Chidgey manages this contrivance with great care, both for its historical fidelity and the nature of its effects. Indeed, the same can be said for the book as a whole. Its aim is not to elicit sentiment, but to enlist witnesses. And as witnesses, we find ourselves unreliable, noticing the unsteadiness of our own gaze and the lapses of our own remote sympathy. There is no such thing,’ wrote Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprún, ‘as an innocent memory’. Catherine Chidgey has tested these words before – in her previous novel, the award-winning The Wish Child, she followed two children living in Nazi Germany as ‘the war keeps rolling on like bad weather’. It was provocative, persuasive, utterly readable. Greta Hahn’s husband Dietrich has become Buchenwald’s Chief Administrator and they move to a spacious house nearby. Greta trips through her days in her sunny new home surrounded by friendly neighbours, attended by Josef, a willing young servant recruited from the camp.

Greta goes to immense mental effort to refuse to know what is happening at the camp. Another Nazi housewife with whom she becomes friends casually mentions the torture of prisoners and Greta just goes a bit blank and changes the topic of conversation. She deliberately avoids curiosity and even common sense: “I decided not to look too closely.” Others collude in her ignorance: “You don’t need to think about things like that, Frau Hahn.” Whenever she comes up against some physical evidence of the atrocities happening on her doorstep she simply removes either it or herself from the scene. The story begins in 1930 with Doktor Lenard Weber describing how he met his wife Anna at the exhibition of ‘The Transparent Man’ a see-through model of a man. Doktor Weber is the inventor of a machine that could be a cure for cancer using ‘remote sympathy’. His ‘Sympathetic Vitaliser’ uses electricity to create resonance through the body and therefore reduce tumours. They marry and have a daughter. The Doktor’s narrative is written as a letter to his daughter after the war. By 1936 Weber is coming under pressure to divorce, Anna is Jewish and even though Weber is very Aryan looking himself he also has a Jewish grandfather. More fundamentally, these narratives are constrained almost from the outset in their possible outcomes. In part, this is a function of historical irony. When Greta’s diary entries begin, in February 1943, her household is decamping to a villa at Buchenwald, where Dietrich is proudly taking up a post. Assuaging her anxieties about the move, he assures her that they will be provided with every comfort, including “excellent servants”. We know, of course, how these comforts and servants will be supplied. We know, too, how Hahn’s illustrious career will end: his transcribed interviews begin in October 1954, meaning that he has been tried by the Americans and escaped execution. Il primo io-narrante che incontriamo - in una lettera alla figlia scritta nel 1946 ha fin qui condotto il racconto iniziando dal 1930 e a questo punto è giunto al 1936 - la sente pronunciare dal direttore dell’ospedale dove lavora, apprende che il suo problema, quello che gli impedisce di proseguire la sperimentazione medica, è avere sposato una donna ebrea. Any comprehension of the Holocaust, wrote Australian historian Inga Clendinnen, ‘poses almost direct threat to our confidence in our own personal integrity’. There is no culpability, she added; rather, the simple fact that those involved were people ‘very like ourselves’.Every time I read a pukapuka set in Nazi times I become obsessed with the question: what would I have done if I had been there? I remember studying Nazi Germany in high school and perseverating on the idea that the ordinary people of Germany could have stopped it all from happening if they had just banded together. At 16, I could not imagine turning my eyes away. I knew for certain: I would have seen through the Nazi propaganda and fought them tooth and nail (probably in a smart trenchcoat like Michelle in ‘Allo ‘Allo!). Now, at 40, I am uneasily not so sure.

I bought this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize (an overdue example of UK literary fiction prizes recognising Antipodean authors), and it was, prior to my reading, also shortlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award. When Frau Hahn’s poor health leads her into an unlikely and poignant friendship with one of Buchenwald’s prisoners, Dr Lenard Weber, her naive ignorance about what is going on so nearby is challenged. A decade earlier, Dr Weber had invented a machine believed that its subtle resonances might cure cancer. But does it really work? One way or another, it might save a life. When Frau Hahn is forced into an unlikely and poignant alliance with one of Buchenwald’s prisoners, Dr Lenard Weber, her naïve obtuseness about what is going on so close at hand around her is challenged.

A tour de force about the evils of obliviousness, Remote Sympathy compels us to question our continuing and willful ability to look the other way in a world that is once more in thrall to the idea that everything – even facts, truth and morals – is relative.

A different perspective on the life surrounding and within the concentration camps, distressing at times to read but I found it interesting. Would make a good movie. The looming presence of the nearby prison camp – lying just beyond a patch of forest – is the only blot to mar what is otherwise an idyllic life in Buchenwald. The tension mounts, building on the failure of Weber’s machine, the progression of Greta’s illness (Greta’s death would end Weber’s protected status and presumably that of his wife and child) and the ever approaching forces of the Allies and the Red Army. Catherine Chidgey is a novelist and short story writer whose work has been published to international acclaim. In a Fishbone Church won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in her region. In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Golden Deeds was Time Out’s book of the year, a Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times and a Best Book in the LA Times. She has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for The Wish Child. Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the DUBLIN Literary Award and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Axeman's Carnival won the Acorn at the New Zealand Book Awards - the country's biggest literary prize. The depiction of camp life was suitably horrific, justifiably so, but I was really interested to find at the end of the book that much of it was based on real people and events, with post-war trial detail being taken directly from the American Military Tribunal in 1947.I REALLY didn't like Dietrich, but guess that is the point, and could not get my head around the way he justified a lot of his decisions to make it seem like he didn't know their true impact on the prisoners. As for his growing collection of gold... Chidgey alternates between three main characters. Leonard Weber is a doctor of Jewish ancestry, inventor of the "Sympathetic Vitaliser", an electrotherapeutic device he believes could cure metastatic carcinoma. SS Sturmbannfuhrer Dietrich Hahn, the new camp administrator at Buchenwald, reads of his work and hopes for a cure for his wife, Greta, our third narrator. She is desperately hoping for a second child but can't conceive because of ovarian cancer. The story largely unfolds through Weber's letters, Greta's diary and the transcribed recordings of Dietrich's post-war trial at Dachau. We hear from the recorded testimony of Hahn, as well as the invented diaries of his wife,and a series of letters from Weber about the contradictions and the horror of Buchenwald, and how this incomprehensible ideology affected the lives of so many. How a minor flaw in a fabric design, in a pair of beautifully made curtains by skilled craftsmen, noticed by a small child, could lead to a death sentence. Moving away from Munich isn’t nearly as wrenching an experience for Frau Greta Hahn as she had feared. Their new home is even lovelier than the one they left behind, and best of all – right on their doorstep – are some of the finest craftsmen from all over Europe, prepared to make for her and the other officers’ wives living in this small community anything they could possibly desire: new curtains from the finest silks, furniture designed to the most exacting specifications, execute a fresco or a mural even.