Tim's Reviews > Trieste

Trieste is a work of documentary fiction about Holocaust survivors. The author invents a female Jewish character who has a child by a Nazi. One day while her back is turned the baby is snatched from its pram. What happened to him remains a consuming mystery to her throughout her long life. Hana discovers the child's father is an SS officer. A monster who reigned at various death camps, including Treblinka. Her desire to track down her son take her deeper and deeper into the incomprehensible insanity of Nazism.
Her son, we learn, was snatched as part of the lebensborn project and then adopted by a German family. When his dying mother reveals to him he was adopted he too is constrained to research the holocaust. The text quotes lots of first hand accounts of Nazi atrocities. An incredibly clever and powerful book.