Insep­a­ra­ble is that rare book that is able to both deliv­er the grip­ping tes­ti­mo­ny of one family’s Holo­caust sur­vival and also pro­vide a deep­er under­stand­ing of the his­to­ry unfold­ing around them. Through the sto­ry of the Hess fam­i­ly, Faris Cas­sell con­veys the hor­ror and sav­agery unleashed on Jews by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Karl and Ilse Hess were hap­py new­ly­weds liv­ing in Ger­many in the 1930s when Hitler came to pow­er. Rec­og­niz­ing the dan­ger of stay­ing in Ger­many, Karl and Ilse immi­grat­ed to Ams­ter­dam, believ­ing that the city would remain neu­tral in the face of Ger­man aggres­sion. Karl and Ilse set­tled into life in Ams­ter­dam, where they even­tu­al­ly wel­comed a set of twins, Mar­i­on and Ste­fan, in Jan­u­ary 1938. Their peace­ful exis­tence did not last long. By Sep­tem­ber 1939, Europe was at war; and by May 10, 1940, Ger­many invad­ed the Nether­lands, shat­ter­ing the Hess’s sense of secu­ri­ty and set­ting them on an unimag­in­able path marked by fear, dis­ease, and death.

Cas­sell describes how, through­out the sum­mer of 1941 and into 1942, the Ger­mans stripped the Jews liv­ing in the Nether­lands of their free­dom and pos­ses­sions, iso­lat­ing them from Dutch cul­ture. Begin­ning in 1942, Jews were sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly pulled from their homes and deport­ed to West­er­bork tran­sit camp and even­tu­al­ly to camps fur­ther east. Karl and Ilse had to decide whether to attempt to hide their young twins with a fam­i­ly or stay togeth­er. They made the fate­ful deci­sion that ​“come what may, they would keep their fam­i­ly together.” 

The author describes Karl and Ilse’s jour­ney through West­er­bork and Bergen-Belsen, as well as the many risky and heart-wrench­ing deci­sions they had to make in order to pre­vent their chil­dren from being deport­ed and sum­mar­i­ly mur­dered. Cas­sell brings the family’s his­to­ry to life by using their own mem­o­ries — mem­o­ries that include the dai­ly strug­gle to stay alive and main­tain hope in the face of beat­ings, dis­ease, and star­va­tion. It is one thing to learn about the num­ber of peo­ple who were beat­en and mur­dered in con­cen­tra­tion and death camps; it’s anoth­er to read Marion’s descrip­tion of her time at Bergen-Belsen. “[M]arching boots, leather straps and cud­gels ready to strike, hunger, cold, shout­ing, scream­ing and always feel­ing like a penned ani­mal,” she recalls. She was only six years old.

Although Cassell’s focus is on the Hess fam­i­ly, she makes sure to describe WWII at large. Her efforts to com­mu­ni­cate the war’s pro­gres­sion and the Nazis’ efforts to mur­der all Jews in Europe may be a bit over­whelm­ing for a read­er new to the his­to­ry. But Cas­sell is able to ground that his­to­ry in the Hess family’s per­son­al jour­ney of survival. 

This is a mas­ter­ful book that com­bines pow­er­ful sto­ry­telling with a metic­u­lous atten­tion to his­tor­i­cal detail.