Jerry Stahl

In the early autumn of 2016, Jerry Stahl, journalist, television and film writer, went on a bus tour of the Holocaust in Poland and Germany. It was both a professional assignment and a personal pilgrimage to the world in which so many of his family had been murdered by the Nazis. And it was a form of therapy for dealing with his own existential demons, his depression, his grief at his failed marriage, his separation from his daughters, his former life as a drug addict.

He begins by telling us how much he hates traveling by bus, especially as a member of a tour group, and that's before he gets to the grim subject of the tour, the worst, most hellish places on earth, the chief scenes of the Holocaust. The tour begins in Warsaw and continues to Krakow, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Nuremburg, Munich and Dachau.

The wonder of it is that Stahl infuses this travel guide from Hell with a lot of humor. It is very dark humor, to be sure, and much of it is self-deprecating. He tells us how he refused to eat at the cafeteria in Buchenwald, but was not above walking through it and taking photos of those crass enough to eat in such a place. He was feeling all smug and self-righteous, until he walked into a plate glass door and a fellow tourist had to bandage his bleeding forehead.

Stahl was at first profoundly uncomfortable among the other tourists on his bus, he was one of the only two Jews in the group, the only vegetarian, the only guy who didn't drink (not even in Munich in Oktoberfest!), but he came to feel an affectionate bond with his fellow travelers. He has a gift for seeing the best in humanity, even when constantly confronted with evidence of cruelty and depravity on an industrial scale. But he is keenly attuned to the universality of evil and our need to be ever vigilant to its existence and threat, including today and here in the MAGA Land of the Proud Boys and their fascist brethren. He ends on a chilling note, "It is not the Holocaust" that is the exception, it is the pause between holocausts that is the exception".… (altro)

This author writes an observational dark humor travel book about a guided group bus tour of concentration camps in Poland. This irreverent account poignantly explores how the author grapples with the horrors and atrocities of the Holocaust. If you thought you had read and seen all the films depicting this subject, this author's approach focuses on his own reactions that lends a fresh approach. It's not the facts but the experience of facing and standing where the horrors occurred. I recommend this book for understanding the human condition.
… (altro)