January 2025 will be the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, a single event which has come to symbolise the Holocaust.
No-one could claim that in the eighty years since there’s been a shortage of literature on the Holocaust: a search on Amazon for ‘Holocaust books’ shows over 40,000 titles. Refine that to ‘Holocaust History Books’ and it’s still over 20,000 books.
Two of the finest and most comprehensive histories of the Holocaust are Saul Friedlander’s The Years of Extermination and David Cesarani’s Final Solution. Both have bibliographies running to over fifty pages, listing more than a thousand books each.
And there are few signs of Holocaust literature drying up. There are still stories to be told, still new angles to explore.
These two books are good examples of this.
I Am André is Diana Mara Henry’s account of the remarkable life of André Joseph Scheinmann. Scheinmann was born into a Jewish family in Munich in 1915. Munich was probably a good a place as any in Germany to be in no doubts as to the danger posed by the Nazis. André’s father Max campaigned against the Nazis in the 1920’s and in 1933, soon after Hitler came to power, the family moved to France. By the time the Second World War started, the family had given up their German passports and André and his father volunteered for the French Army.
André joined an infantry regiment and was given the name André Maurice Peulevey, an identity he retained throughout the war. He was wounded in action in Belgium and taken to a military hospital in Rennes from where he was taken prisoner by the Germans in June 1940.
A month later he escaped from his prisoner of war camp and ended up working for French railways as an interpreter. Soon he became active in the resistance, eventually running his own operations and so trusted by the British whose networks he was working with that in early January 1942 he was sent to England for training, returning to France a month later as a MI6 agent with instructions to set up a new network – and half a million francs to fund it.
A year later he was captured by the Germans: he managed to survive a year of imprisonment – much of it in solitary confinement – and torture at the notorious Fresnes prison near Paris. In July 1943 he was transferred to Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and before being sent to Dachau in September 1944, from where he was liberated at the end of April 1945.
While André’s story is undoubtedly a fascinating one, this account of it is written in considerable detail. That is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, after all, when dealing with a subject as sensitive as this, it is important to set out the evidence. As interesting as his story is, I did find at times the dramatic and fast-moving nature of it was lost in the detail.
Nonetheless, it is an important book. Some holocaust historians have at times questioned the importance of what is often termed ‘survivor testimonies’ because by its nature these accounts are subjective and just tell one person’s story, often related many years after the events. But a book like this is important because it can be added to other testimonies – for example of the horrors of Natzweiler-Struthof or details of the various resistance networks he was involved with. The body of survivor’s testimonies are crucial in helping to provide corroborating evidence.
Given the enormity of the Holocaust, it is perhaps best understood through stories of individuals or of particular events.
Diana Mara Henry is an award-winning journalist, and author of ublished by Chiselbury.
Alex Gerlis is the author of Every Spy a Traitor and eleven other espionage novels all published by Canelo. His next novel, The Second Traitor, is to be published in August 2025.
