LAND OF SNOW AND ASHES, historical novel of Nazi war crimes...in LAPLAND?!

LAND OF SNOW AND ASHES
PETRA RAUTIAINEN (tr. David Hackston)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The haunting, gripping story of Lapland's buried history of Nazi crimes during World War II, perfect for fans of Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius

Finnish Lapland, 1944: a young soldier is called to work as an interpreter at a Nazi prison camp. Surrounded by cruelty and death, he struggles to hold onto his humanity. When peace comes, the crimes are buried beneath the snow and ice.

A few years later, journalist Inkeri is assigned to investigate the rapid development of remote Western Lapland. Her real motivation is more personal: she is following a lead on her husband, who disappeared during the war. Finding a small community riven with tension and suspicious of outsiders, Inkeri slowly begins to uncover traces of disturbing facts that were never supposed to come to light.

From this starkly beautiful polar landscape emerges a story of silenced histories and ongoing oppression, of human brutality and survival.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The Nazis are truly the gift that keeps on giving in horror terms. I had no idea there were Sámi extermination camps. I'm not remotely surprised there were oongoing attempts to "integrate" the Sámi into Finnish overculture, as Westerners seems constitutionally unable to just let people alone.

Sámi victims of extermination are part of a war effort that began in 1944, one of our timelines; the waning days of the conflict as I was taught about the war. It's very instructive that, as defeat was inevitable and impending, these hate-filled nutjobs didn't change their minds but instead doubled down on their appalling cruelty. (Young half-Sámi Bigga-Marja is our witness; her trauma is a major part of the story from that point on.)

Or so this novel tells us.

The Nazis were allied with Finland at this time, 1941 through 1944. Both hated and feared the USSR, and cooperated in warring against them. German troops were stationed on Finnish territory on a friendly basis; though as war ended, they really did sabotage all Lapland's infrastructure they possibly could. There is no documentation supporting any claim to historicity of these specific genocidal events, at least not perpetrated by Nazis. There was, earlier in the 20th century, a joint Swedish/Finnish genocide against the Sámi, with some lackadaisical Soviet cooperation. If there was ever a movement or intention to create a "Greater Finland" I can't find anything about it. (In English; outside the translator's note at the end.)

This is not being marketed as History, so please don't read it as such. Think of it as alternate history-lite, which is how I got my pleasure in the read. The translator's note provides a decent potted history of how Finland experienced the war; understandably it didn't really resemble the way the US or the French did.

Read it because it has lines like this: "{Her eyes} were like freshly blossomed heath violets or fat bilberries glistening in the morning dew. Not quite blue, but something altogether different...A hue reflecting the piercing Arctic light and the universe." That is beautiful, and it utterly unsettled me. There is a lot of imagery like this throughut the story. It is different enough from my own more stodgy fare that I found it both refreshing and off-kilter enough to keep me on my readerly toes. A great deal of untranslated Sámi dialogue appears after Inkeri, our PoV character in the novel's present (1947), arrives...it's a language not readily understood by the wide majority of Finns, either, so the point of leaving it untraslated is maintained: these are not your people, there's no need to wonder about it. Inkeri learns all the awfulness (mostly fictional and not rooted in the facts as presented, remember!) that's been committed in eastern Lapland, and she's still so enchanted by the place and the Sámi themselves that she ups stakes from her Finnish life in the south and relocates there.

Spoiler alert.

Also it's well worth bearing in mind as October slithers ever closer, stinkbugs flying out of her hair and scorpion stingers instead of nipples, demanding you sacrifice your nightly rest with horror reads. There is horror indeed in Bigga-Marja's experiences, there is horror in the way the Sámi were treated by their neighbors, there is horror in all "race" related prejudice.