This is an abolustle triumph of a book and I think everybody remotely interested in the Holocaust should read it. Ostensibly it's a story about a mother who fell in love with an SS officer and is looking for her bastard child who was stolen and given to a German family through Himmler's Lebensborn program, but it's so much more than that. It's a novel but most of the characters were real, and it's clear Drndić was in the archives for years bringing up quotes, situations, photographs that she litters the book with. It's written in this dreamlike style that glides from the particular of Haya's (the aforementioned mother) life and memories to the general of the Austro-Hungarian Slovene-Italian-German experience of World War One and Two. The weight of the past hangs heavy, crushing many in its wake.

Drndić is focused on those who lived during the War without taking sides, who just tried to get on with their lives and looked the other way as millions were trafficked off to their deaths. Her gaze is not kind on these people. It has a Bernhard like rant quality to it, and indeed Bernhard is one of the "characters" in the novel itself, using extensive passages of interviews with him to flesh him out. It's got conversations from Nuremberg, diary entries of SS officers, and a whole host of details and situations and feelings that will make you want to beat Nazis to death for the rest of your lives.

I'll leave you with a sample of her writing, a passage that really stuck with me. I cannot recommend this book enough, but alas it does not appear there's a digitized copy online anywhere. Hopefully your local library or book store has one and you can check out this masterpiece of literature!

The truth is absolutely simple. Our fathers were criminals and murderers, so screw those platitudes about the banality of evil. There are no justifications, there is no valid relativization, there is no excuse. There is no mercy for the pathological debris of humanity, those tainted minds shouldn't have even been brought to trial, what miserable justice, what defense of which dignity, whose dignity, which pathetic Nurembergs, Stuttgarts, Dusseldorfs, Frankfurts, Munichs, Hagues, money wasted, time wasted, only dark, farcical performances after which not a single diseased mind has learned nor will learn a thing, all of them should have been executed after a summary trial the way the Russians and East Germans did in '46, '47, and '48, their germ should have been sent to seed so the new ones don't come along who keep coming and coming, they, too, should be swiftly done away with before they die in comfortable prisons playing chess or, worst of all, free, as heroes to whom monstrous monuments are raised, whose names bedeck city squares and airports, that scum ought to be eliminated so that the story wouldn't continue, elegantly and brazenly, inserting itself into reality and so that the malevolent Phoenix would once and for all stop hovering over our heads. That eternal and infinite Herumgeschmuse of the children of the murderers and criminals is becoming pathetic. Their "They were little Nazis" holds no water. There are no little Nazis. To begin (or end) with, to the children and grandchildren of the murderers and criminals I propose a verbal Exerzier and exercitationes of self-denazification, a mea culpa in the name of the second generation and the third. The fact that the descendants of the Nazis, Fascists, Ustašas, homeguard fighters, Chetniks, and so on and so forth, prefer not to recognize the crimes of their fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, dimishes the overall crimes of the Germans and others, which were committed during the Third Reich. And this holds true, as well, for the descendants of the former satellite Nazi-Fascist fabrications, formerly fascist countries. It applies across the board. And it applies to the Israelis today. I'm still waiting now for the Americans to bump off Morales, the silence has poured into a gigantic block of reinforced concrete, and the Catholic Church, this caricatured parade and more than revolting fabrication, this costumed theatre of transparent lies and empty promises should be done away with right now, once and for all, because the gatherings of the zealously blinded masses who bow down to the divine emissary are reminiscent of the ominious gatherings at which people shouted Sieg Heil!

EDIT: Also adding a link to an interview with her that I loved. Some fun excerpts:

Recently in Charlottesville, but throughout Europe and beyond, the extreme right is approaching, fortunately still on tiptoe and in les petits pas, which of course does not make it less dangerous. There are no small fascisms, there are no small, benign Nazisms. That is what I try to talk about in my books, the importance of remembering. In this age of aggressive revisionism—which tends to brainwash our already damaged, deformed minds—without memory, we are easy prey to manipulation, we lose identity.

It is not my job to interpret what I write. I find it amusing, even comic, if not ridiculous, when at readings, especially of poetry, authors give a short “introduction” to their work. So that the audience would “get it.” So that there would be no misunderstanding. So that the listeners would grasp exactly what and how the “creator” wants. I love open endings, generally speaking, and not only in literature. The undefined, the unrestricted offers freedom of thought and freedom of action. The existence of didactic, logorrheic scribblers, though, is legitimate. They are marketable and easily digested. The problem is their metastatic proliferation at the expense of the ever-diminishing thinking species.