Summer Snow (Paperback) | Released: 21 Jun 2019

For readers of Schindler's Ark (List), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and The Tattooist of Auschwitz - comes the first novel by Guy Dulac: 'Summer Snow.

'Spanning nearly eighty years, the story is one of horror, hope, and love. The book endeavours to show the human tragedy of all those involved in the Holocaust, and the animal instinct that drove them to survive at any cost.

Description: The year is 1987 and, to most, the Friedmann family appear to have a prosperous and envious lifestyle in rural England, but their lives have been shaped by a dark and terrible past. For, in 1945, they were amongst the very few survivors that left Bergen-Belsen - having also survived Auschwitz.

Five pieces of extraordinary luck are recalled in their memoir, inspiring their granddaughter to accept a place on a school trip to Poland and Auschwitz. But now the book and her visit bring back unwelcome memories to haunt them. The horrors of the past are about to be revisited upon them all.

I wanted to illustrate the mundanity of horror at the camps - it was all so ordinary. I think we all find it hard to understand and comprehend the millions killed during the war and the Holocaust. We also make the mistake of quarantining ourselves away from the Nazis - our way of dealing with it all. We use such words as true evil, madmen and monsters, but they were not all at the extreme end of the psychopathic scale - they were and still are, for the most part, average. It was not a small collective of serial killers that perpetrated these heinous crimes but millions of ordinary people in egregious circumstances. They were artists, civil servants, school teachers, shopkeepers - fathers, mothers, sons and daughters - they loved and were loved.

I believe if we forget this, then we open the door to repeated genocides, as we have seen occurring over the last forty-odd years. Most of us have the capacity for 'evil' given the perfect 'fire storm' that happened in Europe after the 'Treaty of Versailles.' The twenties and thirties fostered tribalism, nationalism and mistrust, and the need to blame others for a nation's misfortune. We see the same thing played out on the news each night - across the globe.

We all have an obligation, a duty, not to forget what happened in places such as Auschwitz, but in doing so we also, in some small way, grant their deepest, darkest wish. We hand back some power to the Nazi elite, we resurrect them from history's pages, and, after all, isn't that what the power-crazed always want... to be remembered?

Warning: Whilst the author has tried to make the book accessible to everyone who would like to read it, the dark subject matter has inevitably led to some very graphic descriptions throughout.