KEY POINTS:
I can only say that my reaction to the death of six million European Jews, and numerous other minority groups such as Gypsies and homosexuals, is uncomprehending horror. I wanted to get this off my chest before saying anything else, because the review I'm about to write risks painting me in a very bad light. But the risk of appearing callous and uncaring is not enough to defer me from stating my opinion: This is a very boring book.
Most Holocaust books, like the much better diaries of Peter Ginz, begin by illustrating the everyday struggles of the victim-to-be as they live the life of a usually middle class Jew in some schmaltzy central European city such as Prague or Vienna. If the reader is lucky, he or she can ignore the looming shadow of the impending Holocaust enough to appreciate the life that is being outlined as just that: a life.
The worst problem is that Hitler often assumes the character of Punch in a Punch and Judy show, with the audience feeling the urge to yell, "Watch out for the Nazis!" as the protagonist innocently worries about kosher bread and synagogue attendance. But this isn't a problem in A Garden of Eden in Hell because the book is so dull. I'm sure that the life of the protagonist, Alice Herz-Muller, was as full of event and incident as anybody's, Theresienstadt camp notwithstanding.
But the writing is so plodding, I felt more sorry for Alice for the sluggish way her lifetime was rendered than the horrors she faced in the camps.
Even Theresienstadt forms an incredibly tedious read, and the section of the book that details it reminded me of nothing so much as an unusually long and gruesome shopping list. There might be some kind of point to be made here about the banality of evil, but it's been made better elsewhere. I couldn't recommend this book to anybody unless they were unaware of exactly what happened in occupied Europe between 1941 and 1945. Even then, I'd hesitate.
A Garden of Eden in Hell
By Melissa Muller and Reinhard Piechocki (MacMillan $27.99)
- Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a Wellington historian and writer.
