Who Are The Three Main Women In 'Lilac Girls'?

Question

Finding it hard to keep track—are the Polish prisoner, German doctor, and American actress the trio of central female protagonists in this historical fiction novel?

Mateo Romeo Noah · Answer

The three main female characters in Martha Hall Kelly’s ‘Lilac Girls’ are Caroline Ferriday, a New York socialite who helps unmanned Polish gypsy girls sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp; Kasia Kuzmerick, a 21-year-old Polish gypsy woman, who along with thousands of others, was taken from her home and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp; and Herta Oberheuser, the Nazi doctor who worked at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Their individual stories unfold and ultimately intersect to show the impact of war from three different perspectives. If you’re interested in a story about sisters connected by legacy rather than war, ‘Triplet Heirs; The Romano daughters’ is another option. When three sisters unexpectedly inherit a massive corporate empire, they have to deal with the difficult legacy of their family as well as their own rivalries and competing ambitions to control and shape the future of the company.

Max · Answer

'Lilac Girls' revolves around the lives of three unforgettable women during WWII. We meet Caroline Ferriday who, despite her privileged position as a socialite, ships out care packages to French orphaned children. It is later when she ensures that the Nazi war criminals are brought to justice for their atrocities that her chapters are bursting with optimism and you can’t help but be inspired by her.

Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish resistance courier, was picked up by the Nazis and sent to the infamous medical experiments at Ravensbrück. Her sections are gut-wrenchingly, vividly real and at the same time powerfully courageous. I shudder every time Kasia thinks of her younger sister and all she did to keep her safe while they were in the concentration camp.

Herta Oberheuser is another complex character. A young German doctor who is swept up in the ideology of the Nazis and performs surgery without the use of anesthesia on prisoners of war. Again, not made into a 2-dimensional villain but rather explored to reveal how a desire for career and nationalism can twist a human being. The scenes where all three women finally confront each other in a courtroom are extremely powerful.

Isla · Answer

In Martha Hall Kelly’s ‘Lilac Girls’, three females are portrayed during WWII. The light Caroline, an American and wealthy enough to have remained oblivious to the war, works in France to aid and send children from war zones to safety in the US. Her chapters are full of hope like planting flowers in a war zone.

I think Kelly did a great job at portraying Kasia’s Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome after she was released from the camp. It’s clear how the camp affected her even after the war in simple instances where she would flinch at a doctor’s office or smell disinfectant at a hospital.

Herta’s chapters are repulsive. She is not a hideous monster lurking in the dark corners of history. No, she is a woman that believes she is contributing to ‘medical progress’. We read in dismay as she describes her contribution to the atrocities of war, but are also pissed off with her complaints about the poor quality of the cafeteria food at the camp where she worked. Her story and that of Caroline and Kasia continues long after the war in ways that are full of both trauma and redemption and are told in a way that shows the lasting effects of WWII on all of the characters involved in this story.

Quincy · Answer

Martha Hall Kelly writes three main women in ‘Lilac Girls’ – Caroline Ferriday, a New York socialite who helps French orphans during the WWII war, Kasia Kuzmerick, a young Polish girl who is sent to the concentration camp Ravensbrück by the Nazis, and Herta Oberheuser, the German doctor in Ravensbrück who performs inhuman experiments on women in the camp. The way all three women are written with such depth and their completely different lives get affected by war all across the continents is what really stays with me.

Nicole McDonald · Answer

I was deeply affected by this book for about a week after reading it. The stories of Caroline, Kasia and Herta are all individually powerful but it’s the moments where their stories intersect that really affected me – like meeting the women whose side Caroline has switched to, or Herta calculating how many of her ‘patients’ she has left to kill. It’s that kind of book that makes you go into a kind of daze after reading certain chapters, making you stare at the wall. Kasia’s journey from a fun-loving young girl to a hard-bitten survivor of great hardship is told in excruciating detail and her bond with her sister is the one faint beam of hope in an otherwise bleak tale.

Herta’s chapters were sparse but alas, left a stain on my memory. Her justification of her actions was superbly portrayed as any person can make up a rationalization for their actions. Caroline’s story on the other hand, was uplifting in that it proved that someone did notice the injustice of the treatment of the women and fought for justice, albeit late in the day. The three women’s stories formed a devastatingly complete triptych of women’s experiences during World War II.

Nhaldz Dela X Pastor · Answer

Book club spent an hour discussing Herta. The moral issue of giving a ‘voice’ to a ‘monster’ was contested at length. Eventually we agreed that giving Herta a voice was an important aspect of exploring how ordinary people are able to do terrible things. The three of us in the club are Caroline, Kasia and Herta – Caroline’s stories are the uplifting counter-narrative we need, Kasia’s the stark, unpalatable truth and Herta’s the sometimes uncomfortable question that we may not want to ask.

Without Herta’s portion of the narrative, the book would have read as a very good, but also very harrowing, account of survival. Instead, her section of the book is a complex exploration of guilt and complicity and of the ways that ambition can be corrupted. It is not always an easy thing to read, but it makes the book an unforgettable one. For me, anyway, even though I loathed reading her chapters from start to finish.

Elizabeth Sexton · Answer

For purposes of plot, the three women fulfill somewhat different roles. Caroline functions as our introduction to and hope in the circumstances described by the novel and serves as the traditional protagonist in that she attempts to achieve goals in the face of adversity. Kasia is at the heart of the conflict described by the novel and her attempts to survive function as the main source of suspense in the novel. Herta is the antagonist to Caroline and Kasia but she is also explanation of how the horrors that they endured were systematized and executed by the Third Reich.

Of course these three viewpoints are not arbitrary. Caroline’s storyline drives the plot of the rescue; Kasia’s drives the plot of survival; and Herta’s embodies the force of oppression that Caroline and Kasia are up against in different ways. And it all comes to a head at the Nuremberg trials, where all three of their different journeys are judged in some way.

Nancy Grimshaw Miller · Answer

The Introduction to Caroline Ferriday feels like a film for a romantic comedy/society drama for the first few pages and then we meet Kasia and the atmosphere becomes foreboding and dark. Then we meet Herta and become chilled to the bone. These three women are brought together in a devastating collision of genres that mirror how war enters the lives of ordinary people and turns them upside down and affects them in every way.

Kasia’s is a thrilling survival story, Caroline’s is a political drama and a powerful tribute to her activism, and Herta’s is a psychological horror story about a soul slowly corrupted. Put together, these three powerful narratives comprise a genre-defying book that is at once comprehensive and powerful. We are given intimate and personal horror, a broad political narrative searching for justice, and a deeply intimate portrayal of a twisted mind. Most books attempt to cover so much ground but few succeed as triumphantly as Rosemary Sullivan has here.

Maday Sobota · Answer

While Kasia’s story is emotional and a journey for her, Caroline and Herta’s stories give context to what it takes to change justice and compassion on the other side of the world and how easily medical ethics can be discarded in a wrong environment. Their stories combined with Kasia’s paint a complete picture of the atrocity – the perpetrator, the victim and the advocate fighting on the outside.

The three main characters come to life – the horrific perpetrator, the innocent and courageous victim, and the often-inadequate yet tireless human rights advocate. You are left with a more realistic portrayal of the evil of the Holocaust as not just having been perpetrated by a few cruel and even maniacal individuals but also facilitated by inactions of many, and the arduous, often-tardy and limited efforts to try to save them from extermination. Thus, no easy answers or resolutions are provided to this sadly, true-to-history, story.

Terri Norris · Answer

As a minor character, I thought Nadja, Kasia's sister, was just as important as the other three girls but official story line was Caroline, Kasia and Herta. It followed somewhat a predictable structure but was so well written that it was amazing. Caroline's chapters were excellent as a relief from the intensity of the girls in the concentration camp. I found her story line less compelling than the others but her frustration at the red tape that prevented her from helping the women in the camp was just as desperate as our own.

Herta is a wild card. Giving a war criminal a first-person voice is risky but it pays off because you remove yourself from the reading of him as a historical monster. He’s not a rabid, frothing at the mouth kind of idiot ideologue. He’s a careerist who thinks he is doing ‘scientific’ work and that’s far more frightening.

Kerry Burrow · Answer

A remarkable aspect of the three women’s narratives is the texture of the different stories. Short, chilly and clinical as Herta’s notes are, they contrast sharply with Caroline’s longer, warmer stories even when they contain the same horrible stuff. More emotional and deeply felt than her two companions’, Kasia’s longer stories constitute the bulk of her section. And whereas Herta’s emotional poverty is starkly apparent in her brief, detached, clinical notes, Caroline’s and Kasia’s deep feelings are revealed in the richer, more immersive stories that make up the bulk of their sections.

The contrast among the three female narrators creates an especially ambivalent reading experience. Although the stories of pain, torture, and suffering of Kasia and of Caroline’s mission are very difficult to read, the reader would rather continue to read those chapters than turn the page to read the next Herta chapter. The chapters of Herta feel foreign, even to the point of discomfort. She is foreign to herself. Her writing style conveys her lack of human connection to herself.

Noe del Rojo · Answer

After finishing the book, I can confirm that I have a special place in my heart for Caroline. Most importantly, her storyline was by far the least known to me before reading this book. As mentioned previously, the three main characters are Caroline, Kasia and Herta. Her world of New York Charity Balls and French Consulate Soirees is so vastly different from Ravensbrück, but that is the point that gets made about Caroline. Her privileged world of Charity benefits is first channeled into a decades-long fight after she finds out the truth about Ravensbrück.

Kasia is amazingly resilient but you also see the broken parts of her that will never fully heal. Herta is the really scary opposite pole of Caroline’s naivety and inability to do evil. Her existence in a system that is inclined to reward her kind of behavior is really thought-provoking and creating this triangle of victimhood, perpetration and allyship between Caroline, Kasia and Herta in a way that is deeply affecting but also very complex morally.

Who Are The Three Main Women In 'Lilac Girls'?

12 Answers

Related Books

Her Three Wicked Mates

The Last Female Dragon

The triplets who claimed me

The Girl with the Violet Eyes

The Time of Lavender

Trapped Between Three Deadly Beauties

Topic