The boy who drew shadows

Hugo Fischer, a famous criminologist, comes to investigate. Around Christmas 1943. To Auschwitz. Hugo spent the previous ten years in Berlin, where they mostly turned a blind eye to what was happening in the concentration camps: terrible rumors, of course, circulated around the city, but reasonable people would not believe rumors, right? And now Hugo is faced with horror, for which he, a kindly man and by no means a fighter, is completely unprepared. Meanwhile, the Berlin authorities are interested in one single death that happened where death is a terrible everyday occurrence: a doctor who experimented on prisoners was found dead. And he was found by an eight-year-old boy - a test subject of Dr. Joseph Mengele, a young talented artist who had the skill and presence of mind to immediately sketch what he saw. A Jewish child from Bologna, a criminologist from the Berlin criminal police who has something to hide - a strange duo investigating a strange death in a terrible land - and a whole crowd of possible suspects, each also hiding their own secret. Oriana Ramunno wrote a detective thriller based on her Holocaust research - an incredible, but brilliantly successful move. “The Boy Who Drew Shadows” is “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” if Jean-Christophe Grange had written it: intense detective intrigue, a reliable historical background, the banality of evil and the ability to resist it in those lands from which hope has long ago left. Ramunno drew material, among other things, from the biography of her great-uncle, who visited the death camp and remembered that even in this hell, even among the guards, there were people who had the courage to remain human and resist.