Swiss journalist Sacha Batthyany uncovers an intriguing, disturbing rumor: near the end of the Second World War, his Aunt Margit was alleged to have participated in the massacre of hundreds of Jewish prisoners in the small Austrian town of Rechnitz. The crime took place during a party at her home attended by Nazi officers.

He's haunted and determined to track down the source of the story and see if there's any truth to it. He remembers Margit somewhat from his childhood, after his parents immigrated from their native Hungary to Switzerland, and they visited with her sometimes.

Most importantly, he sees the discovery of the truth about the roots of his family tree, and learning what skeletons are hidden in their closets, as crucial to understanding more about himself. his identity and where he came from.

He tell his psychoanalyst, "I want to know what's still left in my bones from earlier times. I'd like to find out what influence past events have in making us what we are."

So begins his journey across Europe and eventually to South America, tracking the original mystery of the crime, then becoming distracted by a second revelatory incident, as well as pursuing hard facts about his grandfather's Siberian Gulag imprisonment. He's aided by his grandmother's handwritten memoirs, passed along by his father.

The travel narratives and exploration of the family history and crimes are interspersed with his psychoanalytic sessions, as well as some journal excerpts from a Jewish family connected to his own, and some imagined scenes and conversations where he exercises some creative license in assuming what took place to fill in historical gaps.

While reading, I was reminded of a review I read of the movie "Adaptation" that always stuck with me: the movie was based on journalist Susan Orlean's excellent nonfiction book The Orchid Thief, and if you've seen it, you know that it's not at all a straight adaption of Orlean's story, rather a meta story of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman trying to adapt the book. The review said that Kaufman read The Orchid Thief and found that the most interesting thing in it was Charlie Kaufman. (I'm heavily paraphrasing and can't find the review, but I have a point.)

The most interesting part of every story this author tells is himself. After the trip to Russia with his father, with whom Sacha has a strained, complicated relationship described through their conversations and his psychoanalytic sessions, he reflects:

"I had travelled to Siberia to understand that I was no match for international history, for all those wars that haunted his mind...Stalin, I whispered to myself, first robbed all your family of its land, then locked your grandfather up, and after that took your father away from you."
It makes the story more complicated - it's not straight history or memoir, it's like a psychological concept project across genres.

I disliked the imagined conversations - a popular method for filling in details in the narrative, I know, but one I can't stand nevertheless. To some extent, if it's done well enough, it can help flesh out a story that's missing something, but here it went too far into fictional territory. If stories are missing, like pieces of this one are, it seems better to build connected stories around them. He does this somewhat - traveling to South America to meet the one survivor connected to his family's wartime life and share what he's uncovered with her and her family.

This book reminded me of another upcoming release, Maybe Esther, about someone tracing family roots during the Second World War and the Holocaust, also translated from German. I speak German and do some translation into English, but I don't actually read books written in German. So I don't know if this is something characteristic of the literary writing style, but it's this very disjointed, all-over-the-place structure that I find difficult to follow and fully comprehend.

Now for the good, the really good actually, and why we need stories like this - especially this one with its particular angle shining a big spotlight on what Austria is doing wrong.

There, in the Burgenland province where the massacre of Jewish prisoners took place, he met with distant relatives, trying to glean what they knew about Margit's involvement. Snippets of the conversation from these Austrian relations:

"What's the point of it all?"
"Why bother?"
"What's it to do with us?"
"There's been enough written already about crimes against the Jews...The crimes of the communists were just as bad."

Later, an uncle tells him, "Do think about the family's good name. You don't want to drag it through the mud."

The original German title, And was hat das mit mir zu tun?, translates to "And what does that have to do with me?" It's an oft-repeated phrase among Austrians, in my experience at least. When I taught business English, around one anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a woman in one of my courses discussing this news item said, disgustedly, "I can't wait until we don't have to hear about this anymore. Soon there won't be anyone else alive from that time and we can stop talking about. It doesn't have anything to do with us but we always have to hear it." I was in such shock I don't remember how I responded.

Hers is only one such example, another was near verbatim to the above quote about the crimes of the Russians occupying Austria being as bad if not worse than those of the Nazis. That same person also said that Jewish people in Austria get too many benefits and too much money in the form of reparations, and the time of Austria's crimes is long over and they've already gotten so much and don't deserve anything more. Maybe you can see why I had to get away from work that involved so much listening to of Austrians' opinions.

I had to wonder if the German title was changed, not only because that sentence is a bit clunky as a title in English, but because its refrain is well-known if angrily denied or defended in the German-speaking countries, but wouldn't be believed elsewhere. Maybe I'm reading too much into it because this issue always gets me, but I wonder.

That's why this is an important book, if some stylistic and narrative elements were off for me. It's still true, still a personal account of what exists of a disturbing history, and it's something that needs sharing. Austria has come very close within the last year to electing leaders from the far-right party built from remnants of the Nazi party. The Freheitspartei Österreich has made increasingly stronger showings in elections. Germany, in its elections in September, saw the far-right AfD party make history by becoming the first openly nationalistic party to hold seats in the Bundestag in 60 years.

Like Faulkner said: The past is never dead. It isn't even past.

A messily structured, sometimes great, deeply compelling, and contemporarily important other times frustratingly navel-gazing look at a family's complicated wartime and postwar history, and how it all feels in the present.

I am very fascinated with ww2 era I was very excited to receive this book and I was not let down the cover is fantastic and mysterious, the book is well written, and the pieces of the puzzle as to what happened the night at his aunts home and what role she played with the deaths of so many Jews is enormous! you can feel the authors frustration to unlock so many unanswered questions if you like emotional, to the point, ww2 memoirs than this is definitely the book for you the only reason this book didn't make 5 stars from me was the slow up and down start at the beginning of the book but after getting through that I couldn't put it down!

In the way of memoirs, this one is an emotional roller coaster. There were things about this book that I liked and I felt like I learned something from reading it, but there were also times when I felt confused, particularly when delving into the writings left behind by the author's family members. I felt there was just too much going on from too many different sources for me to keep up. I suppose when it is your family and you can keep track of who is who it is easier to understand, but for the standard reader, it might be a bit much.

Still, this is definitely and interesting look at what one generation did and how it has affected future generations. This is a bleak book in some ways, but in the end perhaps there is some redemption. Either way, it was compelling and made me ask questions and that was a good thing.

Recommended to those who enjoy history and want to know more about the Nazi era.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher, provided through Netgalley. All opinions are my own.

A Crime in the Family

A World War II Secret Buried in Silence--and My Search for the Truth



by Sacha Batthyany

Perseus Books, Da Capo Press

Da Capo Press



Biographies & Memoirs , History

Pub Date 10 Oct 2017

I am reviewing a copy of A Crime in the Family through Da Capo Press and Netgalley:

We are introduced to Agnes who was ninety during the prologue but was eighteen when she was deported to the concentration camp. She survived Aushwitz .

In the Spring of 1945 on the Austrian-Hungarian not far from the front lines of the fast approaching red army Countess Margit Battyany gives a party in her mansion. The war was almost over and the SS officers and German aristocrats drinking were well aware that they were going to loose. Later that night the Nazis at the party walked down to the village wheee 180 Jewish laborers were enslaved, they made them strip down and shot them all.

Saccha Batthyany pens a powerful memoir about the events and the vague memories of his Aunt Margarit. This book deals with not only the horrors of Aushwitz, but also the Chas of wartime Budapest and the brutalities of the soviet occupation. It tells stories of corruption and cover-up partly through surviving journals of others in the author's family.

I give A Crime in the Family five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

This book confused me from the start. What should have been a heartwrenching historical horror story was told in a cold, detached way. It was very difficult to start the book...disjointed, introducing characters in a minimal way and describing too many places and times quicker than you could get them straight. Then It switched from being diaries of two women from Hungary, one Jewish and one Catholic--I had hoped it would get more interesting. The incident of the Jews being executed outside the Catholic' woman's house was near the beginning and was told in an oddly detached manner. No one ever knows if the woman herself was involved. The presence of diaries gave me hope that it would get interesting but those petered out and the book seemed to become a rambling dialogue of what the grandson mostly with himself (searching for the truth of his ancestry) imagining what people may have or felt. The therapy parts were boring and a waste of this young man's time and money. Anyway, I was disappointed and wouldn't really recommend it to anyone. Perhaps it is the problem of translation. I must confess that I gave up on the book at about the 80% mark

I was SO excited to get a review copy of this book – I read an interview with the author about a week before I was approved for the book and was fascinated. We’ve all read memoirs from Holocaust survivors, some even from their children documenting their parents’ stories.

But what about the third generation? The ones whose grandparents and great-grandparents survived the chaos of WW2 Europe and its aftermath? How does the past affect them? That is exactly what this book explores, and it’s really insightful.

Sacha Batthyany is a Swiss journalist of Hungarian descent who grew up with parents who mourned for the “old Hungary,” and being told stories of his grandfather, who survived 10 years in a Soviet gulag following WW2 (as a Hungarian/Axis soldier, he was taken as a POW by the Soviet regime). One day, Sacha is shown an article by a colleague which claims his great aunt not only hosted an elaborate party in the waning days of the war, but took her guests out during the festivities to shoot 180 Jewish slave laborers who were working nearby. Shocked, Sacha begins a search for the truth about his family’s history and finds out that history may affect the present more than we think.

The crime mentioned in the description actually doesn’t take center stage for the whole novel – Batthyanny focuses more on his grandparents’ stories as the book goes on. But all of the events of his family’s past really come together in a really revealing way which explores the connections between truth and as it’s known, “the banality of evil.” The books themes of facing the truth and what makes someone “good” or “bad” are really intensely explored as Batthyany has to face his family’s actions or inactions and what that means for him.

As in most stories, there’s a lot of gray areas as more and more is revealed.

I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of these “third generation” novels, and if they’re as good as this one, it’s an exciting prospect.

Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in history and its legacy.