A single word – /“Auschwitz/” – is often used to summarize the totality of the persecution and suffering involved in what we call the Holocaust.
Yet focusing on a single concentration camp – however horrific and catastrophic its scale – leaves an incomplete story, a truncated history. It cannot fully account for the myriad ways in which individuals found themselves alongside perpetrators, and obscures the diversity of experiences of a wide range of victims as they struggled and died, or as they reached, against all odds, to survive. In doing so, we also miss the continuing legacy of Nazi persecution across generations and across continents.
Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book expands our understanding, exploring the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each capturing a small part of the larger story. Reckonings seeks to explore the disjuncture between official myths about dealing with the past, on the one hand, and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators escaped justice, on the other.
The Holocaust is not a simple story, and the memorial landscape barely hints at the swirl of repercussions of the Nazi era on a personal level. Reckonings illuminates the stories of those who remained out of the media spotlight, situating their experiences in broader and changing contexts, as persecutors and persecuted sought to account for the past, forge new lives, and provide a sense of unprecedented suffering.
Mary Fulbrook, Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, University College London.
Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London and author of the Fraenkel Prize-winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust.
Oxford University Press
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