Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death

Otto Dov Kulka

Translated by Ralph Mandel

“It is almost unclassifiable… It tries to penetrate the maze of established fact and personal experience in order to arrive at what seems unreachable… Nothing else I have read comes close to this profound examination of what the Holocaust means. Kulka looks everywhere for loopholes in the immutability of death. His journey strikes me as a quest similar to the attempt to describe the face of God or the structure of the universe. They are too vast and too mysterious. Not that this stops us, or this author, from trying.”—Linda Grant, New Statesman

“This is a great book: read it. And be grateful… So startling and so beautiful.”—Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times

“[An] astonishing book… In its essence this is not so much a book about Auschwitz as one about coming to terms with the shock of survival. Like the 11-year-old Kulka, who came within a few hundred meters of the crematoria, assuming that he would perish there, the writing hovers around the incineration, as he puts it, ‘like a moth circles a flame.’ …What, ultimately, makes Kulka’s book unlike any other first-hand account written about the camps is the authenticity of its vision of an 11-year-old boy… Whether or not setting all this down has done anything to relieve the unrelenting grip the ‘metropolis of death’ holds on his mind, or whether it has tightened that hold, Kulka does not say. But since he has done the rest of us—and the world—so great a kindness by writing his book, one hopes for his sake the former.”—Simon Schama, The Financial Times

“There are almost 50 old photographs and drawings dispersed throughout the book; it looks like W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and in some small sections drifts off into the memorial haze that many people appreciate in Sebald’s last novel. Kulka’s memoir—though he would deny the label—is both more haunting and more knowing… This is the product of a master historian—ironic, probing, present in the past, able to connect the particular with the cosmic. His memory is in the service of deep historical understanding, rendered in evocative prose that is here eloquently translated from Hebrew.”—Thomas Laqueur, The Guardian

“[A] profound and melancholy book of remembrance… Death is in these pages a constant and close companion to the living… This is a grave, poetic and horrifying account of the Holocaust which does not so much revisit the Auschwitz of the past, but the Auschwitz of Kulka’s inner world. It is his own internalized city, with its own enduring horror.”—Arifa Akbar, The Independent

“In this moving and poignant testimony, distinguished historian Otto Dov Kulka draws the reader into the horror of the death-camp through a montage of historical research, essays and poetical images of memory.”—Shereen Low, Northern Echo

“Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death makes for deeply disturbing but ultimately very rewarding reading, and is unlike any Holocaust memoir I have ever come across… This book is not a memoir in the conventional sense, but an extraordinary collection of some of the memories, ideas and dreams that make up Kulka’s internal landscape.”—Keith Lowe, The Telegraph

“This memoir, which is more a book of moments, hauntings and dreams than a narrative, is not primarily about the mechanics of survival or even about the conditions of the camp. It is about death as city and death as law. In that respect it is unremitting and touches us all… If the whole has a hallucinatory power it is because the precisions coincide with the dreams.”—George Szirtes, The Times

“[An] astonishing book… There are enough Holocaust survivor memoirs by historians to make a little canon. One of these, When Memory Comes, by the great Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander, is a classic of this small but fascinating and important genre. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death deserves a place with that volume. It is, quite simply, extraordinary.”—Robert Eaglestone, Times Higher Education

“This is one of the most remarkable testimonies to inhumanity that I know. The deeply moving recollections of Otto Dov Kulka’s boyhood years in Auschwitz, interwoven with reflections of elegiac, poetic quality, vividly convey the horror of the death-camp, the trauma of family and friends, and the indelible imprint left on the memory of a young boy who became a distinguished historian of the Holocaust. An extraordinarily important work which needs to be read.”—Sir Ian Kershaw