A singular horror

Seventy years after the Nazi Holocaust, against the background of a rich and varied literature, Laurence Rees has achieved the unexpected: a magisterial book that consolidates what has come before and manages to offer fresh perspectives. With Brexit, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen now centre stage, it also offers a timely reminder of the dangers that are unleashed when the path of demonisation and discrimination is embraced in the name of national well-being. As Primo Levi wrote in 1947, from his own experience, when the ‘unspoken dogma’ of group targeting becomes ‘the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’.

Like Levi, Rees understands the Holocaust as representing ‘a singular horror in the history of the human race’, and he is particularly well placed to guide us through the multitude of difficulties it presents. One of the world’s foremost historical documentary film-makers, he has spent a lifetime thinking about the Nazi era, crafting balanced, rigorous and reflective films that have won plaudits and prizes. In the course of that work, he has mined a rich seam of human experiences. He has met and interviewed a vast number of people who occupied the front rows of the times of which he now writes, as perpetrators, victims and observers. He is more familiar than most with the theories that seek to explain what happened, and the lessons that might — or might not — have been learned.

He is also a seriously good storyteller — and this is his masterwork. It reaches that pinnacle precisely because he has anchored vast and grotesque stories in individual experience, an approach that gives a book passing across well-trodden ground the immediacy and power of personal testimony.The work is also imbued with its author’s mature reflection; and the warning he implicitly offers to our current crop of politicians, who seem to have had a collective loss of historical memory, is plain: your words and your actions truly matter.

There is a simple reason that so many people watch the documentaries, read the books and devour the personal accounts: the events of this period go to the heart of who we are as human beings, and they remain, even with the passage of so many years, without simple or satisfactory explanations.