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The story of the death camps is here retold alongside that of the perpetrators, whose homes were decorated with lampshades of skin, rugs plaited with hair. We see how close perpetrators and their victims sometimes became. Nowhere more so that in the Nazi ideology of the Lebensborn (\"source of life\"), whereby human stud farms were established in Germany and Scandinavia to breed the super-race of the Third Reich. In a heavily assimilated Central Europe, where many Jews were also baptised (and buried as) Catholics, Aryan soldiers not infrequently fathered ethnically Jewish offspring. The SS officer who fathered Haya's son, Antonio, died young. Her life becomes a quest to recover the child stolen from her and assigned to a \"racially pure\" family. The obsession leads her to contemporary writers - Ian Buruma, TS Eliot and Claudio Magris among them - as well as to apologetic descendants of Nazis. Gudrun Himmler still chooses to defend her father as does Arnold Schwarzengger. Others live on crippled by the shame of an ancestry they cannot redeem, or claim Germans too as \"social victims\".

A review on page 22 of The Times Book Review today about \"Holograms...

\"Her story is a small one,\" Drndic writes, but a necessary one, for Tedeschi, a mathematics teacher, knows that if she succeeds in \"sweeping away the underbrush of her memory,\" her testimony will take its place in \"a vast cosmic patchwork,\" and some truth might emerge about the grotesquely unnerving history she's lived through. Drndic's Hans Traube, ne [Antonio Tedeschi], says of adults who began life under Lebensborn: \"We are a lot unto ourselves, an ilk that has unhooked itself from Earth and now wanders through space.\" According to Drndic, the \"graduates\" of Lebensborn resemble the actual children of some actual Nazi leaders, dazed, stained penitents who \"wash themselves any way they know, heal themselves as best they can, find straits through which they navigate quietly, on tiptoe, to avoid, at all costs, meeting themselves.\" As, one way or another, all Jews navigate through their own remains. Yet it is not the least part of Drndic's achievement, in a smashing translation from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac, that it rewards the reader with a very high order of lyrical writing that seems to originate from the interior of consciousness: \"The train glides along, lit from the inside and nearly empty. I move through the black silence, through the fragrance of summer, through a silence which envelops itself, which pours slowly and lazily across the earth and sky, everywhere around us.\" Drndic's characters are not only pushed around by immense forces, but also have their eyes and hearts open. In the spirit of, say, \"Mrs. Dalloway,\" \"Trieste\" is a tale of inner lives embroiled with other inner lives, as if a single tangled organism were the true protagonist.

Pinker reviews Leeches by David Albahari and translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac.

Despite the danger, the writer's immersion in the kabbalists' \"conspiracy\" is deliberate, even necessary; it's a way to escape \"the general sense of things falling apart\" in a time of ultra-nationalist fervor. Even as the novel's mysteries multiply - the narrator repeatedly refers to an ever-growing pile of \"unknowns\" - [David Albahari]'s achievement is to show how this kind of submission to an otherworldly scheme can be so tempting. After all, \"the countrywas in a state of collapse, threats of bombardment hung in the air like overripe fruit... lunacy had nearly been declared the norm.\" In such an environment, chasing phantoms in the streets and investigating immortal Jewish spirits no longer seem so strange. For example, in \"Tsing\" a writer traveling around the United States struggles to write something new while consumed with memories of his recently deceased father. In \"Bait\" a Serbian man listens to tapes of his mother (also recently deceased) and claims repeatedly that he is unable to write the story of her life. In the powerful \"Götz and [Meyer]\" a teacher researches the annihilation of Belgrade's Jews through the semi-fictional lens of two SS men, Götz and Meyer, who drive a gas van. As he performs his research, the teacher ascribes various qualities to Götz and Meyer - who are always referred to as a pair - but his understanding reaches a limit, crashing up against the inscrutability of the dyad, exemplified by the quotidian nature of the title characters' murderous behavior.

Axelrod reviews Gotz and Meyer by David Albahari and translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac.

Rosenfeld reviews Gotz and Meyer by David Albahari and translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac.

Albahari, David. Götz and Meyer. Tr. by Ellen Elias-Bursac. Dec. 2005. 176p. Harcourt, $23(0-15-101141-9).

That is true of this novella, \"[Gotz] and [Meyer],\" by [David Albahari], about two meticulous SS drivers, all of whose thoughts go pridefully, anxiously, to the new truck they have been assigned, and none at all to its cargo. This is not chickens or baling wire but Jews, who, in the course of an hour's drive, and thanks to the clever reattachment of the vehicle's exhaust pipe, are lethally gassed. As when \"Gotz or maybe it was Meyer\" hands out chocolates to the children who were to board the truck. Or gets out to reposition the exhaust pipe. Or wistfully imagines being a Luftwaffe pilot. Or which of the two? cries out in his sleep. (As I say, this is more than satire, and inside \"inhumane\" nestle the letters spelling \"human.\") The blur of identity conveys atrocity's supreme horror: a specific act without a specific actor. Examine the truck. And because \"Gotz and Meyer\" has a resonance beyond its own times, examine: all trucks, airplanes, and bureaucratic memoranda that outline, or that blur, the permissible methods of interrogation. \"The banality of evil\" remains a living phrase, if only to call for an enduring vigilance over our own banalities for the evil to be found in them.