Three stories about the effects of the holocaust on three German (non-Jewish) families: The first two are from the point of view of children and young people who are witness to war and brutality, not entirely cognizant of their meaning, who endure their own suffering, albeit never suggested by the author to be the equivalent of what the Nazis inflicted. The first is about a handicapped young photographer, who stumbles with his camera on violent scenes and mass exoduses at a train station and who also survives the Berlin bombing. The second story is about a family of five children, left to make their hazardous way across Germany at the end of the war through four occupation zones until they can reach their grandmother in Hamburg. The third and longest story, which encompasses almost the entire second half of the book, takes a different approach with a probing theme. This story takes place in the present day and the narrator, Micha, is an adult who is trying to find out if his grandfather killed Jews when he was an SS officer in the Ukraine during the war. Although the writing, particularly the dialogue in this story, is a little awkward at times and the speakers hard to keep straight, overall it succeeds with its message. Most questions and thoughts that might go through anyone's mind are examined here. Without giving away what happens, I think it would be safe to say, that Micha finds out that there can never be a satisfactory answer to why evil takes place. I highly recommend the vision of this book and the treatment of a volatile subject in a subtle, emotionally complex, and sensitive manner with a different viewpoint.

...The Dark Room concerns itself with events in Germany before, during and after the Second World War. There is Helmut (who reads like an echo of The Tin Drum's Oscar Matzerath), a boy born without a pectoral muscle who, as a result, cannot fight alongside his friends and neighbours in the war. Already quiet and withdrawn, Helmut withdraws from his family into the dark room where he works developing photographs of Berlin and surreptitiously noting the numbers of people leaving the city not to return. Lore comes next. She is a fourteen year old girl forced by circumstance (her parents are imprisoned by the Americans in the first days of defeat) to travel across country with her sister and three brothers, confronting death and national shame in the revelation of the Holocaust (they are American actors those people, yes, the people in the large graves covered in lime?). Micha figures last (and figuratively acts as Sieffert's retelling of Schlink's The Reader), attempting to understand the role played by his grandfather in the war (that perennial question, did you kill, did you kill, did you kill?).

All of which makes for a thoughtful and compelling read. Sieffert has a remarkable talent for saying something complex simply. Her sentences are short. The words she selects do their job better than you would ever expect simple words to do. Stray details (tree blossom, cloud, shoe leather, straw) conjure wider space. A world falls into place without you noticing.

And yet there is a problem with Rachel Sieffert's debut novel. The problem is this: this is not a novel. What you have here are two novellas and a short story. Two novellas and a short story that are connected by the fact that they are all set in Germany and revolve around events that took place during the Second World War. Because you read expecting a novel, you strain your eyes looking for what connects the characters within each section but, of course, nothing (other than historical context) connects these characters. Each tale is distinct. The Dark Room (like David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, another collection of pieces masquerading as a novel) is very, very, very good. But it is not a novel.

Rachel Seiffert is a writer who was born in England but now lives in Germany. She should be congratulated for having the courage to tackle very difficult subject matter as she did in "The Dark Room," i.e., telling the story of the Holocaust, not through the eyes of its surviving victims, but through the eyes of the murderers instead.

Although the protagonists (there are three) in Seiffert's book aren't actually murderers per se, they have become murderers by association; their implicit acceptance of Nazi Germany's crimes against the Jews has condemned them. There is Helmut, who is a Berlin teenager at the start of the war; Lore, a young girl who becomes yet another displaced person at the war's end; and Micha, perhaps the most interesting character, who is actually a member of the next generation. Micha is only thirty years old in 1997 when he begins to question his own ancestry and the history of his family.

I like the way Seiffert tells the stories of her three protagonists. Her prose is terse, quite muted and written entirely in the present tense. We are given only information the protagonists themselves know and understand and they come to know and understand themselves and their situations very slowly and very deliberately.

It is fitting that none of the characters in the three stories that make up "The Dark Room" fully understands the situation that surrounds him or her. Helmut, the protagonist of the first story, becomes a photographer's assistant when a birth defect keeps him out of the army. In his photographs of Berlin he notices that people keep disappearing, but it is quite some time before he understands why.

The book's second protagonist, Lore, may be the character least likely to comprehend the horrific events going on around her. She is only a teenage girl, yet she must take care of her siblings on a journey from Bavaria to Hamburg. It takes both Lore and the reader time before they understand why Lore must get rid of "the badges" and just exactly what those badges really are. Lore's story is a story filled with deception and ambiguity and we really don't comprehend all of the deception until the story's end.

Micha's story is the most tangled, perhaps because he is the protagonist furthest removed from the happenings during the war. Micha is a young German school teacher who is struggling to come to terms with his ancestry and his school's activities commemorating the Holocaust.

All three of the stories that make up "The Dark Room" represent a different, but very good look at the Holocaust and help us to understand the feelings of those involved, albeit indirectly. Germany is indeed a "dark room," but it is a room in which the truth must eventually come to light.