This book is... fiction, so while it may convey some emotion some people felt surviving World War II, it's difficult to know, because Doerr removed the anchor to reality in order to accommodate a too-precious dollop of narrative parallelism.

It's difficult to know, because many people who went through those times wouldn't talk about them. Toward the end, did starvation and stress wear people down into mad vegetables? Did people who compromised their ethics and ideals, in order to survive, truly question their decisions and feel guilt over what they did, like everyone in this book seems to, or did they rationalize it away like a normal person? It's unsatisfying, because it's difficult to know.