First published 2014
Clements Olin arrives at a former concentration camp in late autumn 1996. He joins a group that prays at the crematoria and meditates on the selection platform where Nazis once sent over a million Jews to their deaths. The participants sleep in the same quarters once occupied by SS officers. Olin came to research the puzzling suicide of a Holocaust survivor, but the week unfolds differently than he expected. Political disagreements and personal conflicts emerge among the group members. The intensity of the place strips away their pretenses about healing and reconciliation. Olin finds himself pulled from his role as detached observer into something more demanding. He must confront not only the survivor's death that brought him here, but his own family's complicated past and his place within it.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Concentration Camp
Period: 1996
256 pages · Hardcover · Riverhead Books
Content warnings: death, suicide