The next generation of Holocaust memoir is equally as powerful

Two things are striking about these books. First, except for Spiegelman, all the authors are women. Second, nearly all these authors were born almost immediately after the war, when their parents’ experience of loss and displacement was still fresh.

In the last few years there has been another group of similar memoirs which if anything have had an even greater impact: The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) by Edmund de Waal, East West Street (2016) by the human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, What You Did Not Tell (2016) by the historian Mark Mazower, When Time Stopped (2020) by Ariana Neumann, How to be a Refugee (2020) by the philosopher Simon May, The Young Survivors (2020) by Debra Barnes and Meriel Schindler’s The Lost Café Schindler (2021). If anything, the appetite for these memoirs is growing over time.

These authors were significantly younger, mostly born in the 1960s. They have three things in common.

First, many draw the reader in with a compelling family mystery that reads like a detective story: What is the true story of the author’s family, a story full of silence and secrecy? Second, this mystery invariably has something to do with the Holocaust and the dark history of mid-20th century Europe.

Third, in many of these books the story of the authors’ family is bound up with another fascinating story about art, the history of ideas or curious objects: Japanese ceramics (de Waal), a famous architect (Kehoe’s father, Berthold Lubetkin), the founders of modern human rights (East West Street) or a collection of beautiful watches (When Time Stopped).

Neumann begins her memoir, When Time Stopped, with a question: on the walls of an old synagogue in Prague there is a list of more than 70,000 names, all victims of the Nazis. One entry bears the name of her father, Hanus Stanislav Neumann, but unlike all the others it has no date of death, just a question mark.

Why a question mark, she wonders, since he was definitely still alive at the time? But as she points out, “questions about my father had emerged long before”. Her father’s past had always been shrouded in mystery and silence and she had known she “must solve the mystery of what had happened [to him] if I was ever going to be able to understand him”.

“My father,” she continues, “left the world of which he seldom spoke as a riddle for me to unlock. He left it as a puzzle because he could not tell the story in its completeness.” Her book is an attempt to tell this story.

What do these family memoirs have in common? What is their appeal?

Why the importance of second-generation narrators and why the importance of secrecy and mystery? Finally, why are so many of the authors women and why are so many mysterious figures at the centre of their books, fathers, Louise Kehoe’s father, Lubetkin, Ariana Neumann’s father Hans, Meriel Schindler’s father, Kurt?

What they have in common is an attempt to find out what happened to their parents or other members of their family during the Holocaust. What makes this so urgent is that their parents maintained a strange silence about their traumatic past and, almost invariably, have recently died, leaving papers, objects and other clues to their past.

Their children have turned part-spy, part-detective, trying to solve the mystery of their parents’ lives, to break the silence that has haunted their childhoods.

Schindler’s The Lost Café Schindler begins in a small shabby cottage in Hampshire where her father lives, far from interwar Austria where he spent his early childhood. Right from the start he is presented as a strange, enigmatic figure. “I only remember Kurt holding down a job once…’” His companies “invariably collapsed … engulfed in debts and litigation”.

“As a father,” she writes, “Kurt failed to provide even the most basic stability.” Right from the beginning, May’s How to be a Refugee presents his family’s life as a puzzle. If his parents were German Jewish refugees, why had his mother and aunts become Catholics and why wasn’t it “permissible to consider myself English or British”? Why, in short, was his family so strange?

What is the appeal of these books? First, crucially, they are all very well written. But perhaps just as important, they are historical detective stories. We know who did it, but what we don’t know is which of the victims survive and how.

Don’t we also feel there is something mysterious, even unknowable about our parents? There is no one closer to us, yet more strange than our parents, except perhaps our grandparents. These books are also about families under huge pressure and how they manage to keep together — or don’t.

The Young Survivors by Debra Barnes is a classic example of a large extended family, with five young siblings and their experience of trying to help each other survive in Nazi-occupied France. It’s not just about the bonds of family or even the power of love.

The question at the heart of her book is: What if everyone you loved was suddenly taken away?

Why are all these authors from the second-generation, the children of survivors? It is no coincidence that this wave of books started to appear in the early 1990s, just when the Holocaust became such a compelling subject, with films like Shoah (1985) and Schindler’s List (1993), the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC (1993) and popular children’s books such as The Boy in Striped Pyjamas (2006).

Just as the first generation started to die, so the second generation started to find their voice at the very moment when the silence about the Holocaust, in the culture and in their families, started to break.

Finally, why are so many of the writers of these books women, fascinated by their parents, but especially by their fathers?

And why is it the fathers who are so often the key figures in these stories? The mothers tend not to loom so large, nor indeed do the authors’ siblings.

Could it be because fathers tend to suppress their traumatic stories more than mothers do? They just don’t communicate as much?

That’s why the papers and archives are so important. Suddenly, the mystery of these silent men can be solved.

This is another strong feature of these books: they are superbly researched. These writers have spent years tracking down old letters, photos, documents, emailing distant relatives around the world.

These memoirs make up a fascinating new genre, hugely popular, and offering a new way of thinking about displacement and loss.