Greg Book Review - Into the Tunnel : The Brief Life of Marion Samuel 1931 - 1943 / Gotz Aly

I picked this book up from the SL Library when I saw it on the recently released shelf and I immediately thought of another book that had a tremendous effect on me in graduate school. At Ohio State, I read a book that helped me to focus on what I thought was going to be my dissertation. The book was This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski, a fictional, although autobiographical, collection of stories about life in Auschwitz. I read this in a Polish literature class at the same time I read Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov, about the Soviet prison camps in Siberia. The raw emotion and incredible decision-making abilities of the characters in each of these books stunned me look few others have in my life. I couldn't imagine making these decisions myself under the circumstances that they faced, reason would have failed me. Into the Tunnel is a similar sort of book, although it is not fiction like the other two books. Gotz Aly had won an award for another book he had written about the Holocaust and he was going to be presented with the award that is named after a faceless death of the concentration camps. Aly wanted to know more about Marion Samuel so he researched everything he could about her and then presented it in this book. Marion Samuel was just another Jewish girl growing up in eastern Germany, near the Polish border, when the Nazi persecutions started affecting her family in the early 1930's. Her family was eventually torn apart, her parents killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Dachau, along with Marion at the tender age of 12. Aly shows pictures of the family before the Nazi's came to power, German documents showing the repossession of their apartment and the goods contained therein, and a haunting train list with their names on it as they depart to the camps.
Unlike the other concentration camp literature, this one is factual but still left me with the questions of "How did this happen to so many people?" and "How was it possible for one human being to do this to another?" I also found myself saying "Never again, never again." If you want to gain an understanding of what concentration/Soviet gulag camps were like- read these three books plus other works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Elie Wiesel. Powerful works, you will never be the same.

Conclusion - two somber thumbs up