Cyrla's neighbors have begun to whisper. Her cousin, Anneke, is pregnant and has passed the rigorous exams for admission to the Lebensborn, a maternity home for girls carrying German babies. But Anneke's soldier has disappeared, and Lebensborn babies are only ever released to their father's custody-- or taken away.
A note is left under the mat. Someone knows that Cyrla, sent from Poland years before for safekeeping with her Dutch relatives, is Jewish. The Nazis are imposing more and more restrictions; she won't be safe there for long.
And then in the space of an afternoon, life falls apart. Cyrla must choose between certain discovery in her cousin's home and taking Anneke's place in the Lebensborn--Cyrla and Anneke are nearly identical. If she takes refuge in the enemy's lair, can Cyrla fool the doctors, nurses, guards, and other mothers-to-be? Can she escape before they discover she is not who she claims?
Mining a lost piece of history, Sara Young takes us deep into the lives of women living in the worst of times. Part love story and part elegy for the terrible choices we must often make to survive, MY ENEMY'S CRADLE keens for what we lose in war and sings for the hope we sometimes find.
In 1941 Rotterdam, Cyrla has spent the last five years with her cousin's family, to better get to know "her mother's people", sent away from a Poland threatened by the gathering storm of war and Hitler's determined decimation of the Jewish population. Cyrla suspects she is a painful reminder to her father after her mother's death; yet even in her cousin's home, the girl is uncomfortable, her half-Jewish background a shadow on the others. Cousins Anneke and Cyrla are close, but Anneke's father is increasingly impatient and hostile to the extra person at the table. As ominous news reaches the family of the closing of the Polish ghettoes, paranoia increases in Schiedam, the family increasingly anxious about Cyrla's vulnerability.
Although her soldier boyfriend is suddenly unavailable, Anneke's announcement of pregnancy is not greeted kindly by an intolerant father, who arranges for his daughter to be sent to a Lebensborn, one of the German maternity homes where acceptable young women bear the babies of the pure blooded German race. Suddenly Cyrla must choose between an uncertain future and a chance to take her cousin's place at the Lebensborn. With barely time to prepare for living as Anneke, Cyrla is thrust into a foreign environment where every word and false move breeds danger. Keeping her own counsel, the mother-to-be is desperately lonely, torn with guilt over her transformation into her cousin, dreading discovery as her own baby grows. Benefiting from a monstrous enterprise to repopulate the world with pure-blooded Aryans, Cyrla is an intruder with a terrible secret.
Describing Cyrla's predicament with chilling accuracy, from the paranoia of Schiedam to the insular world of the Lebensborn, Anneke's soldier's fate unknown, Cyrla's beloved Isaak at risk of death in the camps and a world at war, the author reveals the ugly details of those caught in Hitler's dream of a Master Race, whether by choice or circumstance and the infinite dangers of hiding in plain sight. The once-naïve protagonist is forced to confront the terrible realities of her position and limited choices at the Lebensborn. That she might find love in such a place is extraordinary, for there are monstrosities at the heart of this novel, evil born of an ideology that flourishes while Cyrla navigates a treacherous path. Shocking and painful, the author injects hope into the hopeless, love into the unlovable. Luan Gaines/ 2008.
