The Best Books Club: Examining Our Own Lives in Response to History

I love history and always have. Several years ago, however, I developed an inexplicable antipathy toward books written about or set during World War II. As a result, I intended to never read Heather Morris’ best-selling, award-winning “The Tattooist of Auschwitz.” Ultimately, though, I succumbed to the urging of more than a few people and selected this novel based on actual people and events for The Best Books Club.

As I read the intriguing story of Lale, the tätowierer of Auschwitz-Birkenau, I pondered its clearly-admirable themes: survival as resistance to evil, the morality of ethical compromise, the power of love and compassion. But all the while and for days after I closed the back cover, the discomfort and even aversion I felt toward the novel lingered, and I couldn’t identify their cause.

Finally, I had an “aha moment:” It’s not the book that caused my discomfort, I realized. Instead, it is the book’s “promise” as well as our own hypocrisy. Let me explain.

Publishers and critics, celebrity book club hosts such as Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon, and 99% of hometown book club members and Amazon reviewers laud “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” — and similar books — as a work that will ensure the atrocities committed by the Nazis will neither be forgotten nor, as a result, repeated.

At the risk of sounding old and cranky, I say hogwash!

You see, in the more than 75 years since WWII ended, countless millions around the world have read “The Diary of a Young Girl” (Anne Frank), “Night” (Elie Wiesel) and other true, horrifying accounts of the Holocaust. But even a fairly quick search of “genocide” in that same time period proves the attempted extermination of specific groups has continued unabated and, in many cases, virtually ignored by the general public, even when reported by news sources. Recent cases in point: Myanmar, China and Iraq.

OK, you say, maybe some people have forgotten and/or are repeating the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis, but it’s not us. It’s “them.” You and I — we’re better than them. We would never kill or even hurt anyone because of their faith or ethnicity or political beliefs.

Really? You and I may not have physically harmed anyone, much less committed mass murder, but let’s examine our behavior from just the past few weeks.

How many times did we post or share on social media something that was blatantly disrespectful of an individual or group because of their ethnicity, belief system or political affiliation? How often, when we encountered someone who didn’t look or speak like us or adhere to our beliefs, were our first thoughts — to put it mildly — less than charitable? How often did we blithely purchase products made in countries that are currently and openly committing genocide — in effect, feeding the coffers of murderous regimes? How much effort did we put into doing anything at all to stop the Hitlers of today?

Books like “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” can only remind us of past wrongdoings. You and I — each one of us — must show we have learned from those wrongs by doing everything we can to stand against those who choose to repeat them.

__Some points we’ll discuss in our Facebook Live chat on Tuesday, April 11, at 4:30 p.m. include:__

1. What is your impression of Lale when he is first introduced? How did your opinion of him change throughout the course of the book?

2. Survival in a prison camp depends on people doing deeds of questionable morality, as we see with Lale, Gita and her friend. What were your thoughts on the “questionable acts” committed by the prisoners in the book?

3. We see in the book that non-Jewish prisoners were treated differently than those who were Jewish. What does that indicate to you?

4. Was Lale a true hero?

5. What implication does this book hold for us today?

__Up Next__

Next month, we’re going to change the pace and also move closer to home as we read “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.” Bill Bryson, a Midwestern Baby Boomer from Des Moines, Iowa, will take us back to a “happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you,” according to an Amazon blurb.

Patti Miinch, a resident of Cape Girardeau, is an author, mother and mother-in-law of two, grandmother of three and retired educator; while she has many loves, spending time with her family, sports, travel and reading top the list.