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Martin Amis doesn’t make the people who run a concentration camp in his book automatons but rather portrays them as complex and flawed.Eric Thayer

Martin Amis's excruciating and masterful new Auschwitz novel The Zone of Interest imagines what life would have been like on the administrative fringes of the concentration camp, for the people who ran the murder factory with precision and gusto, and the families who lived there with them. The horror unfolds from the perspective of three characters: Paul Doll is the buffoon of a Commandant who lives with his wife, Hannah, and their children, and is busy climbing the concentration camp corporate ladder while dealing with the stress of increased transports (as if he didn't have enough on his plate, he complains). The "desk-murderer" Angelus "Golo" Thomsen is a well-connected Nazi bureaucrat, (a fictional character whose uncle is Martin Bormann, the real-life personal secretary to Adolf Hitler). And Szmul is a member of the Sonderkommando – Jews tasked with disposing the bodies of their fellow Jews after they were gassed – but not before extracting valuables such as their gold fillings. These were "the saddest men in the history of the world," Amis writes.

It is not the first time Amis – the larger-than-life bestselling British author of 14 novels, two short story collections and six works of non-fiction – has tackled the subject of the Holocaust. His 1991 novel Time's Arrow is also set partially at Auschwitz, in a tale told in reverse, so a doctor living in retirement in the U.S. goes backward in time eventually to the concentration camp, where people are plucked from the gas chamber, put on trains and sent home to their families.

But Amis's experience writing The Zone of Interest was heightened, with much more at stake personally. The book is dedicated, in part, to the "countless significant Jews and quarter-Jews and half-Jews" in his life, in particular his mother-in-law, his younger daughters and his wife.

"That was the difference between writing the first novel and writing the second," he explains in a recent telephone interview. "I've been with my wife for 20 years and the children, our two girls, are 17 and 15. So it was qualitatively different writing about it when your flesh and blood is involved. And of course my mother-in-law's family [from Ukraine] suffered, as every Jewish family did. So I took it more personally. When I wrote the first book, I knew I couldn't do anything about the experience of the victims, and in this one I felt I could a bit. That I somehow had the right of entry into that experience that I didn't have before."

The book begins with Thomsen falling in love at first sight with Hannah. She is in a white dress and cream-coloured straw hat, laughing, encircled by her children, moving past the windmill, the maypole, the three-wheeled gallows …

That was the scene that was in Amis's head, he explained in the interview from his Brooklyn home, when he sat down to write the book. "And then as often happens in the sort of magical way, all the rest just appeared."

The spark for the novel came when Amis learned in detail about the SS men bringing their families with them to live at the concentration camp. "I think it's an incredible fact that in fact the Commandant at Auschwitz had his five children there. And I just thought they must have had a sort of simulacrum of a kind of social life. They must have played along as if there was some reasonable social dimension to what they were doing. And that had always sort of bothered me."

Amis has read deeply on the subject over these many years. "I never stopped reading about it," he says. "And I haven't stopped now. I've read several books about Hitler and Nazism since finishing the book."

The Zone of Interest has been described as a comedy set at Auschwitz and an office comedy – a description Amis "hated." Neither of these comes remotely close to describing the book. And for Amis, they rankled. He wanted to use humour not to get laughs but to illustrate the utter baseness, stupidity, vulgarity of the Nazi project.

"I wanted the irony to be militant, satirical, but I wouldn't call it a satire and I wouldn't call it a comedy. I'd call it a serious historical novel but [one] that does use mockery as well as revulsion."

Hitler is never named in the book. (Amis employed a similar technique in his Soviet gulag novel House of Meetings, where Stalin's name is mentioned only once, in a footnote). But after the last, devastating page, Amis has inserted a creepy photograph of Hitler with Bormann standing behind him, smiling like a smitten schoolgirl.

"My wife questioned it," Amis says. "But I thought it was Hitler looking so loutish and Bormann smiling juicily over his shoulder, I just thought it was evocative."

Amis, 65, is a highly marketable author, and early reviews were glowing(in Britain both The Observer and The Spectator called it the best thing he has written since London Fields, 25 years ago). But his publishers in Germany and France passed on this book, leading to speculation that there may have been some discomfort about the subject matter given the Second World War history of those countries.

Amis's reaction? "As you'd expect, sort of all stunned and bitter." He says there was no conversation with his French publisher, and he received a "perfunctory" letter from his German publishing saying they'd found Thomsen's position unconvincing. (He has since secured a new publisher in France.)

"What you actually feel when that happens is that you thought you had a relationship with the publishers and in fact you don't. I always assume that publishers go by whether they're going to do well with the book. So that's what I suspect they thought; that it wasn't going to do well. I'm reluctant to attribute anything grander to them than that."

Amis, who describes himself as a Philo-Semite, believes anti-Semitism continues to be an issue in Europe. "I promise you that when you bring up Israel anywhere in Europe [when public speaking], the whole atmosphere of the room changes," he says. "And there's no other explanation for it other than subconscious anti-Semitism. Nothing else explains it."

The situation in Israel might. Amis has always sympathized with Israel, he says, even if the country makes it "very hard for one to support it." He adds: "The Holocaust and Zion is one story. It's hard to separate the two historical streams. That's a symbol of renewal. Saul Bellow said to me that without Israel, Jewish manhood would have been finished. And there would have been nothing left for the Jews but abject assimilation and just forget the whole 4000 year story. And just hunker down and assimilate, become invisible. And that, as we know, hasn't happened."

Amis is now working on an autobiographical novel in which Bellow, along with Philip Larkin and Christopher Hitchens, are the main characters. "This is really a response to Christopher's death in a way, because suddenly his story is over. It's complete. And I can write about him with a freedom that I didn't have, couldn't have had, couldn't have imagined while he was alive."

Amis dedicates The Zone of Interest in part to two other deceased writers, Holocaust survivors Primo Levi and Paul Celan. In his acknowledgments, he shares a famous and powerful passage from Levi. Shortly after arriving at Auschwitz, packed into a shed with other prisoners and nursing a four-day thirst, Levi spotted an icicle through the window, reached out and broke the icicle off – only to have a guard snatch it away from him. "Why?," Levi asked. The guard responded: There is no why here.

When looking for that impossible why, there's a sort of safety in thinking of the men (and women) who carried out these horrific crimes – and manufactured the mechanisms to do so – as automatons, brainwashed by an evil fanatic. Amis instead uses his literary virtuosity to paint them as humans – complex, flawed and real. In doing so, he also implicates corporate Germany of the Nazi era, German voters, anyone who smelled that smell – and who, nearby, did not.

"I do think there are responsibilities involved in taking this subject on. And as with all writing you have to earn it. But I felt I'd done the emotional suffering spread out over 20 years and I felt that I'd sort of earned the right to address it, just by preoccupation and reading. And you proceed," says Amis, who "gratefully" accepted the duty of writing this novel.

"For a subject like this, you bring everything you've got."

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