Affinity Konar, Mischling: A Novel (New York: A Lee Boudreaux Book/Little, Brown, 2016).
Lucette Matalon Lagnado & Sheila Cohn Dekel, Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz (New York: William Morrow, 1991) ("There is nothing in Josef Mengele's early life that would have prepared him for the notoriety that was destined to engulf him. As a youth,he was charming and carefree and not especially studious. No one who remembers Mengele growing up in his picturesque Bavarian town ever saw a hint of the pathology that would make him a killer, or a sign of the obsessions that wold make him a concentration-camp doctor. There was an innocence and a sweetness to your Josef that would lead Gunzberg's citizens to shake their heads in disbelief when they heard, years later, of his savage deeds at Auschwitz. The fiendish death-camp physician had nothing in common with the lovable youngster they all had known. The Nazi professor brutally experimenting on young towns could hardly have been the same playful little scamp they affectionately called 'the Beppo,' years after he had grown out of the childish name." "Even as he grandly swept through the barracks at Auschwitz years later, he was like a vision, this handsome, genteel German officer in his impeccable SS uniform, shiny boots, and white gloves. He looked less like a Nazi official than a Hollywood version of one--Tyrone Power in the role of SS captain. Dr. Josef Mengele would maintain this beautiful facade throughout his tenure at Auschwitz. [QUERY: Why is it a 'facade' and not who he is? Can not he be both without one or the other being a facade? Don't we all known countless individuals who are, say, tyrants at work and loving spouse/father at home, or good beloved co-worker, mentor, boss at the office, while abusive spouse/parent at home? A lot of people are very good compartmentalizers.] None of the bewildered new arrivals wold discern the murderer, or even the sadist, in the polite young SS doctor until it was too late. Mengele would decide who lived and who did with a smile and an airy wave of his elegant white-gloved hand. He would charm the women of Auschwitz-Birkeneau even as he sent them to the gas chambers. The Gypsies would love him as one of their own to the very end. But Mengele would be at his best with the young twins he moved form the selection line for use in his medical experiments. With the, he could be as warm and affectionate as he had been as a little boy growing up in a small Bavarian farming town. Did he see something of his old self in the children, innocent and doomed? For what better symbol, after all, of Mengele's own dual nature--the angel and the monster, the gentle young doctor and the sadistic killer--than a twin." Id. at 31-32. [QUERY: Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that one can engage in the greatest cruelties and, more important, dupe one's victims, if one does it all with a smiley face or the appearance of good character. Is not that the nature of a con-artist?).
Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1975) ("The existence of Dachau and Auschwitz as historical phenomena has altered not only our conception of reality, but its very nature." "The challenge to the literary imagination is to find a way of making this fundamental truth accessible to the mind and emotions of the reader. The uniqueness of the experience of the Holocaust may be arguable, but beyond dispute is the fact that many writers perceived it as unique, and began with the premise that they were working with raw materials unprecedented in the literature of history and the history of literature. The result is a body of writing that forms the subject of this study, what I call the literature of atrocity. . . At a time when technology threatens more and more to silence the rich resources of language, it seems singularly appropriate, and perhaps even urgent, to explore ways in which the writer has devised an idiot and a style for the unspeakable, and particularly the unspeakable horrors at the heart of the Holocaust experience." Id. at xii.).
H. G. Adler, The Wall: A Novel, translated from the German by Peter Filkins (New York: Random House, 2014) (See Cynthia Ozick, "Alive to the Past," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/21/2014.).
Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird, 2d ed., with an introduction by the author (New York: Grove Press, 1976).
Piotr Rawicz, Blood from the Sky: A Novel, translated from the French by Peter Wiles, with an introduction by Lawrence Langer (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2003).
George Steiner, The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.: A Novel, with a new afterword (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1979, 2009) (From the "Afterword": "But when one tries to think through these unthinkable paradoxes, when barbarism mouths statistics beyond our imaginings, let alone reasoned explanations, the mind sickens and grows numb." "This, I venture, is the point." "The Portage of San Cristobal of A. H. is a a parable about pain. About the abyss of pain endured by the victims of Nazism. Endured by those being 'ethnically cleansed' in a ravaged habitat in Amazonia. It tries to instance language, and with it the fragile chances of truth, when words are racked into rhetoric and madness. First and foremost, this fable engage the pain of remembrance, the imperative but unendurable pain pf recall. It was written in pain. I will have failed if this fact is not palpable to its readers." Id. at 174-175.).
Volker Weidemann, Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark, translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Pantheon, 2016).
