The Forest of Vanishing Stars

The Forest of Vanishing Stars is a work of historical fiction set primarily in Eastern Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. During this time, more than three million Polish Jews were forced into “ghettos,” a term for places the Nazis forcibly isolated groups of people, primarily Jewish people, during World War II, and eventually murdered by Nazi forces. Nearly 90% of the Jewish population of Poland perished, but a considerable number escaped into the dense forests along the border of Poland and Belarus (then Belorussia), where they avoided capture and even carried out missions against the German aggressors until the war ended. The Forest of Vanishing Stars draws from historical records and the narratives of survivors to tell the story of Yona and the people she guides to safety.

The events of The Forest of Vanishing Stars begin in Berlin in 1922, four years after the end of World War I and just a year after Adolf Hitler assumed control of the National Socialist German Workers Party—a party that Siegfried Juttner, Yona’s father, was eager to join. By 1930, the NSDAP had become the second-largest political party in Germany, and Hitler’s rise to power had begun. In 1933, Hitler became chancellor and introduced a long list of laws severely curtailing civil liberties and banning other political parties. By 1934, he had combined the posts of chancellor and president, passing the Enabling Act that made him the supreme leader of Nazi Germany. In a bloody purge called “the Night of the Long Knives,” Nazi forces murdered many of Hitler’s political enemies, ensuring cooperation between the German Army and the Nazi Party.

Between 1934 and 1938, Hitler moved to eliminate opposition and foster an image of Germany as a strong, united country that concealed the country’s growing militarism and hatred of non-German populations, including Jewish and Roma people. In 1938, Hitler began moving to annex territories outside Germany, starting with the Sudetenland, a border region of former Czechoslovakia inhabited by many ethnic Germans. The other great powers of Europe—Great Britain, France, and Italy—agreed to cede control of the Sudetenland in exchange for a guarantee that Germany would not seek to take other territories in Europe.

That promise was short-lived. Later that year, Germany annexed Austria—Hitler’s home country—into the German Reich. In August 1939, Germany signed a non-aggression pact with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, in which both countries agreed not to attack each other for 10 years. That pact allowed for the partitioning of Poland between the two countries, and in September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, annexing Polish territories on Germany’s Eastern border. In the novel, this conflict breaks the peace of Yona’s life in the forest with Jerusza.

In 1941, Hitler and his deputies determined to eliminate all the Jews in Europe. That same year, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, breaking the non-aggression pact signed just two years before. Germany seized all Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland, eventually taking all of Poland’s prewar territory. Then they moved to exterminate the country’s large Jewish population. Polish Jews were rounded up and forced into squalid ghettos, where many were tortured and killed, events described in the novel by several characters including Chana’s father Isaac, Aleksandr, and Zus. Yona’s experiences in the village depict the experiences of Jews in many towns and villages of Eastern Poland, as well as those who tried to help them, like the nuns who Yona tries to save by bargaining with her Nazi father.

By 1943, the tide had turned against Germany. The Soviet Union defeated Hitler’s forces at Stalingrad, and the Soviet army forced Germany to retreat from Poland through Belarus. In 1944, Allied troops landed on France’s Normandy beach, laying the foundation for Hitler’s ultimate defeat and the end of the Reich’s pogrom against the Jews.

The exact number of Jews who took refuge in the vast Bialowieza and Nalibocka forests of Eastern Poland is not known. These individuals found each other and banded together, everyone contributing what they could to survive. One of the best-known of these bands was the Bielski group, led by Tuvia Bielski and his brothers. The Bielski group survived for two years in the forest, and by the end of World War II, they had over 1,200 members. Groups like these inspired the various groups Yona encounters in The Forest of Vanishing Stars.