The Little Liar, Mitch Albom, HarperCollins, New York, NY, 2023, 333 pgs. $26.99.
By Daniel Santacruz
In life, there are big liars and little liars. In this fast-paced novel, the little liar is an 11-year-old boy, Nico Krispis, that tells big lies that affect the lives of many.
Other characters are Sebastian, their schoolmate Fanni and the Nazi officer Udo Graf. But lurking behind the scenes is the most terrifying of all the characters: Truth.
Truth, which narrates the entire story, makes its debut on page seven with a stern warning: ``I am the shadow you cannot outrun, the mirror that holds your final reflection. You may duck my gaze for all your days on earth, but let me assure you, I get the last look.”
No less threatening is Graf who, at 24, heard the Wolf speak at a public square and married the cause: a new Reich. Over time he reaches the rank of mid-level commander of the Nazi SS, and the Wolf promotes him and sends him from Germany to Salonika, or Thessaloniki, to rid the city of every Jew.
The Wolf isn’t identified by name but you don’t have to rake your brain to know it’s Hitler.
The novel follows the characters from 1936 to the 1970s through Europe, the United States and back to Salonika.
Before the war, the city was the only one in Europe with a Jewish majority—50,000 Jews—many of them Ladino speaking, descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1492. It was a ripe target for the Nazis to implement what they had done to the Jews of France, Hungary and Poland: ship them to concentration camps.
Between March and June 1943, some 48,000 Jews were deported from Greece, most from Salonika, to Auschwitz.
Nico’s friends nicknamed him chioni, Greek for snow, because he doesn’t lie. But that changes the day when the cattle cars appear in the city, ready to transport thousands of Jews to that infamous concentration camp.
At Graf’s request so he could save his own family, Nico is to go to the station platform to persuade the unsuspecting Jews that the trains will take them to a “homeland,” somewhere in the north, where a new life awaits them, where families will be together.
The “resettlement” deception was the biggest of all the lies floating in the air of Salonika. Among the less harmful ones were the phony pink receipts given to the Jews assuring them that their homes would be protected until their return.
Nico, who speaks Ladino, French, Hebrew, Greek and some German, escaped from Salonika after the deportations ended and never told the truth again after that.
The Holocaust in Greece is a topic seldom explored in historical fiction and Albom, an award-winning journalist and the author of several fiction and non-fiction books, gives the reader a different perspective.
This novel accurately reflects the events of the tragedy of Greek Jewry during he 1930s and 1940s, which the author meticulously researched. Included also are accounts of survivors.
“Without the brave accounts of those who lived through it, we would have never known the depth of the evil that took place at the hands of the Nazis, and would have no blueprint to ensure it never happens again,” writes Albom in the “From the Author” chapter. “Many brutal truths went into the construction of the book.”
The book can also be read as a morality tale or a parable that delves into the consequences of dishonesty and lies.
August 20, 2024
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