Ledicia Costas writes fiction for both adults and young people; in the latter category she was awarded the Spanish National Book Award in 2015. She is an accomplished narrator. An Animal Called Mist (200 pages) is a collection of six short stories showing extreme human situations in the context of the Second World War.

In the first story, ‘Leningrad’, Katarina Savicheva lives in St Petersburg and recalls a time seventy years earlier when this city was called Leningrad and she would go fishing with her father on Lake Ladoga, where she would gaze at the seals and dotted islands, or they would walk on the beach at the mouth of the Neva River. It was here that they discovered a piece of amber with a fossilized butterfly inside, and her father told her the legend of Jüraté, the queen of the sea who fell in love with a fisherman, Kastytis. This angered the Baltic god of thunder, Perkūnas, so much that he killed the fisherman and destroyed Jüraté’s palace. The pieces of amber we find are the goddess’ tears. In the summer of 1941, the German army began its siege of the city of Leningrad, first attempting to wipe out the city with its bombs, then switching strategy and trying to conquer the city’s inhabitants through starvation. In the winter of 1941-2, it became so cold that Lake Ladoga froze over and allowed the evacuation of some of the city’s inhabitants and the transport of some food for those who remained. They planted cabbages all over the city, boiled wood in water to give the water some taste, sucked their own shoelaces and resorted to hunting down the city’s cats and dogs. That first winter, Katarina’s grandmother died of hunger, having eaten the flowers off the wallpaper in her room, thinking that these would give the family some nourishment. In fact, the varnish in the wallpaper made her delirious. The foreman of the Kirov Plant, which manufactured weapons with which to resist the Nazi assault, asked one of the workers to tie him to a chair so he could continue overseeing the production of weapons, but in the end he died. People in the city took to eating the flesh of corpses. Katarina asked her mother the meaning of the word ‘anthropophagi’, but her parents didn’t want to tell her. She was still sad at the memory of eating their pet cat to stay alive. The siege lasted 900 days, and it is said that between 600,000 and a million people died. Seventy years later, in St Petersburg, Katarina feels the amber melt in her fingers. The butterfly comes to life and flies out of the window. At this exact moment, Katarina herself dies. In the second part of this story, some residents of Leningrad sought refuge from the German bombardment in a basement. There was a young couple, Iván and Svetlana. Svetlana gave birth to a child, Irina, but there was not enough food for everybody. One old woman recommended that Svetlana give her breast milk to Iván instead of to the child, since Iván stood a chance of surviving and they could always have another child. In the end, they escaped the siege over Lake Ladoga, but both Iván and the child were already too weak and died of starvation.

In the second story, ‘The Last Mission of the USS Indianapolis’, Hunter Scott is an eleven-year-old boy who has not lost the capacity of children to be surprised. When going to a party, he wants a helium balloon, but his father says he’s too old. In the evening, he watches Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws and is hooked by the shark hunter Quint’s monologue on the USS Indianapolis disaster during World War II. He decides to go to the library to investigate. During the Second World War, after twenty years of service in the US Navy, Charles B. McVay is made captain of the Indianapolis. His first missions are to support landings on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In the latter assault, the ship is so badly damaged by a kamikaze pilot that it is forced to withdraw for repairs. It is Saturday, and Hunter Scott asks his parents about the Indianapolis. His father says it was sunk by the Japanese, while his mother says this was only after transporting the materials needed to make the Hiroshima bomb. While the ship is being repaired, Charles returns home to see his wife and son. He also visits his mother in the house where he grew up and, on leaving, is confronted by his childhood sweetheart, Mary Jane, whom he hasn’t seen in fifteen years. They end up making passionate love. In the library, Hunter discovers that the Indianapolis was a supremely well armed ship, but had two weaknesses: its centre of gravity was too high, and its crew lacked sufficient experience. Back in the war, Charles is ordered to embark at once. The Indianapolis must transport some mysterious containers to Tinian island, at full speed and without an escort. It is then destined to the Philippines for training. In the library, Hunter cannot understand why the ship would be destined to the Philippines across an area of sea patrolled by Japanese submarines, without an escort again, and with the order not to zigzag in order not to lose time. He feels it’s as if the ship was deliberately given up into enemy hands. In the war, the Indianapolis was sunk by two manned torpedoes from a Japanese submarine. The ship sunk in twelve minutes. The US soldiers who escaped, some with life jackets, others without, were forced to float in the sea for four days and nights, during which shark attacks and lack of food and water decimated the crew. On the fifth day, survivors were spotted by a bomber. A flying boat rescued 56 men from the water, and rescue ships were summoned. Hunter feels upset about the outcome of the story. His mother promises to take him the next day to see someone who knows all about the tragedy, his grandmother Mary Jane, who was friends with the captain. Mary Jane explains that Charles was court-martialled for failing to avoid the sinking of the ship and later committed suicide, in 1968. Hunter, still only a boy, decides to do something to exonerate this man. His investigations lead to Charles’ record being cleared. We are then given the note Charles wrote to Mary Jane in farewell, declaring his love for her.

In the third story, ‘Portrait of the Rising Sun’, hibakusha are surviving victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Hope Tibbets comes out of the cinema and meets an oriental woman in the street, called Jun, with whom he falls irremediably in love, but the woman walks away. Andrea, the wife of Paul W. Tibbets, the pilot who dropped the Hiroshima bomb, is appalled to learn of the bombing and destruction inflicted on the city of Hiroshima and the lives of so many people. Her husband, Paul, says that this was the way to finish the war. Paul’s father had been a confections wholesaler. Paul’s first experience of flying came at the Hialeah Park Race Track, dropping candy bars from a plane. At this point, he realized he wanted to be a pilot. Fast forward almost twenty years, and his crew is dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Japanese citizens are charred in their seats. The fires burn for six hours. That same morning, a little girl, Aiko, had been collecting flowers by the side of the Ōta River. When the bomb exploded, her clothes were incinerated, the skin on her hands falling off in strips and blood bubbling out of her ear. A worker at the Mitsubishi factory in Hiroshima, Enemon Kawaguchi, survived the blast and was transferred by train to Nagasaki, where, three days later, he endured the second blast, the bombing of this city. He again managed to survive, only to succumb to all the radiation in his body in 1957. Paul Tibbets’ wife, Andrea, was pregnant with their son at the time of the bombings. She tried to detect some indication of evil in her husband in the early days of their relationship. When she gave birth, she decided to call their son, who was born with ulcers all over his body, Hope. Now an adult, Hope refuses to let this woman disappear from his life and invites her to a coffee. She explains that she is a descendant of victims of the Hiroshima bombing; Hope lets out that his father was the pilot who dropped the bomb. He shows her the ulcers, thinking that the budding relationship is all but doomed, but she reaches out her hand to him.

In the fourth story, ‘Sad Villa Song’, the film director Luchino Visconti is responsible for filming the execution in June 1945 of Pietro Koch. Before that, in Rome, Pietro Koch uses the Pensione Jaccarino to interrogate and torture partisans. He lives in luxury upstairs, making love with his secretary, Marcella Stoppani, while in the basement prisoners are kept in the dark. His band arrests two public security policemen, Giovanni Sporttu and Maurizio Taglio, who have been passing information to the Americans. They both refuse to talk and are beaten up by Koch’s henchmen, Marcella kissing Maurizio on the mouth and then extinguishing a cigar on his neck. The second interrogation is even more severe. Maurizio is tortured by an instrument that squeezes his temples. But neither of them talks. Giovanni is only sad that he will not live to see his unborn child. In the third interrogation, they are taken downstairs to a torture chamber, where Giovanni is electrocuted on his genitals and Maurizio is attached to a bed of nails that pierce his flesh. They still refuse to give the names of their collaborators. After that, one of the henchmen, Walter the Butcher, comes to their cell, offers them chocolate and cigarettes and proceeds to relate how Giovanni’s wife has come with their child to beg for Giovanni’s life. He then beats Giovanni so severely that he dies in a few hours. After another two interrogations, Maurizio also dies, pronouncing the word ‘freedom’. When the allies reach Rome, Koch and his band have to flee north and continue torturing people in Milan. But when the authorities arrest Koch’s mother to ascertain his whereabouts, Koch hands himself into the police and is executed.

In the fifth story, ‘An Animal Called Mist’, the women in Ravensbrück concentration camp are forced to provide slave labour to local factories. Two women arrive together at the camp, Martha and Anne. A barber shaves the hair of their heads and their pubic hair, stripping them naked and exploring their orifices. Martha feels she has lost her identity. When the German soldiers watch them in the showers, the women cover their shaven heads, not their bodies. This is what makes them ashamed. A lot of women stop having their periods; those who don’t are forced to go naked. One time, Anne is washing herself to get rid of the blood when a German soldier rapes her from behind. Other women are operated on, their ovaries removed. Some are taken to be gassed. For all these reasons, Martha agrees to be transferred to Mauthausen, where she is told she will work as a prostitute for six months, with certain privileges, before being released. Every night, the women in the Sonderbauten, the barracks for prostitutes, are forced to endure the visits of up to twenty men, who could be soldiers, administrators, male prisoners… After three months, Martha feels so unwell she starts to be sick. She is summoned by an officer who tells her she must either continue working or be returned to Ravensbrück. She doesn’t want this, in three more months she will be released, so she agrees. The officer then sodomizes her. After six months, Martha is returned to Ravensbrück anyway. She tries to find Anne, to apologize for leaving her, but Anne has been shot for refusing sexual relations with an officer. In despair, Martha hangs herself.

In the sixth and final story, ‘Three Trials for Three Nazis’, American Colonel Burton C. Andrus is responsible for rounding up leading Nazis so that they can be put on trial. He stations himself in a hotel in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, while the courthouse and prison in Nuremberg are being built. When the prison is ready, and the door frames of the prisoners’ cells have been painted black, Andrus orders the prisoners to be transferred to the new facility. There are twenty-one defendants in the Nuremberg trials. Three are missing: Gustav Krupp is considered medically unfit for trial; Martin Bormann is convicted in absentia (he was actually killed while trying to flee Berlin in May 1945); Robert Ley commits suicide in his cell. The first person to be put on trial is Hermann Göring. He is questioned by Judge Robert H. Jackson. During an aside, we are taken back to Buchenwald concentration camp, where two Jews, Jacob and Daniel, try to stay alive by merging with the shadows, passing unnoticed. They are summoned to form part of a line of prisoners in front of the camp commandant’s wife, Ilse Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald, who has a penchant for prisoners’ skin, with which she has bags, lamps and book covers made. Jacob is relieved that she finds him unattractive. Back in the courthouse, Göring claims that he had little or no knowledge of the extermination of the Jews. He is sentenced to death by hanging, but poisons himself in his cell the night before the execution. The second trial is that of Rudolf Höss in Warsaw. When he was appointed commandant of Auschwitz, he went to see how other camps exterminated Jews using carbon monoxide. He opted to use Zyklon B, a pesticide which would kill in three to fifteen minutes. We are taken back to the gas chamber in Auschwitz. The human remains would be used for fabrics, soap and fertilizer. Any gold or valuables would be removed from the corpses. Back in the courthouse, Höss explains how new arrivals at the camp were allocated to forced labour or extermination. He is sentenced to death for the murder of up to three million people. The third trial is that of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. He was captured in Argentina and flown to Israel. He declares himself not guilty in the sense of the indictment, but is sentenced to death. In an aside, we are taken back to the camp at Mauthausen, where prisoners were not only gassed, but forced to climb 180 stairs with a heavy rock, which was then thrown on top of them as they ran back down the stairs. Operations were performed on inmates without any kind of anaesthesia. Human skin was stripped to make saddles, shoes and bags. These three Nazis were sentenced to death; others lived on in anonymity.

These stories are written in a chilling and absorbing way. The reader is horrified by the extent of human cruelty and torture, and the desperate attempts made by ordinary humans to survive such cruelty and torture. An Animal Called Mist is a book that powerfully relates atrocities of the not so distant past as a kind of monument, to remind us collectively not to let such atrocities happen again.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne