Reviewer
Lavanya Karthik: Lavanya is from Mumbai, India and is a licensed
architect and consultant in environmental management. She lives in
Mumbai with her husband and six-year old daughter. She loves reading
and enjoys a diverse range of authors across genres.
Author: Jan
Elvin
Publisher: AMACOM
ISBN:
978-0-8144-1049-3
Click Here To Purchase The Box from Braunau: In Search of My Father's War
“Soldiers aren’t the only casualties
of war”, says author Jan Elvin in the afterword of this engrossing
and well written memoir. ” Their families suffer as well although
their battles are fought later, on the home front.”
While
never diagnosed, Elvin’s father may have suffered the ruinous
effects of post traumatic stress disorder(PTSD) long after his return
from the front as an American soldier during World War II, in turn
emotionally scarring his wife and children as well. Struggling to
hide his trauma while providing for his family in the years following
the War, Bill Elvin steadily became a controlling and emotionally
remote father, prone to anxiety, erratic behaviour and sudden bouts
of violence when startled. He became a pillar of his community and a
respected reporter, but failed to preserve his marriage or build
strong bonds with his four children. This book is the story of his
daughter’s attempt , nearly fifty years later, at understanding
what he went through during the war, and how this might have
affected his life thereafter.
The Box from Braunau :
In Search of My Father’s War begins with the author’s
realization that a simple gift her father received during the war
from a prisoner he helped liberate from the Nazis might hold the key
to discovering her father . This book chronicles her investigation
into her father's experiences during World War II, many of which he
never revealed to his family. As Elvin delves deeper into her
research and encourages her father to begin speaking about his
experiences, she realizes that he had witnessed not only frontline
combat but also the chilling horrors of a slave labour camp in
Austria . Meeting other veterans and survivors of the war, she
further realizes that her family’s struggle was far from unique;
thousands of families like hers struggled with PTSD then, and
continue to do so around the world.
The narrative,
interspersed with extracts from Bill Elvin’s lucid war time journal
, is elegant and restrained; Elvin knows when to step back and
let her father do the talking. The gaps in his journal, the
issues he felt unable to write about, are filled in with meticulous
research, giving the reader a seamless and detailed picture of
the War from the American perspective.
I liked the way
Elvin built up a portrait of her father by delving right back into
his childhood, examining the incidents that shaped him and guided him
towards the choices he made. Bill Elvin emerges as a flawed but
remarkable man, displaying great courage under adversity and
dedicated to his family despite their estrangement. She is also
honest about her own feelings of anger and resentment towards her
parents as she struggled to deal with their separation and the
responsibilities this thrust on her.
As much as this is
a tribute to Bill Elvin, it is also about the author’s own search
for closure on a lot of unresolved issues she had with her father.
It is heartening to note that she does indeed achieve this and,
towards the end of his life, grow closer to him. But above all, the
book seeks to reach out to families of soldiers in past and
ongoing combat zonesaround the world, to help them deal with the
psychological battles that may continue long after they return home.