A Story of Honor and Resistance: A Review of White Rose

A number of books and movies have focused on the White Rose, the underground movement that circulated flyers in Germany against the Nazi regime during the Second World War. The small group of students (and one professor) seemed almost defenseless in the face of the Gestapo, and in fact, the entire group was captured in 1943 and almost everyone associated with it executed after brief show trials.

Kip Wilson’s debut novel in verse, one of the first from the Versify imprint created by Kwame Alexander, focuses primarily on Sophie Scholl who, with her older brother Hans, were the nucleus of the White Rose and the first ones captured when a janitor spied them leaving leaflets at their university lecture hall in Munich. Wilson imagines Sophie’s story through a collection of poems that begin with her interrogation across the hall from her brother, her hope that her and her brother’s stories align and that no more White Rose members are implicated. These scenes in the present alternate with flashbacks of Sophie’s childhood, her on-and-off romantic relationship with a Wehrmacht (army) officer, her decision to join the White Rose co-founded by her brother in order to make a difference in the world, and their efforts to keep their flyers a secret from the authorities while reaching enough Germans to spark an uprising against the regime.

Wilson’s narrative is powerful and timely. Her extensive research – with many sources in German, a language in which the author is fluent – gives weight and credibility to Sophie’s thoughts even though we know they’re invented. Wilson weaves into the narrative the text of the White Rose flyers and other underground publications, many of which resonate today:

 

Isn’t it the case that

every honest German today is

ashamed

of his government?

 

or:

 

Every word

that comes out of Hitler’s mouth

Is a lie.

 

Although readers know Sophie, her brother, and the other White Rose members’ fates, the novel creates suspense by exploring both the students’ motives for taking part in what appeared even then to be a hopeless mission and their reactions to their inevitable deaths. Hans’s statement to the judge, notorious for sentencing dissidents to death in the People’s Court, is prescient:

 

He levels

his gaze to meet

the judge’s cold, hard eyes.

Today you’ll hang us,

but you

will be next.

 

Whether from Sophie’s perspective, letters from her boyfriend or siblings, or pronouncements from Nazi officials, every one of Wilson’s poems ring true. Designed to be read with books from that era such as The Diary of Anne Frank, White Rose is a powerful and fitting tribute to those who sacrificed their precious lives to fight for justice and truth against a brutal absolute power.