Book Review: Bitter Herbs by Marga Minco

The horrors that alleged “enemies of the Third Reich”, most of all those with Jewish ancestors, had to endure under Nazi reign were so appalling that at the time many simply couldn’t believe rumours about them. When eye witnesses and hard facts of systematic atrocities turned up eventually – as they use to, in general –, the world was dumbfounded and reluctant to take them at face value. In a modern European country like Germany people couldn’t be so barbarous as that, could they? Therefore even when their countries were annexed or occupied, many Jews lulled themselves into a false sense of security until it was too late for escape. The narrator of Bitter Herbs by Marga Minco observes the growing concern of her apparently calm family, notably her parents, as race laws are gradually implemented in the German-occupied Netherlands and deportation to the Polish concentration camps becomes a daily threat.

Book Review: The Pianist by Władysław Szpilman

Without doubt, the vast majority of Eastern European Jews who died during World War II and weren’t shot or otherwise killed on the spot wretchedly lost their lives in the overcrowded ghettos or in the concentration camps spattered across the Third Reich. Today it’s common knowledge that the latter were designed as extermination camps of industrial dimensions or as forced labour camps where the younger and stronger were selected to slowly starve to death while (often pointlessly) slaving away “for the benefit of the German people”. But some escaped this horrible fate getting the unexpected chance to go underground like The Pianist Władysław Szpilman whom unknown hands dragged from his family boarding the train to Treblinka (and certain death) and who, after some more months of forced labour, managed to go into hiding in Warsaw to write down his and his family’s story after the war.