Has anyone read the novel by Gerald Green?
Its quite good and features much extra material from Rudi and Eriks diaries, i got mine from a car boot sale for 20p
I think the novel is even better than the miniseries. I read it for the first time when I was 11.
shareI loved the novel. I didn't read it until after I saw the miniseries. It's probably available in many public libraries.
shareI remember my cousin (thirteen at the time) had read the novel (after seeing the tv mini) and he said with enthusaism to his mom "It's great, it's intriguing, you get to know exactly how they operated the gas chambers!"
Maybe he found a less-than-good turn of phrase there, but his mother who was a kid in the forties (and outside of the war) replied:
-You don't get how terrible it was.
Does anyone know if the book is avaliable in audio? If yes, then where and aprox. $.
sharebought it for a dollar at a secondhand bookstore. :d
share50 cents at a church sale!
shareI bought mine at a local used book store for thirty cents.
I remember thinking how ingenious it was for Gerald Green to split the novel between the account of the Weiss Family and Erik Dorf's journal. The only question I had was would anyone directly involved in the unspeakable thing Dorf was actually keep a written record. Of course the Nazis actually filmed some of their atrocities a journal might not be out of the question; a sort of personal confession from one who had long ago sold his soul to the devil.
TAG LINE: True genius is a beautiful thing, but ignorance is ugly to the bone.
Gerald Greene really didn't think a lot of things out when writing the book or the mini-series it was based on. You can check the trivia for several things that people have had problems with the mini-series, but the book itself was greatly flawed. He was trying to copy what Herman Wouk had with Winds of War in 1971 and hoping to beat the sequel of Wouk's WoW to publication, he wrote the teleplay to Holocaust, and wrote the novel based on that.
Holocaust was a success in ratings, but because many people who watched it weren't survivors of Auschwitz or Terezin or any other camp, they didn't know. The people who did survive dislike the series and novel. The serious historian dislike the series. That's why both have been mostly forgotten.
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Gerald Greene really didn't think a lot of things out when writing the book or the mini-series it was based on. [... The] book itself was greatly flawed.
Agreed. Like the poster above you, I found it questionable that Dorf would keep such highly detailed diaries at all, given the situation he was in. Another problem I had was that the "Rudi" sections of the book were somewhat contrived; no matter what was happening, there was always someone close enough to the action to give a detailed account, and who conveniently survived so that Rudi could be told about it later on.
Green wrote the book in first person, with Rudi as narrator. Had he written it in ordinary third person instead, he could have easily avoided these and other problems. Now, any junior high school English teacher will tell you that the "advantage" of first person writing is greater immediacy. Most of those teachers have never actually written anything in their lives, however, and any professional author will tell you that this so-called advantage is actually no advantage at all; third person writing can be done with just as much immediacy and intensity as first person, and without going to extraordinary lengths. The cost of first person is that the POV is limited to the narrator, and the author must resort to all sort of devices, sometimes clumsy, to inform the reader of things that the narrator could not reasonably know about.
Now, granting those suspensions of disbelief necessary to read Holocaust, it was far from being a "bad" book. I did like that it explored the relationships between the Weisses more than the miniseries did. Berta in particular was nice enough in general, but also a somewhat snobbish character who not-so-secretly believed that Karl had married beneath him, that the Nazis would never harass fine, cultured people like herself and her family, et cetera. These things are hinted at somewhat in the miniseries, but always in contexts in which the clues can be explained in other ways. For example, in the miniseries Anna (just before running out of the apartment to her fate) chews Berta out for being so pretentious, but this comes across not so much as if Anna has a real cause for complaint, but rather as if she's simply at the absolute limits of her frustration and is taking it out on the nearest person.
Incidentally, I seem to be the only person in this thread who paid full price for the book. It's available on Kindle now, and cost about five bucks or so. In the context of that price, my review is ... meh. Not a bad book, just a weak one, and in all honesty if it weren't for the fact that I had already seen the miniseries I'd consider the book to be forgettable.