For me, non-fiction has to meet a lot of requirements in order to be classified as a good read. I’m a curious person. Even a nosy one. I want to eavesdrop on the writer’s experiences and secret thoughts. I want to know what happened to them. I want to understand how they felt. And, most of all, I hope to discover profundity, some kind of wisdom about what it means to be alive. It’s a tall order, but I’ve found a book that fills it.

Relief by Execution: A Visit to Maunthausen by Gint Aras (Finding the Moon in Sugar, The Fugue) is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time. Lyrical and gripping while sparkling with wisdom, Aras leads his reader through darkness and despair to epiphany as he ruminates on his experiences of abuse, racism, ethnic identity, and the long-term effects of generational trauma.

Aras begins with his December 2017 visit to Maunthausen, a World War II concentration camp site turned memorial outside of Vienna, Austria. He states his intent: to experience Maunthausen not in the mindset of a victim, but as a Nazi perpetrator. The rest of the book illuminates the circumstances that led him to this startling experiment.

Aras grows up in Chicago, the son of Lithuanian World War II refugees. From a young age, Aras’s father abuses him. His family is willing to overlook the abuse, which erases and invalidates his suffering. Aras also witnesses racism within his family, a drawing of lines that includes Lithuanians but excludes many others, including Jews and African Americans. As a young man, Aras travels Europe. Racial lines blur and Aras begins constructing a more holistic view of his own ethnic identity. It’s not until he becomes a father that a mental health crisis forces him to confront not only his past, but also his fear that he may again participate in the generational cycle of abuse.

Relief by Execution is memoir, but in the best way, feels more like a long essay. The English word essay comes from the French verb essayer, which means: to try, to attempt, to test, to aim. In that respect, Relief by Execution is a true essay: an attempt at understanding. And Aras’s “attempt,” this little diamond of a book, shines with clarity and value. 

Little, yes. The book is short, but that has no correlation to its impact. Aras tells his story beautifully, weaving together moments separated by centuries and connected by cobblestones. He is fearless and honest about his struggles, but also concise, limiting himself to description and analysis. This is especially effective in passages that could have been rendered longer, but with a potentially gaudy effect. He never wallows or resorts to self-pity. With a direct simplicity, Aras condenses complex, hard-earned truths into thoughtful, moving prose. He examines his experience with PTSD, and wrangles with his subconscious. He makes significant connections between his father’s abuse, his community’s denial and erasure of it, and the mindsets that sanctioned the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Aras’s angle on the Holocaust is not typical. Readers are more familiar with the perspective of the victim from writers like Elie Wiesel, Corrie ten Boom, and Anne Frank. But there are others involved in those stories. The Nazi soldiers, for example, but also those who helped them, or who simply didn’t resist racist propaganda because it had no perceived negative effects on themselves.

It is easy to sort the world into the dualistic “us” and “them” without thinking about the consequences of this mindset. If someone is right, someone else must be wrong. If someone is more, someone else must be less, and then they can be treated that way. Instead of choosing a side, Aras examines himself for right understanding, to see his whole self, even if it makes him uncomfortable. Even if it puts him in Maunthausen, in the position of the perpetrator.

In our fragmented, increasingly antagonistic Western culture, Gint Aras’s story is urgently important. We need books like these, full of honest writing, earnest exploration, and profound insight. Relief by Execution: A Visit to Maunthausen is available from Little Bound Books on October 8, 2019. I hope it assumes the place in literature it deserves.

– Allison Wall