Making a choice

In the 2017 novel The Boat Runner, Devin Murphy tells about a Dutch boy, Jacob Koopman, who comes of age during World War II. Jacob, the first-person narrator, faces the question many Europeans must have faced during the war: Which side should he take?

Before the war, for business reasons, Jacob's father sends him and his brother to a Hitler Youth Camp. His father runs a light bulb factory, and he thinks this will help him win a contract with Volkswagen. And so the boy has early sympathies for the Nazis, strengthened when he later blames the Allies for the death of both his brother and his mother. Yet his father apparently died running from the Germans.

Martin, his uncle, has Jacob help him when he kills Nazi soldiers he is transporting on his boat and when he sinks a German submarine. Jacob eventually joins the German navy and even singlehandedly sinks a British ship, becoming a hero. But when he witnesses the extermination of large numbers of Jews, he thinks differently yet again.

Many of us who read this fine novel may think we, in similar circumstances, would have immediately made the right choice and fought the Nazis. That's easy to think now. At the time it could not have always been that easy. Chances are we, in similar circumstances, would have asked the same kind of questions: How can I best survive? Who is most likely to win? And who is responsible for the deaths of those I loved?