THE DUTCH WIFE by Ellen Keith

Amsterdam, May 1943. As the tulips bloom and the Nazis tighten their grip across the city, the last signs of Dutch resistance are being swept away. Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and deported to different concentration camps in Germany. Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labour camp or—for a chance at survival—to join the camp brothel.

On the other side of the barbed wire, SS officer Karl Müller arrives at the camp hoping to live up to his father’s expectations of wartime glory. But faced with a brutal routine of overseeing executions and punishments, he longs for an escape. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, this meeting changes their lives forever.

Woven into the narrative across space and time is Luciano Wagner’s ordeal in 1977 Buenos Aires, during the heat of the Argentine Dirty War. In his struggle to endure military captivity, he searches for ways to resist from a prison cell he may never leave.

From the Netherlands to Germany to Argentina, The Dutch Wife braids together the stories of three individuals who share a dark secret and are entangled in two of the most oppressive reigns of terror in modern history. This is a novel about the blurred lines between love and lust, abuse and resistance, and right and wrong, as well as the capacity for ordinary people to persevere and do the unthinkable in extraordinary circumstances.

(Mel's Quote in Good Reads) which I felt too while I read this book.
The 'Side' Story
This separate story is based on a historical event I knew nothing about until reading The Dutch Girl. While the 1970's account of the Dirty War in Argentina and the wrongful communist persecutions sets up a great contrast to the WWII narrative; every time Keith swapped to this story all I wanted was for the chapter to be over so we could return to our leading man and woman at the camp.
The book would be better served without Luciano’s inclusion.

This was one of the best fiction books I’ve read on what happens to people who are captured and put in concentration camps.