An interesting and rather different collection of stories about the suffering of people at the hands of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Most, but not all, of the narrators are Jewish, and I think they're all Polish.

What makes the stories original is that Grynberg devotes considerable attention to his characters' postwar experiences. So many Holocaust books, both fiction and non-fiction, end at liberation or have just a short epilogue, and sometimes you get this "and they lived happily ever after" sense. But in fact the survivors of the carnage were all severely traumatized, and those in the USSR and eastern Europe had to deal with additional suffering and repression.

This book wouldn't be for everyone, and it took me awhile to finish, but it was certainly worth reading. ( )

Drohobycz is a town located in that area of Europe that has been batted back and forth between Poland and the Ukraine. At the start of World War II, nearly 50% of its population was Jewish. Grynberg is a child survivor of the Holocaust, and most of his 26 books of prose, poetry, and fiction deal with the Holocaust and its aftermath.

Drohobycz, Drohobycz consists of 13 'True Tales of the Holocaust and Life After.' Because of Drohobycz's location, a few of the stories also relate to the Stalinist purges.

The stories read like interviews that have been transcribed into narrative form. In each, the individual character of the narrator is fully realized and clearly distinguishable from the narrators of the other tales, although their experiences parallel each other. In the title story, the murder of the writer Bruno Schulz by the Nazis is described by the narrator, who was one of Schulz's former secondary school students. The murder is almost an aside to the other horrific events that unfold in the account. ( )

I visited the small Polish village of Oswiecim a couple of years ago; it's better known as Auschwitz, and was home to two concentration camps. They're chilling places - especially Birkenau, which was custom-built by the Nazis to operate at the greatest efficiency. However, it was hard to really get a handle on the level of human suffering - buildings and grass and barbed wire can only say so much. For the rest, one has to turn to the people who survived to tell the tale. Their stories, some of which are collected here, are the true testament to suffering and survival. It's not a pretty read - though the quality of the writing is frankly exceptional - but I think it is a necessary one. ( )