Tag: WW2

Book Review – The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

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About the Book

Book cover of The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

Amidst the horrors of Auschwitz, German officer, Angelus Thomsen, has found love. But unfortunately for Thomsen, the object of his affection is already married to his camp commandant, Paul Doll.

As Thomsen and Doll’s wife pursue their passion – the gears of Nazi Germany’s Final Solution grinding around them – Doll is riven by suspicion. With his dignity in disrepute and his reputation on the line, Doll must take matters into his own hands and bring order back to the chaos that reigns around him.

Format: ebook (322 pages) Publisher: Vintage
Publication date: 30th September 2014 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

This was a book club pick prompted by the recent release of the film adaptation. I haven’t seem the film but I’m reliably informed it is quite different from the book in that, although it focuses on the family of the camp commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the camp is very much in the background – quite literally – whereas Amis takes us right inside it.

This is a very dark place to be and it’s fair to say many of the book club members found it a place they did not want to inhabit and either didn’t finish the book or, knowing the subject matter, decided not to read it at all. I can definitely understand this as there are some extremely disturbing scenes although of course these probably pale into insignificance compared to the reality. There are phrases in German scattered throughout the book without any accompanying translations which some readers also found a barrier. Personally, I didn’t bother looking up what they meant.

Each chapter of the book features three narrators: German officer Golo Thomsen, the nephew of Martin Bormann, who is in charge of the construction, using camp labour, of a factory to produce synthetic rubber; Paul Doll, the camp commandant (based on the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss); and Szmul, a member of a group of Jewish prisoners tasked with escorting fellow Jews to the gas chamber and disposing of their remains.

Initially Thomsen, something of a playboy, views his position and his Aryan good looks as an opportunity to bed any female he sets his eyes on but he soon becomes besotted by Hannah, the wife of the camp commandant. His feelings for her seem to awaken a sense of humanity in him and they share a growing awareness that Germany is going to lose the war.

Doll is obsessed with numbers, treating his role as something like the overseer of a production line, bewailing the unceasing demands from his superiors and the complaints of local inhabitants about the smells emanating from the camp and the state of the local drinking water. Often drinking himself into a stupor, Doll bemoans his wife’s unwillingness to sleep with him, observing her in the bathroom through a two-way mirror he has had installed. The sections written from his point of view are shot through with black humour as he becomes an increasingly ridiculous figure albeit a remarkably dangerous one.

Szmul knows his survival rests on his usefulness to the Germans but that this will end at some point. The only kindness he can bestow on those heading for the gas chamber is to tell them ways to shorten their suffering.

As I was reading the book, Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ came to mind. This is mass murder as a bureaucratic operation with every detail recorded, prisoners’ worth calculated in terms of the work they can do versus the calories they consume, the arrival of trains carrying new prisoners meticulously scheduled and the most cost effective way of disposing of bodies argued over. At the same time, there is the nauseating artificiality of new arrivals being welcomed by the camp commandant whilst an orchestra plays in the background.

Many questions arise from the book: How did such an atrocity happen? How did a whole nation allow the ‘normalisation’ of mass murder? How did one individual manage to convince good people to do awful things? I don’t know the answers to those questions but books like this, even as disturbing to read as this one, should make us keep asking them, especially as we look around the world today.

The Zone of Interest is not an easy read but I think it’s an important one.

In three words: Hard-hitting, dark, thought-provoking
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About the Author

Author Martin Amis

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

He passed away on Friday 19 May, 2023, aged 73.

Book Review – Darkness Does Not Come At Once by Glenn Bryant @GlennMBryant

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About the Book

Book cover of Darkness Does Not Come At Once by Glenn Bryant

Meike is seventeen and she uses a wheelchair. Already in life she’s accepted that she’ll always somehow be ‘different’. But overnight, different becomes dangerous after the government announces disabled youngsters under the age of eighteen must spend the war in specially designated institutions.

Suddenly Meike is on the run in the rural lanes she calls home, bordering Berlin. It is 1939 and the whole of Germany, it seems, wants to fight the world.

Quietly, members of Meike’s family distance themselves, but two unlikely allies stand by her. One is an elderly woman and a lifelong Catholic, forced to question her faith; the other is a fifteen-year-old boy Meike hardly knows. They begin a search for answers as they scramble to find Meike and, in a country they no longer recognise, themselves.

Format: Paperback (288 pages) Publisher: The Book Guild Ltd
Publication date: 28th April 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

In Darkness Does Not Come At Once the author returns to the subject he explored in his first novel, A Quiet Genocide, namely the horrific treatment of people with a disability (physical or mental) by the Nazi regime. But this time we’re experiencing this as it happens, to a young woman named Meike who uses a wheelchair following an accident.

Following the arrest of her father, Meike goes to stay with her grandparents, Marta and Hans, and makes friends with a local boy, Alfred. But her happiness is shortlived because in a dramatic change of fortune, witnessed by Alfred, but the traumatic circumstances of which we only fully discover later, Meike is sent to Hadamar. Supposedly it’s an institution designed to safeguard disabled people for the duration of the war. However, it’s anything but a sanctuary; rather it’s a place of the most depraved cruelty in which the patients are treated as less than human. When one nurse shows a degree of kindness towards the inmates, she is repriminded by Hadamar’s chief nurse. ‘Lumps of flesh, that is all. Worthless, useless idiots, all of them, serving no purpose, of no value.’

I think we’re all aware that atrocities were committed by the Nazis during World War Two against various sections of society. But the nature of these still has the ability to shock. For me that includes the ruthless efficiency with which they were carried out: paperwork completed, records kept, numbers tallied, targets set.  One of the many chilling scenes in the book depicts the staff of Hadamar celebrating the successful completion of their final task.

The book explores the various responses to Meike’s situation. Initially, her grandmother’s focus is on being allowed to visit Meike, believing the propaganda that Hadamar is a place of safety. When she discovers the truth, her attitude turns to a fierce determination to rescue Meike. However, the people she approaches don’t want to help, either through fear, complicity or an unwillingness to confront reality. Her husband, Hans, fears he no longer has sufficient stomach for the fight because of what he experienced in the First World War, returning home as part of a defeated and humiliated army. And Meike’s sister, Anselma, has fallen prey to indoctrination by the Nazi regime. This gives rise to another particularly chilling scene.

The book’s title is apt because the darkness descends little by little until you can’t believe the light will ever return. But it does eventually – if only for some – because of the courage of those who refuse to give up the fight. And, l though I would have liked to learn more about the lives of the characters in the intervening years, the book’s ending made me very happy.

I wouldn’t say Darkness Does Not Come At Once is an easy read because of its subject matter but it feels important that we are reminded of the depths to which humanity can descend.

My thanks to the author for my digital review copy.

In three words: Powerful, moving, dramatic
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About the Author

Author Glenn Bryant

Glenn Bryant is a former daily news journalist who today works as a senior copywriter for a financial technology company. Darkness Does Not Come at Once is his second novel, following A Quiet Genocide, published in 2018. He is a registered carer for his wife, Juliet, who has a spinal cord injury. They live happily in South Oxfordshire.

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