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Review: Remote Sympathy

Anne Garvey admires a fictional but authentic account of life in Buchenwald

May 20, 2021 12:03
Roll call at Buchenwald concentration camp, ca. 1938-1941 alamy E1CWAK-a
E1CWAK Roll call at Buchenwald concentration camp, ca. 1938-1941. Two prisoners in the foreground are supporting a comrade, as
2 min read

Remote Sympathy
By Catherine Chidgey
Europa Editions, £16.99
Reviewed by Anne Garvey


Sympathy? That’s a few hundred years out of date, at least,’’ laughs Doctor Schiedlausky, Camp Medical Director, when he encounters the “Sympathetic Vitaliser”, a machine designed to cure cancer. The irony of Catherine Chidgey’s acutely authentic novel’s title infuses the text. No place on earth could have less sympathy than the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp. Incongruously built in idyllic, woody mountains around Weimar, historic home of Goethe and Schiller, its ravaged prisoners and their minders live out a perilous existence under its brutal regime. It is a mixed camp, with many political prisoners. And early on in the book, five Austrian Catholic priests are crucified in the “punishment bunker”.

Greta Hahn’s husband Dietrich has become Buchenwald’s Chief Administrator and they move to a spacious house nearby. Greta trips through her days in her sunny new home surrounded by friendly neighbours, attended by Josef, a willing young servant recruited from the camp.

It is 1942, yet Greta has no suspicions. Occasionally, an agonised shriek startles her but is easily attributed to unseen peacocks in the distance (the camp implausibly has a zoo). Even when she finds out her nervous servant is a Jehovah’s Witness denied his freedom because he refused to abandon his beliefs, she dismisses his murmur about torture.

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