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Although I’ll say SPOILERS FOLLOW, this isn’t a book you read for its plot. We know the plot: horrendous times of hardship and near-starvation in a forced labor camp. While the characters may be fictional, the existence of these labor camps is a relatively unknown historical fact. After the end of WW II, the Stalin-led Soviet Union rounded up Eastern European resident Germans in countries that the Soviets occupied including East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia. They enslaved people in labor camps in the USSR, such as the Romanian Germans in this story.



Through the story of one young man, this Nobel Prize winning author tells us the relatively unknown story of thousands of Romanians of German descent who, in retaliation for WW II, were forced into Russian work camps. These people were not prisoners of war; they were men and women rounded up from their homes.

Those in the camps lived for up to five years in borderline starvation eating only two meals of watery cabbage soup and a slice of bread every day. They were so hungry that they traded slices of bread with each other, often several times, because the other person’s slice always looked bigger. Occasionally they begged for food in a neighboring village or cooked edible weeds gathered from the roadside. Hunger became so all-pervasive in their lives that “it was an object� and the Hunger Angel was surely the devil. No medical care was available and those who died were buried out back.

In blister-inducing wooden shoes (only two sizes: small or large, so none fit) they shoveled coal into a power plant and worked cement to make concrete blocks. Muller’s descriptions of how you shovel coal or handle cement and its dust shows she had an informant who filled her in in great detail, or she tried it herself. (Perhaps her informant was her mother who had been imprisoned.)

During their last year in the camp they were suddenly paid some minimal wages and the hunger ended. Then they were freed. The young man feels forgotten and displaced at home by the birth of a baby brother. He feels lost in a strange world; clearly PTSD. A frightening book.

The USSR considered this forced labor part of Geman reparations after the war. Some people were enslaved as late as 1950, five years after the end of WW II. A study by the German Red Cross in 1964 estimated that 875,000 Germans had been imprisoned and the conditions were so harsh that 39% of them died in the camps. Soviet statistics admit to 275,000 people imprisoned with a death toll of 24%.



The author, Herta Muller (b. 1953), won the Nobel prize in 2009. Her family was of German ethnicity living in Romania and, before she was born, her mother had been sent to the camps. Hunger Angel is her best-known work. I’ve read two other books by her that I thought were quite good, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment.

Top photo: German women and girls being released from a Soviet forced labor camp in 1947. Photo from Wikipedia
The author from romania-insider.com

{Revised, photos, shelves and historical info added 9/1/23]