To an extent, this book certainly belongs to the category of writing that has come to be known as Holocaust literature. Several very obvious difficulties make it one of the most daunting categories of writing to venture into. Compared to most historical calamities, by now the Holocaust might be the most extensively recorded event. What can a writer say about it now that will be new? Should one attempt to tell another Holocaust story if it has nothing of conceptual or moral significance to add? These questions may be unanswerable, yet any engaged reading of this text should probably at least recognize these issues.

The book is divided into five parts, the very first of which deals with the author's first meeting with his future subjects, and the process by which he embarked on this project. It is in the second part that the story proper of Shanti, first of the two lives, begins. Shanti, like Seth later, left India as a young man to study in Europe. Though he spoke no German, he was accepted at a dental institute in Berlin and lived in a house owned by one Mrs. Caro, whose elder daughter Henny was initially against the arrangement: "Don't take the black man," she warned her mother.

Shanti's life as a student, then as an officer in the Allied Forces, and the first decade after decommissioning seems full of sudden crises, any one of which might have halted a less steely character. When Shanti despaired of learning German on short notice, one terse line from his older brother--"put your backbone where your wishbone is"--seemed to be all the reminder he needed to find the necessary grit within himself. Thereafter, he faced--and overcame--every blow as if steeled by that one talismanic line from a revered brother.

During the Third Reich he was not allowed to pursue a career after graduation, so he migrated to England where the authorities refused to recognize his degree. Once he re-qualified himself, he was drafted as an officer in the British army, and went on to lose an arm in the Second World War. While he felt the anguish at such blows, he was never defeated, and overcame each crisis with courage and persistence. He not only learned to use his left arm, but also gained enough mastery over his artificial arm to start his own dental practice in London, where he lived out the rest of his mercifully less eventful life. The most significant event of this latter part of his life was his marriage to Henny.

When Shanti and Henny first met, Henny was engaged to another man. However, Henny came to regard this foreign boarder as a good friend. Indeed, when Henny fled to England to escape Nazi persecution, Shanti proved to be one of her principal sources of comfort through the uncertainties of war. Although he himself was away at war, he supported her with gifts and money, and most importantly with letters. The affectionate, and increasingly amorous, missives from the one person in her life who knew her from the wonderful days of her youth came to mean a great deal to Henny. Seth would discover years later from his aunt's letters that more than any great romantic passion it was this deep, warm glow of understanding that finally persuaded her to marry Shanti--eighteen years after they first met.

It may seem a little pallid to a casual observer, in this age of candied romances, that two lives brought together in war were tied more in friendship and understanding than in passion. Yet friendship in many ways emerges as the great theme of this book.

Apart from the gritty determination, courage and persistence repeatedly showed by Shanti, and shared by Henny, what sustained them is the quality of their friendships with each other and other kindred souls.

Seth originally expected to be able to say little about his aunt, who was reticent in life, and had already passed away. A chance discovery of a trove of her letters, however, opened up aspects of Henny's life to him. What these letters reveal is the depth of feeling Henny had for her friends, and how the Holocaust, and each person's role in it, recast those ties. Henny withdrew her friendship from people she felt had not at least sufficiently abhorred the Nazi crimes within their hearts. Yet a few people emerged as greater friends than she had previously recognized.

Friendship, that great ability of making kin out of strangers, weaves the two lives together. When Henny is failed by her own brother, fiancée, and friends--to say nothing of her countrymen--it is still other friends who save her. While Henny's circumstances are more tragic, this capacity for friendship is yet more remarkable in Shanti. Coming from a culture that relies so heavily on blood ties, Shanti ultimately makes a world of his own that is more defined by his friends than by literal family. This is probably the ultimate mark of his modernity and urbanity; and his final will, which so baffles the author, may also be a distorted extension of this same impulse of trusting forged ties over received ones.

Along with friendship, what else emerges here the value of normalcy. It may seem like a banal point, yet given the human craving for drama, it is also a point worthy of deliberate consideration. When the author's brother Shantum, a next generation immigrant, faces a kind of racism that Shanti never experienced, he becomes a combative radical. Yet Shanti reminds him that in the modern English liberal democracy, people had not been killed by the thousands by their neighbours for ideology or any other prejudice. It was a place where both he and his wife, fugitives of history, were finally able to find the peace and joy of living a "quiet middle-class life, without having it ripped apart by madmen."

Another small but remarkable moment that occurs in this book is in a slightly odd interlude in which the author tries to widen the lens to discuss the implications of the larger context of history. While his observations about the German nation are not strikingly novel, it is very remarkable that he nearly rejects the state of Israel as a morally acceptable consequence of the war. It is doubtful if there has ever been a book about the Holocaust that was utterly sympathetic to the victims of that great tragedy, and yet also condemns Israel as a solution.

Hopefully the book will not suffer too much controversy from this unusual and contrapuntal note, since it is almost a passing one. Besides, this book is less about the concatenations of history than about the quotidian marvels--bridge with friends, walks in the park--with which we survive history, and which alone matter.

Kazi Anis Ahmed is director of academic affairs at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.