War

War is the most pronounced theme in “Finding Rebecca”, as the novel is set during the Nazi regime before and during World War II. Although chapters 2-18 are set before World War II and chapters 39 well after, chapters 1-2 and 19-38 take place during the heart of World War II and the Nazi regime. However, the threat of war is present in other chapters, as well.

Dempsey starts the novel at Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the concentration camps in the larger Auschwitz complex set up by the Germans for the Jewish population. The tone is immediately set that this will be a novel about the Germans trying to extinguish the Jewish population, and what one German man who loves a Jewish woman will do to save her. When the author goes back to the mid-1920s and writes through the early 1940s, the threat of war gradually...