In The Unspeakable, Nicola Hanefeld draws family members, their interactions, atmospheres of daily life and the premises of emotion out from the murky depths of shadowy Holocaust history. She is a literary paleontologist as she patiently and painstakingly brushes caked mud from delicate fact-fossils that, at the outset, she’d merely stumbled upon with a sense of ignorance, shock, and confusion. Correspondence, official documents, receipts, historical archives and other authors’ research – plus photos of previously unknown, never-mentioned relatives piece together a tapestry of the past where secret truths reveal roots that newly define the author’s own. With tact and sensitivity, and despite the overwhelming personal impact she felt while doing research and writing, Hanefeld recounts her family’s multi-faceted, multi-generational, multi-national history with an objective voice. The story gains in power as one after the other, stark facts speak for themselves. Even when unexpressed trauma (long imprisoned behind walls of silence) emanates up and out through her person and her words, Hanefeld’s narrative is largely devoid of pathos. And because of this, it is a story that is not only hers and that of her family but one that becomes ours as well, a mirror of 20th century history that is repeating itself today in new, yet not-new shape-shifting forms. The very normalcy of her relatives’ secular lives and of how they were able – or not –to cope with intentional, dehumanizing circumstances offers human perspectives that we can all recognize and honor. This is precisely what makes this book so moving, and what brings it so close to home.

Nicola Hanefeld embarks on an impressive and in-depth search for records of her family, which leads her to the Arolsen Archives. She unfolds a touching and revealing picture of her forebears with the documents she discovers there. Nicola interweaves her research experience with the dark chapters of persecution, imprisonment, and murder during the Nazi regime. The narrative reveals a striking understanding of where hatred, antisemitism, and racism can lead.