Tom Lampert Ein einziges Leben. Acht Geschichten aus dem Krieg (One Life: Eight Stories from the War.) Carl Hanser Verlag, August 2001. 316pp. ISBN 3-446-20075-4 Since at least the publication of Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark, writers have successfully suspended potential disbelief in depicting the horrors of the Nazi epoch by making their accounts explicitly fictional yet closely tied to verifiable facts. This method enables the problems of unreliable memory, unwitting distortion, and suppression resulting from trauma to be overcome and indeed turned to use. But it also lays the writer open to possible accusations of falsification and invention. Lampert has chosen to focus on characters whose lives he can document in an appendix. Not all were Jewish. Although known to scholars of National Socialism for some time, the protagonists of these stories have received little attention to date. Some were obscure, some were marginal because their actions did not fit cleanly into the accepted categories used to interpret the Nazi era. But between them they stand as a cross-section of all those whose outlook, language or manners caused them to become victims of the Nazis' measures. The author's aim is to reconstruct the experiences of the time as they seemed to those involved, in all their complexities and ambiguities, without the hindsight of later generations, and to leave the final judgement to his readers themselves. The fates of this chosen company vary along with their circumstances. Miriam, a problem teenager, has already left Germany for the safety of Palestine when the account of her adventures begins, but she is expelled and returned to Germany. Wilhelm K, National Socialist and anti-semite, is appointed General Commissioner of occupied White Ruthenia in 1941, and battles to save as many Jewish lives as possible in Minsk - even just 'one life'. A third and most pitiful victim is an elderly non-Jewish lady in a rural community who is deliberately left to die, simply so that the authorities, having pronounced her to be Jewish (and therefore not eligible for treatment) can declare the community (inaccurately) to be judenfrei. With their skilful blend of reportage, restrained indignation and understated irony, Lampert's tales of shame have a collective impact which it is impossible to overlook.