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A review by chewdigestbooks
A Crime in the Family: A World War II Secret Buried in Silence—And My Search for the Truth by Sacha Batthyány
4.0
This was interesting because it was part family history and part navel-gazing. The author goes to therapy questioning if trauma and evil are passed down via genes and to find out why he feels little or no connection to his country of birth.
It starts with a coworker tossing a newspaper article onto his desk about his great aunt and her guests supposedly taking a break from a party to slaughter 180 Jews in WWII Hungary only to go back to the drinks and dancing. Now that would be shocking to anyone and who wouldn't want to start investigating it's verity although it's hard for Betthyanay because the only one left in his family is his father who is less than communicative about the past, as many who lived through that time are. His grandfather had spent 10 of his formative years in the gulag of the Soviet Union, so it isn't like his father knew much about that side of his family anyway.
However, his father did not honor his own mother's wishes to destroy her journals and never having read them, passes them onto his son as if the past means nothing to him, so "here you go."
(Note: why did his dad, who didn't seem to care, not destroy the journals as asked if he didn't care and never looked at them? This question, never answered, intrigued me. I would have loved an enlightening conversation with his dad about that though I'm not sure that he even really knew.)
To Be continued, my PC is being a wanker.
It starts with a coworker tossing a newspaper article onto his desk about his great aunt and her guests supposedly taking a break from a party to slaughter 180 Jews in WWII Hungary only to go back to the drinks and dancing. Now that would be shocking to anyone and who wouldn't want to start investigating it's verity although it's hard for Betthyanay because the only one left in his family is his father who is less than communicative about the past, as many who lived through that time are. His grandfather had spent 10 of his formative years in the gulag of the Soviet Union, so it isn't like his father knew much about that side of his family anyway.
However, his father did not honor his own mother's wishes to destroy her journals and never having read them, passes them onto his son as if the past means nothing to him, so "here you go."
(Note: why did his dad, who didn't seem to care, not destroy the journals as asked if he didn't care and never looked at them? This question, never answered, intrigued me. I would have loved an enlightening conversation with his dad about that though I'm not sure that he even really knew.)
To Be continued, my PC is being a wanker.