Has anyone (besides me) read The Ventriloquists by ER Ramzipoor?

Asked by elbanditoroso (33549

) September 13th, 2019

It’s WW2 fiction, roughly about the Resistance in occupied France and occupied Belgium. Not the best WW2 historical fiction I have ever come across, but not the worst. A pretty good read.

In the book, there are three subplots that involve gay characters. In one of the subplots, the protagonists’ homosexuality is essential to the plot and absolutely makes sense. The other two subplots, gay characters give the people personality, but their homosexuality isn’t essential to the plot or the outcome.

My question: Was homosexuality that common in WW2 occupied Belgium? Is the book accurately depicting the social conditions of the time? Or was the inclusion of gay characters where their sexual identity wasn’t essential to the plot an author’s whim?

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2 Answers

I highly recommend the book The Last Battle by historian Cornelius Ryan. He interviews people on every side of the conflict in the lead-up to the Soviet arrival in Berlin, and provides some quite interesting anecdotes from people who were actually there.

The reason I mention this is, in the book, he discusses a pair of German communist lesbians who spent the entire war hiding in a cave outside Berlin spying on the Nazis and sending radio reports to the Russians at terrible personal risk. When Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin, the two women emerged jubilantly from their cave to greet them, waving the hammer and sickle… and were promptly gang-raped by the vengeful Red Army.

SmashTheState (14252

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