Historical Fiction Holocaust Novels & Stories

Or maybe he had braked before and I was distracted and distrustful, looking everywhere, making sure that no one attacked me from behind, and I didn't look where he stopped. "What?" I asked, and with a gesture with his chin he indicated the dungeons that were to our right. What the…what is this? —Dungeons, here they brought the Jews to be tortured in the holocaust. The Nazis used these tunnels to escape in the war. "And now comes the part where you tell me why the fuck do you think taking a girl on her first date into Nazi tunnels is a good method of courtship?" He laughed at my quip and went on without answering.

His elegant, flowing script detailed the paranoia of the European witch trials, the mud and blood of the trenches in the Great War, and the blinding, horrific ash of Hiroshima. One particular ledger from the mid-twentieth century made her hand tremble. In it, Lucian recounted the liberation of the camps during the Holocaust. His words were devoid of his usual aristocratic detachment, replaced instead by a profound, weeping sorrow for the millions of lives snuffed out by mortal cruelty. He wrote of the scent of burning ash, the hollow eyes of the survivors, and the terrifying realization that his own monstrous nature paled in comparison to what humans could do to one another. No wonder he is

He could’ve very easily been Sam or Sebastian or Scully, but for some reason, I went with Shaw. I can tell you where the name Hollander came from, though. At some point, I was going to have Shaw and Isobel have a conversation where Shaw talked about his great-grandfather, Gene, who survived the Holocaust. I wanted his surname to be authentic, so I searched for names of Holocaust survivors, until I found a Eugene Hollander who wrote the book From the Hell of the Holocaust: A Survivor’s Story. I ended up not writing that actual conversation in the book, but that is how I arrived at the name Shaw Hollander, nonetheless! It’s strange how my mind works, isn’t it? ROSES: