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2000s: If you met an old man today who told you that he had been an SS officer at Auschwitz, how would you feel? An intriguing premise for a novel…
The Storyteller
What you need to know before your trail
If you met an old man today who told you that he had been an SS officer at Auschwitz, how would you feel? Now imagine that your Jewish grandmother had been at that camp? Can you really forgive someone for such a crime – if you are not the actual party who the crime was against?
You have this information. What do you do with it?
The Storyteller is a harrowing and heart rending tale about Sage, a woman faced with a huge decision – she finds out that a customer who comes into her bakery once once an SS officer. He wants to confess and for her to help him die. He knows she comes from a Jewish family although Sage does not practice the faith.
Travel Guide
Set in New Hampshire, the scene is one of peace and a quiet life so much so that this is the last place that you would expect for the horror of Nazism would rear their ugly head.
“If you’ve lived in New Hampshire your whole life, lie I have, you can smell the change in the weather. It’s oppressively hot but there’s a thunderstorm written across the sky in invisible ink”
However this is where the reality of the war does come to – and in fact has been here the whole time – hidden from plain sight. Josef Weber is 95 and has not got long left. He has been hiding his former life in plain sight – as a well respected and much loved member of society as a German teacher in New Hampshire. It’s a picturesque, small community and from the peaceful reality of life working in a bakery and a small community, we are thrust back in time to Auschwitz and the homeland of Minka, the grandmother in question who came from Poland.
“You speak some Latin yes? It means Asshole of the world. But you, he said. “You probably know it as Auschwitz.”
The real setting of this novel is not the moral high ground but the rocky reality of when truth and history meet and those in the present really have to decide what is right or wrong. There is a huge moral dilemma faced by the characters in the novel however – does this former Nazi want forgiveness from someone from the Jewish faith so that he can finally get forgiveness and die in peace? and should Sage be the one to give it to him?
The author states that she researched much of her novel in the US Holocaust museum in Washington.
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Twitter: @JodiPicoult
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Web: jodipicoult.com
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