Five Books To Help Ensure We Never Forget

Holocaust Memorial Day takes place each year on 27th January. It’s a day when people around the world are encouraged to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust as well as the millions more murdered as a result of Nazi persecution of other groups. These include Roma people, Polish and Slavic citizens, the disabled, gay people, political opponents and trade unionists. To find out more, visit the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust website.

Here are four novels I’ve read that explore aspects of the Holocaust along with a survivor’s memoir. Links from each title will take you to my full review.

The Draughtsman by Robert Lautner – Ernst Beck has a new job at prestigious engineering firm, Topf & Sons. He is assigned to the Special Ovens Department and tasked with annotating plans for new crematoria that are deliberately designed to burn day and night. Their destination: the concentration camps. Topf’s new client: the SS. Ernst must choose between turning a blind eye, or speaking out for the fate of thousands.

All the Broken Places by John Boyne – The sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the book is an unsparing exploration of how the sins of the past weigh on individuals and the burden of complicity. ‘By doing nothing, you did everything. By taking no responsibility, you bear all responsibility.’ 

Darkness Does Not Come At Once by Glenn Bryant – It’s 1939 and Meike, a young disabled girl, is sent to an institution supposedly designed to safeguard disabled people for the duration of the war. However it’s no sanctuary but a place of depraved cruelty in which the inmates, all either mentally or physically disabled, are treated as less than human. ‘Lumps of flesh, that is all. Worthless, useless idiots, all of them, serving no purpose, of no value.’

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis – Set in Auschwitz, the book is narrated by three characters: a German officer in charge of the construction using camp labour of a factory to produce synthetic rubber; the camp commandant (based on the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss); and a member of a group of Jewish prisoners tasked with escorting fellow Jews to the gas chamber and disposing of their remains.

Living Among the Dead by Adena Bernstein Astrowsky – Subtitled My Grandmother’s Holocaust Survival Story, the book describes how young Mania Lichtenstein witnessed the massacre of Jews by German death squads in the city of Lwów (now Lviv in Ukraine) in July 1941, was interned for three years in a labour camp but managed to escape and hide in the forests until the end of the war.