The House of Ashes by Oscar Pinkus

An unforgettable book. Regarded as a one of the literary classics of the Holocaust, it is a beautifully written and emotionally powerful first person account of the author’s experience in surviving WW II. I hesitate to write about this book for fear of not doing it justice. Perhaps the immediacy of the experience is tied to the journal he kept throughout the war and used in writing his story. His prose is gentle and direct: silent as a shadow; or speaking of watching the body of his murdered friend, He would float away in pools of green light, then come back hugging the cobblestones. He was not a corpse but the silhouette of a murdered city.

The book moves beyond the myopic story of survival for Pinkus and his family, illustrating the larger social and emotional world of those in his orbit as relationships between survivors and rescuers evolve over the course of years of tension. What begins as a monetary transaction eventually becomes a personal relationship with shared goals against a common enemy - the Germans, and protection against the local AK, the Polish Home Army.

In the Epilogue, Oscar Pinkus enumerates every entity in the world that knew genocide was being perpetrated again the Jews and did nothing to stop it. I was left thinking no one wants to be a person who is aware mass murder is being committed and still does nothing. What can we do today to prevent having that same accusation directed at us?   More Info

Reviewed by Kate Boris-Brown

This book is available to borrow from the Holocaust Center's library. Email Rosa@HolocaustCenterSeattle.org. Books will be mailed for free to members.