As a mom, hearing how she attempted to feed her children and create some semblence of normalcy, no matter how fragile, was amazing. Entertaining them, distracting them from their fears, and still maintaining a sense of calm is hardly imaginable. When a fire began on their roof, it took 48 hours to get help. Without panes of glass in the windows, they nearly froze in their apartments. Small details jump out the most: how a copy of Gone with the Wind seemed to inspire her to hold on to her old clothes lest she have to use the drapes for fabric. How rumours and gossip made fear escalate even more. And how, even in extreme danger, women will still bicker over the price of produce!

Another intriguing part of the book involves her creation of a new business to try and make money. Since newspapers no longer circulated, and the Poles desperately needed items that would normally be offered in the classified ads, Langer used her advertising background and a friend's help to create posters of small items for sale. Despite interference from the German's occupying Warsaw, they still found a way to post these and make a small amount of money.

In all, her family suffered greatly during the Siege and family members was tragically killed. But Langer and her children survived and were able to get to Vienna. Soon after, they left for America. I'm most amazed at how readable this is compared to other books about the war experience. Suitable for all ages, it would make an excellent resource in a classroom and a stepping stone to further study on the Siege of Warsaw. Hearing from a survivor about the human capacity for resilience and inner strength is motivating, especially in a time when nothing made sense.

Rulka Langer was visiting her family in Poland when Germany invaded in 1939, setting off World War II. Her husband was in America, where they had been living, but she had taken their two children back to Poland to visit her mother, her brother, and other relatives. She and her children remained in Poland through the German siege of Warsaw, before finally escaping back to America in 1940.

Langer’s account of the German invasion and siege was first published in 1942. The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt has now been re-issued with fresh editing; more than a hundred new photographs, maps, and other supplemental documents; and a new Epilogue written by her son.

This is an incredible book. Subtitled “War Through a Woman’s Eyes, 1939 – 1940,” it reads like a novel, dragging the reader through the burning streets of Warsaw as German bombs drop on the city, on perilous train and cart trips through the war-scarred country-side, and through the treacherous and increasingly evil post-siege German administration. Her writing is crisp and honest – revealing her prior experience as a journalist.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader.

The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt: War Through a Woman's Eyes, 1939-1940 is the personal account of Rulka Laner, a Warsaw resident, who survived the World War II Nazi invasion of Poland.

This book sat in my TBR pile for a bit, mainly due to its imposing girth (a rather imposing 467 page hard cover.) Silly me, I had no idea what a marvel I was pushing off.

From the second I began reading The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt, I could not put this book down. Rulka Laner's story is so real, so honest, and so compelling- it is easy to quickly lose oneself in the pages.

While history interests me (after all, it's important to know from whence we came,) I wouldn't say I'm a "history buff" or that generally, I would gravitate towards a "war" novel. But The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt called to me, perhaps as all mermaids do. What I discovered in the pages was life-altering. One cannot read this book and walk away unchanged.

Ms. Langer wrote The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt in 1942 as part of her effort to explain to Americans the devastation of World War II for the average, ordinary human beings caught in it. The updated version of this book includes maps, pictures, and an afterward from Rulka's son, George, that adds a "vivid" enhancement to this mesmerizing account.

What I appreciated most about the The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt is Ms. Langer's ability to view not only her surrounding world with impeciable candor, but to offer us an open and honest account of her own frailties.

The tale is certainly an arduous one, at times, difficult to to read through the glimmer of tears and sympathy you will have for the citizens caught in the throes of war and the gratitude you may have for not having to live through such hell in first person. Yet, the pages are also a celebration of human life and the brave men and women who rose above their circumstances to deal with the best and the worst of their own humanity.

An eye-opening, riveting read.

This book came to me through the Early Reviewers program. The author is a Polish woman who finds herself in Warsaw during the German Invasion and occupation. It should be kept in mind however that the book is focused on the years 1939-40, and as such there is not very much mention of the treatment of the Jewish people. Which was interesting in itself as it opened my eyes a bit to the difficulties of everyday life of all people in Poland during this time. Daily air raids, food shortages, and people being deported. Anyone who lived through war like this is a testament to survival.

I had requested this ER book after doing an internet search, finding the text online and liking what I read.
I immediately fell in love with Rulka Langer's English, which has a unique quality and style (I do not think that the book was translated, since the author spent some time in the USA before the second world war).

This new edition (published in time for the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the war) contains a number of photographs, of the author and her family as well as topical pictures of the time, bringing the story to life: Inhabitants of Warsaw digging trenches, the devastation after the air raids, dead horses, family photos, children's paintings.

Rulka Langer begins her story just a few weeks before the German invasion, and we get to meet an upper-class Polish family, enjoying the summer in the countryside. Rulka works at a bank in Warsaw, her husband has been working in the United States since 1938, and she hopes to join him soon, together with their two children. Towards the end of August, the news are getting more frantic, and in the last week of the month the family returns to Warsaw, because war is imminent. Rulka enrols with the air defence helpers.

Warsaw suffers heavy air raids from the first day of the war, and quickly the city runs out of supplies, hunger sets in. People are carving up horses that were killed during the air raids, to have some meat. Only four weeks after the war began, Warsaw surrenders to the German troops and the occupation begins. After the occupation, things turn quickly to the worse. The occupiers are putting the pressure on and things as little as damaging a propaganda poster can land a person in jail or even lead to their execution.
During all this time Rulka is unsure of what to do, but in January finally decides to go ahead with her plans to join her husband in the USA, to get her children out of the war-torn country. She is able to get the necessary papers and passports, despite the turmoil. In February 1940, Rulka Langer is finally able to travel towards Genoa, to get on board the ship to the United States.

These five months show an ever tightening rule of oppression, the beginning of the separation of the Jews in Poland and beginning of (mass) executions in revenge for killed German soldiers. The book is a fresh view of the events, particularly since it was written only months after the fact, with the events still fresh in the author's memory, and the future still unknown.

Well worth reading, even if you think there is nothing more to be learnt -- like many of my compatriots, I have read books about Nazi Germany, about the occupation in Eastern and Western Europe and biographies of people who suffered under our army and in the German labour camps and extermination camps. I cannot remember reading an "early-days" report that was not written years after the war, with the knowledge of what followed. This book is a new perspective for me, and I was grateful to have the chance to read (and review) it.½

The Mermaid and the Messerschmidt is a fine memoir of a particular part of WW2 from an intelligent observer with an eye for detail.

It’s the story of Rulka Langer, a young, educated Polish woman who worked in an office in Warsaw at the time of the German invasion of Poland at the start of the war. The book describes her experience in the lead up to the start of the war, the invasion, the siege of Warsaw and life under occupation, before she escapes overland with her children to an eventual destination in the US.

Rulka was intelligent and educated (some of it via a scholarship in the US prior to the war) and she was able to observe sharply the minutiae of Polish life and the ever-increasing effects of the war on the Polish people. The book was originally published in 1942, and the freshness of the author’s memory comes through strongly in the writing. This is no long-term memoir diluted by the effects of time – it is one that was created almost contemporaneously with the events she describes, and the details are sharp and vivid.

There is a sense of innocence in her descriptions of Polish life before the war, a relative simplicity of life: an innocence that is then ground away by subsequent events; and a sense that something has been washed away forever.

Langer writes with pathos and with humour both (the scene where a maid is struggling to take dozens of hand-me-down dresses with her as the family is packed up to escape the city still makes me smile).

Overall, this second edition of Rulka’s memoir, published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of WW2 stands as a very fine and eminently readable reminder of the horrors of war and its effects on a population that finds itself on the battlefield and unable to get out of the way.

Recommended.

I've always been fascinated by non-fiction that was written at the time of the event, stories that aren't filtered through time and exposure to other views and opinions. Since this book was written in 1942, emotions and memories of the invasion and occupation are still fresh. The addition of footnotes and photographs in this edition helps people of the postwar generations to place her experiences in context. It was fascinating to read the 'home front' experiences of someone in a theatre of World War 2 with which I had little familiarity. 'The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt' is an intense, well-written memoir.

I liked this book very much. Although Ms. Langer was fortunate enough to escape Poland early in the war, she experienced one of the worst and most senseless seiges in the war. The Germans were basicly showing off their ability to wage war with impunity. When the Russians came through Poland five years later and into Eastern Germany, the barbarity was repaid...

Anyway, the courage displayed and the drama of her escape make for a riveting story, even retold after 70 years. Thank you George Langer and Aquila Polonica for republishing this story.

This brilliant account takes us from the last days of peace in August 1939 to February 1940 - a fairly short time in terms of days and weeks - but what a lot this family lives through in that time. The place is Poland, and in particular the city of Warsaw, the destruction of which was truly awful. Our narrator is Rulka a young mother and career woman, whose husband is in America at the time war breaks out. Rulka and her children are living with her mother, during the seige of Warsaw and the first uneasy days of the German occupation. What they must put up with in terms of hunger, cold and very real fear, brings it home to the reader just how completely life was turned upside down in a matter of days. Rulka is resourceful though, and even manages to start up her own business within just a couple of months of the Germans moving in. She is not the only tough customer we meet, people help each other, including running along burning streets to warn people they are in danger from the fires. At one point Rulka says to a friend just returned to Warsaw, how war brings people's true nature's out - they are in effect unable to pretend - you see people for who they are at such times. This is a fascinating, hugely readable, hard to put down book, I came to love the Rulka's family and neighbours. So many fabulous photographs in this edition bring Warsaw and it's people to life, and show the utter devastation of a beautiful city. So very glad I had the chance to read this book.½

Travel back in time to WW2 and see through the eyes of someone who was actually there. Learn about the invasion of Poland and the Siege of Warsaw from a young mother's point of view. In a desperate times, true colors shine. When this woman is faced with some life's most difficult challenges, she truly rises above it.

This book is brilliantly written. You can't help but connect with the author and see what she sees and feel what she feels. Truly amazing.

When I got this book to review I must admit I thought it would be a dry autobiographical narrative but I found I was hooked Rulka brings to life what life was really like during the first few months of the war.

This book was originally published in 1942 but this edition released for sale from today is expanded with photos and footnotes For those of us born after the war I feel its a book that should be read to bring the reality home to us of what our parents and grandparents lived through I found it a real eyeopener If you get the chance of obtaining a copy then its a book well worth reading