Passage to the past

The irascible Hans likes to stick to the facts, but even those spare details reveal a bleak story, heightened by the gentle humour and empathy with which the son tells it

The Berlin Shadow: Escaping the Ghosts of the Kindertransport

Author: Jonathan Lichtenstein

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 306

Price: Rs 599

The Holocaust is a reminder of the toll that politically legitimised xenophobia can extract from society, even one as vibrant and technologically advanced as Germany. Numbing recollections of relentless cruelty within a state-sponsored infrastructure of work and death camps dedicated to annihilating Europe’s Jews have created a grim cultural legacy in museums, films, books and plays. But there are many who suffered the Holocaust at one remove, whose experiences largely remain outside this cultural matrix. This poignant and luminously written book is the