The State of Dark

Like many children of Holocaust survivors, born in a postwar Holland to Jewish parents trying to rebuild their shattered lives, Judith Mok was raised with the emotional trauma of having no extended family. Despite the constant presence of the past in silences and whispered conversations, Judith had little information about the hundreds of her family members who had died in the camps. While training as a classical singer and performing all over the world, she was continually confronted with the Holocaust. After working with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, DBE, she discovered that the great German soprano had been a long-time member of the Nazi party and mistress of Hans Frank, the 'Butcher of Poland', entertaining German troops in Poland while 163 members of Judith's family were being murdered in Auschwitz and Sobibor. Over 100,000 Jews from Holland were killed in the Nazi camps, including the diarist Anne Frank, who befriended Judith's aunt Saar in Auschwitz in 1944. A phone call made from her Dublin home in 2017 leads to Judith's discovery, in shocking and intimate detail, of the terrible fate of her family. The State of Dark is a moving, beautifully-written memoir of a Second Generation survivor, as the Holocaust continues to be a living presence in European life and culture.