Into the Tunnel
The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A generous feat of biographical sleuthing by an acclaimed historian rescues one child victim of the Holocaust from oblivion
When the German Remembrance Foundation established a prize to commemorate the million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust, it was deliberately named after a victim about whom nothing was known except her age and the date of her deportation: Marion Samuel, an eleven-year-old girl killed in Auschwitz in 1943. Sixty years after her death, when Götz Aly received the award, he was moved to find out whatever he could about Marion's short life and restore this child to history.
In what is as much a detective story as a historical reconstruction, Aly, praised for his "formidable research skills" (Christopher Browning), traces the Samuel family's agonizing decline from shop owners to forced laborers to deportees. Against all odds, Aly manages to recover expropriation records, family photographs, and even a trace of Marion's voice in the premonition she confided to a school friend: "People disappear," she said, "into the tunnel."
A gripping account of a family caught in the tightening grip of persecution, Into the Tunnel is a powerful reminder that the millions of Nazi victims were also, each one, an individual life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Aly (Hitler's Beneficiaries) ingeniously reconstructs the life and death of a German-Jewish girl in this impressive piece of detective work. After being awarded the Marion Samuel Prize (established by the German Remembrance Foundation to commemorate the million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust), Aly decided to learn as much as he could about Samuel and her family. With the help of ads and a speech, both published in German newspapers, he got in touch with individuals who knew the family, was able to find a few surviving relatives and pieced together a narrative from these scant sources. Soon after the family's business was ransacked in 1935, Samuel and her parents left their small town and moved to Berlin, where they lived until they were sent to Auschwitz. Illustrating civilian complicity in their fate, Aly notes a letter from the Samuels' former landlord, asking the authorities for rent that went unpaid after the Samuels were deported. Aly's account puts a face on the tragedy of the Holocaust.
