NONFICTION: HISTORY
The Witness House: Nazis and Holocaust Survivors Sharing a Villa During the Nuremberg Trials by Christiane Kohl. Translated from German by Anthea Bell.
In 1945, a private home in small-town Germany became a temporary residence for one of the most disparate groups of houseguests in history: a mix of former Nazi Party officials and Holocaust survivors.
The visitors had been called as witnesses — some for the defense, some for the prosecution — in the Nuremberg Trials, the military tribunals in which members of the Nazi party were tried for war crimes. Allied forces had provided the house as safe lodging.
In “The Witness House,” journalist Christiane Kohl gives a richly detailed and deeply researched account of the diverse list of people who stayed at the villa and what life was like for them inside. “The Witness House was obviously a place of opposites: pain and joy, laughter and tears, bitterness and arrogance in close proximity,” she writes.
Still, the atmosphere there was remarkably civil, largely thanks to the house’s affable manager, Countess Ingeborg Kálnoky, who had a knack for steering conversations into neutral territory. Nevertheless, the witness house was not without outbursts or scandals — a shouting match, a suicide attempt and forbidden romances are all part of this fascinating story.
Kohl weaves anecdotes of what happened at the villa with facts about each person’s biography and testimony at Nuremberg. Among the many characters she introduces are Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer and confidant; Eugene Kogon, a prisoner at Buchenwald who saw the atrocities of death camps firsthand; and Gisa Punzengruber, whose husband carried out cruel medical experiments on concentration-camp prisoners (she testified for the prosecution).
Each had a vastly different experience under Hitler’s rule, and their stories add up to a 360-degree view of this critical time in history.
FICTION: SLICE OF LIFE How to Bake a Perfect Life by Barbara O’Neal
Ramona Gallagher is nursing sourdough starter when the dreaded phone call comes: Her 7-month-pregnant daughter’s husband has been wounded in Afghanistan.
Within hours, Ramona has taken over the care of her step-granddaughter and the child’s stray dog; the pipes in her house have burst; and she is teetering ever closer to bankruptcy.
Barbara O’Neal adds to the growing pile of novels fortified with recipes with her latest release, “How to Bake a Perfect Life.” Told alternately from Ramona’s, her daughter’s and her granddaughter’s perspectives, the novel includes bread and sourdough starter recipes.
But these are really just window dressing for the story, which explores serious subjects, including teen pregnancy, drug addiction and the war in Afghanistan. Ramona was a teenage mother. Now in her early 40s, she is still trying to figure out how to repair her relationship with her own mother and family while helping her daughter cope with her husband’s injuries.
Her daughter, Sofia, is suffering through the final stages of pregnancy while trying to remain strong for a husband who no longer seems to want her around. And her granddaughter is struggling with the potential loss of her father to war and her mother to addiction.
The beauty of O’Neal’s novel is in its recognition that sometimes good things happen along with the bad and that those chances at happiness — whether they’re baking bread or falling in love — cannot be pushed off to a more convenient moment without the risk of loss.
Despite the hard subject matter, “Perfect Life” is unfailingly hopeful, and while some might think the plot wraps up too conveniently, there’s nothing wrong with an occasional happy ending.
NONFICTION: PUNISHMENT
Stay of Execution: Saving the Death Penalty from Itself
by Charles Lane
Washington Post editorial writer Charles Lane succinctly makes the case in this slim volume for shrinking the death penalty in order to save it. The Supreme Court has pruned around the edges in recent years, barring capital punishment for offenders who are mentally disabled or were juveniles at the time they committed the crime.
But Lane argues that state legislators and Congress should now take the lead in ensuring capital punishment is reserved for “the worst of the worst” crimes.
He would limit the death penalty to acts of genocide, terrorism and the most heinous premeditated murders, such as those involving torture and rape, while excluding single murders committed in the course of more common felonies, such as robberies.
Lane would also centralize state decision-making about who gets charged with capital crimes. He is not too concerned about alleged racial bias or executing the innocent, neither of which he says is as large or ineradicable a problem as foes insist. Rather, he is troubled most about the inconsistent way capital punishment is applied.
But Lane’s eminently reasonable proposals are unlikely to be well received among lawmakers skittish about ratcheting back the war on crime or local prosecutors reluctant to cede control over capital punishment.
