Nelka

Lviv, 1941. Sixteen-year-old Nelka is picked up by soldiers and taken west with a large number of other women and girls. They end up on an estate in northern Germany, where they are forced to carry out hard labour. Nelka’s father had taught her about fruit-growing early on, and even as a little girl, she had helped him to graft his apple trees. Thanks to this knowledge, she is initially able to avoid the violence of Marten, the manager of the estate. She plans the layout and maintenance of the orchard, and his apple trees make him a wealthy man after the war is over. Decades later, Nelka returns to the site of her suffering. She wants Marten to remember the very things from which she is seeking to finally free herself.

In her new novel, Svenja Leiber reveals the traces left behind – on the present and in the landscape – by the violent history of the twentieth century and by the forced labour of the Nazi regime. She tells stories of women whose knowledge and bodies were exploited, and who banded together as friends to resist humiliation and brutality. Nelka sheds light on their fate in an insightful and sensitive way – preserving their memory.