The Unspeakable

An alternative therapy coach discovers that several of her relatives were victims of the Holocaust in this memoir.

Now living in Germany, Hanefeld, who was born in 1958, grew up in England with her English mother and Czech father. The six relatives she knew on her father’s side were her grandparents, an aunt, and a great-uncle and great-aunt, who’d all resettled in England. The family never spoke of their background, and it was only in her late teens that Hanefeld realized they were German-speaking Czech Jews who fled their homeland just before the start of World War II. In 2004, a year before her father’s death, he unexpectedly sent her his aunt’s 1935 passport with a note that she and other close relatives, whom the family never mentioned, were murdered in concentration camps in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. That document prompted her to undertake a painstaking investigation, aided by family correspondence, her own fluency in German, and historical archives. As she tells of how she reconstructed the stories of her relatives’ lives, Hanefeld details some of her own memories and the emotional impact of her discoveries. After providing some background with a family-tree diagram, she devotes a chapter to each of 16 people, concluding with a dialogue between herself and her first cousin about the family’s legacy of silence, followed by an epilogue; she also includes a timeline and an extensive list of references. Overall, this is not a dramatic, novelistic memoir; at times, the narrative is slowed by excessive detail, and at others, the author summarizes and speculates when research couldn’t fill in gaps. However, her stories effectively reveal her family members as businesspeople, lawyers, homemakers, and students with everyday, unremarkable concerns, and, intriguingly, that appears to be Hanefeld’s point: “This is the quieter, less dramatic side of the Holocaust, but it too deserves attention,” and “the impact of personal narratives is greater than speaking abstractly about the vast numbers of people murdered.” She also discusses salient questions of identity, and how suppressed trauma can affect succeeding generations.

A thought-provoking remembrance that speaks for those who can no longer speak for themselves.