Heart-Breaking & Inspiring

The Ruins In Which We Bleed by Steve N Lee is a powerful historical novel that I read in just two sittings, pausing only to sleep. It is the third book in the World War II Historical Fiction series but can be read as a stand-alone.

This is a book that will both horrify and inspire you. This is a book that will impact you and not leave you unchanged – because this is a book that is based on real lives.

What the lead character went through seems unbelievable, it seems impossible – but this impossibility is in fact true.

This is a story about a sixteen-year-old who was brave and resourceful. As you read the tale, it is all too easy to forget that she was just sixteen. She was wise beyond her years.

The story is set in the Warsaw ghetto. We hear about life both before and after the Warsaw uprising. We see the importance of family, and of having someone else to live for. Complete isolation would break a spirit. People needed to have someone to live for. “She smiled at the furry little creature. Even in hell, it appeared that friendships could blossom.”

Resistance came in many forms. “This was her sixteenth notebook… The other fifteen had been buried around the ghetto in tins… She couldn’t fire a gun, but she was deadly with a pencil – this was her way of resisting.” Without written records and personal testimonies, how would the world know? “Resisting isn’t only about picking up a gun but about refusing to simply lie down and die… We are resisting… because we’re still here.” There was a strong spirit to survive. “She’d vowed to survive to tell the world.”

Life in the Warsaw ghetto was horrific. Steve N Lee has written sensitively, whilst still relaying the horrors to the reader. “What kind of a world had they built where it was normal for streets to be littered with the corpses of emaciated children?”