"Les Enfants de l´Hiver"

SYNOPSIS:

“Winter of 1943, in a French Pyrenees some guides are captivated while they tried to evacuate six children, whose parents are members of The Resistance, and bring them to Spain. They hid the children and refused to betray them. Furious, members of the SS executed them. After exhaustingly looking for the children, the executioners decided to abandon them in the cold Pyrenees, destroying the only footbridge that they could use to get to the valley. The six kids are prisoners of the mountain and winter has just started. They need to organize themselves, find food, make a fire and overcome the social and religious differences in order to survive”.

 Credits to Goodreads.com (Translation by me)

REVIEW:

Wars always make terrible holes in history and consequently leave their stains in literary works. The main characters in Gilbert Bordes´ novels are not the soldiers belonging to The Resistance, but a group of children, left alone during the winter in the French mountains.

The author presents a group of teenagers and children quite different compared with each other, as some of them are jews, others are sons or daughters of members of The Resistance, and others sons and daughters of those sympathetic to the ones fighting against Nazis.

Each of them has a story to tell and carry the sorrow of losing somebody, but also have the responsibility to fight not to get caught so that those that gave their lives to protect them did not die in vain.  

The novel is fantastic, I had never read any other novel from this author and I actually loved his writing skills.  Bordes introduces the reader to an atmosphere full of despair, fear and adrenalin and writes about a group of kids that need to grow up and behave like adults during the days they spend in the mountains.

Fair enough, the best thing about this book is that the author has perfectly represented the different personalities of the main characters and even if the children pretend to be adults and simulate that they can do lots of things on their own, let’s not forget that there are still scared children. Besides, I don´t want to spoil you, but the ending is quite emotional and original.

To put it in a nutshell, Les Enfants de L´Hiver is a captivating and moving story, where children must prove their survival instinct to overcome hunger, fear and cold and don´t have any choice but leave their differences aside if they want to survive.