Not the lightest of topics, maybe, but Remembrance Weekend seems as good a time as any to consider the books which most effectively portray the reality of the Holocaust.
How do you describe the indescribable, or imagine the unimaginable? Many writers have tried and failed, but these below are the books which, for sometimes different reasons, deserve a space on any bookshelf.
If This Is A Man by Primo Levi
No other book goes into the detail of life in Auschwitz in such forensic detail, whilst at the same time managing to look at the wider moral and philosophical questions raised by the author’s experiences. If one page is filled with vivid descriptions of the latrines and washrooms, the next will look at the soul-destroying solitude of life in the camp and the inability of men to support each other in the most desperate of circumstances.
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
At first glance not a Holocaust novel, this of course turns out to be all about the long-term impact of the concentration camp on Sophie Zawistowska. Self-destructive, broken, and unable to live with her guilt over the choice she was forced to make, this is the best book about the reality of life after liberation.
Memoirs Of A Holocaust Survivor by Icek Kuperberg
This is the virtual opposite of Primo Levi’s book; simple, sparse and written in an anecdotal, almost diary-like form. “It was beyond anyone’s imagination to feel the pain and agony that we went through. It was horrible,” is about as expressive as it gets.
But it is this very simplicity that gives this book its power. The fact that the most unspeakable events are narrated in such a banal way is itself evidence of extremities of behaviour can become normalised.
Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally
It probably shouldn’t work; the Holocaust told from the point of view of a womanising, profiteering industrialist German. That it does is due to the efforts of two people – Poldek Pfefferberg, a survivor with a story to tell, and Keneally himself, who took the project on and succeeded in making Schindler believable and, ultimately, heroic.
(The film version, largely successful even though some railed against some of Spielberg’s touches – girl in a red dress, anyone? – makes one huge improvement over the book. Keneally ends his novel with a simple description of Schindler’s death and funeral. The film joins together the actual survivors with the actors who played then as they place stones on Schindler’s grave, in a genuinely emotional postscript.)
A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal
While many who survived Auschwitz were fully-grown men with the strength, sharpness and determination to do what they had to do in order to survive, Thomas Buergenthal was ten when he entered the camp. If his descent into his worst nightmares is heart-breaking, his survival, liberation and ultimate journey to become a judge at the International Court in Hague is equally uplifting.
Babi Yar by Anatoli Kuznetsov
Away from the camps of Poland, Anatoli Kuznetsov’s book – part memoir, part novel, part historical record – tells the story of the massacre of vast sections of Ukraine’s population; not just Jews but anyone considered an enemy of the Nazis.
It probably shows better than any other book the devastating impact of hunger and famine over almost an entire nation. Who can forget the sausage-maker who kills people so he can use their flesh in his products?
