"Counting Lost Stars" by Kim van Alkemade
Reflecting on collective guilt, celebrating WWII queer romance.
A good WWII novel is a novel about collective guilt.
My day-to-day work often involves defending people who’ve been accused of wrongdoing. I spend a fair bit of time thinking about guilt, but not in the way people assume.
I’m asked by relatives, Uber drivers–and smarmy prosecutors who can fuck all the way off–how it feels to defend guilty people. I’ve gotten that question less in recent years. I like to think it’s because Black Lives Matter and similar movements have made more Americans think twice about whether someone’s guilty just because a prosecutor says they are.
I also like to think that said movements—alongside the rise of fascist politicians—have led more Americans to think less about individual guilt and more about collective guilt. We’ve all been born into an unjust system. Those who’ve benefited from that system on any level—white people, wealthy people, men, straight cis people, me—are wasting time asking me how I defend guilty people. They—and “they” includes “I”--are better off asking, “How guilty am I?”
Clearly, I spend a lot of time thinking about guilt. I’ve sat with clients in courtrooms when juries and judges decide their fates. I’ve sat with them in prisons or windowless conference rooms talking through the most stressful situations of their lives. And part of my job has been to tell their stories—who they are, why they’re innocent of what they’ve been accused of, or why (as Bryan Stevenson said) they’re more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.
This can be both rewarding and draining. But it also helped bring me back to WWII fiction.
WWII fiction at its best is a human story of courage and guilt—individual and collective. It should make a reader feel the human capacity for destruction and heroism through individual characters’ choices. It also should show how and why those choices weren’t made in a vacuum.
Which brings me to Counting Lost Stars.
The book alternates between the ‘60 and ‘40s. The main narrators are Rita, a woman in 1960s New York working for a company that’s acquired old IBM computers; and Cornelia, a woman in occupied Holland working as a punch-card operator for the Ministry of Information, which has just acquired IBM computers. Cornelia comes to realize what the Nazis are using the technology for—even as she’s falling in love with Leah Blom, the Jewish woman next door.
Diverse perspectives?
Hell yes. I love a good romantic drama in the middle of a war, and WWII fiction has been woefully short on LGBTQ+ perspectives. Trying not to give away spoilers on this one, but the scenes between Cornelia and Leah are smart, sweet, and sensual. More of this, WWII fiction, please.
Which character felt realest?
I may tweak this question going forward; I’m writing a separate post about it. But for this book, the answer was easy: Cornelia. When we meet her, she’s bored at the Ministry of Information; when the Germans bring in computers that require English to use them, she volunteers to help. She tries to justify it to herself, and starts resisting in small ways, but once she realizes Leah and her family are being deported–-and that her work at the Ministry helped the Germans identify and track Jewish people—she decides to risk everything.
There’s a crucial twist in her story midway through that I can’t bear to give it away, but it had me in tears—both then, and in the last chapter we get from her POV. Sorry to anyone on that flight from Vancouver to DC who wondered what the hell was wrong with me.
Taught me something about WWII I didn’t know?
While I knew that IBM (and other German companies) had played a role in the Holocaust, I didn’t know much more than that. Counting Lost Stars digs a lot deeper into IBM’s role in the Holocaust, particularly in the Netherlands, and the “punch cards” developed to track Jews trapped in occupied Europe.
Corporate complicity in Nazi—and Japanese—war crimes is relatively unexplored in WWII fiction. God forbid suggesting capitalism can be used for evil. What American buys that novel?
I joke, sort-of. But this goes back to collective guilt and why good WWII fiction matters more than ever. It’s easier, as a modern reader, to put distance between myself and a concentration-camp-commandant than it is to do that with a character like Cornelia who’s showing up at an office, day in and day out, not loving what she’s being asked to do, but rationalizing it to herself while also trying to find ways to resist, even though it doesn’t affect her day-to-day existence until it does. That’s a person I can recognize. Counting Lost Stars is a novel about individual choices—heroic and not—but it’s also about workers and citizens and the collective consequences their choices have.
I’m really grateful to have subscribers, and I’m always looking for more recommendations!
If you’re in a mood to talk about how humans are terrible, what’s your rec for a WWII novel about collective guilt?
If you’re in a mood to talk about how humans give you hope, what’s your rec for a WWII novel from a queer perspective?