This book is made up of two novellas which look at the long shadow cast by the Holocaust from very different angles.
THE STRANGE HOUSE
Caroline is an impoverished student studying for a law degree in London and looking for digs. She finds a room in a house on the edge of Hampstead Heath inhabited by a strange collection of Jewish intellectuals.
Young and inexperienced as she is, she is nonetheless alive to disturbing undercurrents in the household, which culminate in the death of one of them, Sarah.
Much to Caroline’s consternation, she finds herself unexpectedly the heir to a house worth over £1 million, following Sarah’s mysterious death.
The lawyer in Caroline wants to get to the bottom of these tragic and worrying events, but she soon discovers that life is not as simple as that.
FORGIVE AND FORGET?
Ben is a middle-aged Jewish chemist working on the cure for various viruses and living comfortably in Hampstead in London.
As a nine-year-old boy he spent a few months in the notorious concentration camp, Dachau, an experience which he only survived because a kapo, a prisoner who himself survived by doing some of the guards’ dirty work – in this case, shovelling human remains from the prison furnaces – took him under his wing.
Ben just about survived until Dachau was liberated, and was eventually adopted by an English Jewish couple. As he grew up, he surrounded himself with the good things in life and did his best to eradicate all his nightmarish memories. Even when the kapo went on trial, Ben kept quiet.
Ben went back to his comfortable life, until the Gestapo officer who signed his parents’ death warrant was abducted and put on trial in Israel. Against his better judgement, Ben testified against his parents’ murderer. Afterwards, he retired and tried to fill his time helping homeless refugees. Then one day a man who had been at school with Ben while Ben’s family were in hiding with a Christian family of vineyard owners landed on Ben’s doorstep and faced him with an unwanted and unforeseen moral dilemma.
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