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The Dark Room in Rachel Seiffert‘s novel is both real and symbolic. Helmut, the protagonist of the first section of the novel, really works in a dark room as a photographer. A minor handicap (a missing breast muscle that prevents him from raising one of his arms) prevents him from becoming a Nazi soldier. He succeeds as a photographer but some of the scenes we watch him photographing are very disturbing indeed – the rounding up of gypsies, on a piece of waste land, for transportation during the holocaust,  for example. Helmut is obsessed with what he sees but fails to respond and draw the conclusions the reader draws.

When I began to read yet another war novel, I was dubious about it. We have had so many of these. However, I was drawn in by the second section when we follow 12-year old Lore as she attempts to take her siblings to Oma in Hamburg from their home in a divided Berlin in 1945 after the cessation of hostilities. Lore’s parents, like Helmut, were enthusiastic and efficient Nazis and are now being punished in camps but Lore is driven to the absolute limits of desperation in her struggle to survive, aided by Thomas, another piece of war debris, an ex soldier who has concealed his identity.

I was strongly reminded of Ian Seraillier’s classic, The Silver Sword, and Anne Holm’s I Am David as we witness the hardship of these child victims of war.

The third section of the story when a teacher, Micha, attempts to discover the reality of his grandfather’s participation in the war as a member of the SS Waffen is a suitable follow up to the first two sections. We have been in the dark room of the past but Micha has experienced a post-war Germany where education systems have focused on sympathy for the victims but not on any understanding of the situation of the people involved in the atrocities.

Micha’s visits to Belarus, where his grandfather served, and his meeting with yet another voice from the past, Kolesnik, is a dramatic final twist in the story.

It is easy to understand why this novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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