Book review of The Unspeakable. Breaking my Family’s Silence Surrounding the Holocaust by Simon Steyne.

Published in January 2026, in Second Generation Voices magazine. No.91. ISSN 2397-5016

Many second-generation family histories, starting with the ‘shoebox in the wardrobe’ moment, are forensically researched and grippingly written accounts of discovery. Nicola Hanefeld’s book contributes something more. Considering the author’s career path, in maternal health, the Alexander Technique and Bach flower remedies, it is perhaps unsurprising that she displays almost psychotherapeutic emotional intelligence. Nicola describes her own emotions and those of relatives she knew with gentle, touching freshness, empathising convincingly with those who were murdered fifteen years before she was born. We feel she has really come to know them.

Although the story is about her father’s family, The Unspeakable conveys a purposeful feminism, weaving together the threads of Nicola’s relationship with her father, with her cousin Julia and many others in the extended family.

Before reading The Unspeakable, I had not realised that Nicola, 40 years resident in Freiburg (where I studied as an under- and a postgraduate), writes fluent English because, like me, she was born in London to a German and Czech-speaking Jewish refugee father and an English mother. It took me a while to enter her writing and to follow the ‘cast’, but I was soon absorbed by the first of several gripping first-hand accounts, reproduced in full, reflecting experiences of exile, loss and identity. Pre- and post-war lives are recounted vividly, including informative, even exciting reports from her father and aunt of their brief returns to liberated Czechoslovakia. Nicola and Julia eventually return too, weeping together at the family house in Opava.

The commonplace second-generation family omerta meant Nicola became aware of the Holocaust and her own Jewish identity only later in life. Her ‘shoebox moment’, the catalyst for a growing curiosity and years of research reading and travel, came when her father sent her [in 2004] the 1935 Czech passport of Grete, his cosmopolitan polyglot aunt.

Given the silence, it is understandable Nicola had not known that the people she was researching might have had both Czech and German names. Despite having moved to live in Germany in her early 20s, she knew little about Nazi Germany, the occupation of the Czech lands and the Holocaust (an indictment of her school’s history curriculum, which stopped at Queen Victoria’s death). She “only had sketchy knowledge of the Warsaw ghetto and had never heard of the  Łódź ghetto.”

The Unspeakable is a family Alltagsgeschichte [account of everyday events] and emotional autobiography. It illustrates the personal histories of surviving and murdered relatives, alongside the historical events that shape their lives and fate, including a chapter about Switzerland’s treatment of refugees. She describes her own background and, as she learns more, her developing inner self. Exploring the darkest depths, her empathetic spirit accompanies the shaven and naked to the gas chambers: not the only moment that reduces the reader to tears.

Czech historian, Anna Hájková, suggests that 70 extended clans comprised the 120,000 pre-war Jewish population of Bohemia and Moravia. I consequently find coincidences with the author’s family history. Some of our pre-war Prague families were near neighbours. Nicola thanks the Prague archivist, Lenka Šindelářová - a distant cousin of mine.

Both our fathers spoke English inflected with German grammar. There were German books on the shelves of our childhood homes. Neither wished to speak German with their ‘English’ children. More sadly, and to our mutual dismay, I discovered that Nicola’s great-grandmother and my great-grandfather were both transported from Prague to Theresienstadt in June 1942. Seven weeks later, he and Nicola’s great uncle Edward died within 35 minutes of each other.

I approach second-generation writing primarily as a historian, but, emulating Nicola’s emotional honesty, I confess that, alongside shared grief, The Unspeakable aroused personal envy. Nicola’s Czech grandparents had come to Britain with their children in 1939 and were part of her childhood. My grandmother took her own life at home, rather than be transported. Our grandfather survived, but after release from imprisonment during the Stalinist purges, he was forbidden to leave Czechoslovakia. As children, my sister and I conjured up the presence of our ‘grandad over the sea’ by listening to the sound of waves in a conch shell.