Auschwitz

Auschwitz: a place where millions were killed and which thousands now visit each year. A mass grave - and a tourist destination. The focus of this work of autobiographical fiction is on the sightseers - the curious that are drawn to visit. It is a book that questions our need to look: what is there to uncover, other than the difficulty of peering into such a place and into a subject that has been obsessively documented, yet can never really be understood? How to write about Auschwitz in the twenty-first century, in a time when the last generation of survivors is soon to be lost? This is also a book that searches for a personal story. It opens on a local bus that takes Angela, her husband En (whose mother survived the holocaust where most of her family did not) and their two sons to Auschwitz sixty years after the holocaust, and ends in a pine forest outside Minsk where En's grandparents were shot in May 1942. The backbone of Auschwitz is a series of e-mails between the author and acclaimed Franco-American writer Raymond Federman. At the age of 14, Federman (now approaching 80) was hastily thrust into the small upstairs closet of their Paris apartment by his mother just before she, his father and two sisters were taken to Auschwitz, where they were killed. Federman also has spent a lifetime trying to find a language appropriate for the enormity of the holocaust and his part in its legacy, ultimately espousing laughterature - laughter as a means of survival. This beautiful, powerful and innovative work experiments with new forms - correspondence, reflections, dreams, a travelogue - that mirror the fragmentary legacy of the holocaust itself and that, at the same time, capture its contradictions - and sometimes its absurdity.