Review of "An Epiphany in Lilacs" by Iris Dorbian

Score: 91+/100 (9.1+ out of 10)

What happens after all the pain, the loss, and the trauma?
How does one return to a sense of normalcy after experiencing a horrific event that is everything but normal?

Most books about the Holocaust tend to focus on the time before and during the concentration camps—the attempts to hide, escape, endure, and survive. They tend to linger on the ghettos and the camps themselves. This book is dramatically different as it focuses on the aftermath, the limbo where survival begins all over again. The time in which one struggles to find answers.

Set in the uneasy calm right after liberation, the novel follows 14-year-old Daniel in a British-run hospital and later a DP setting as he fights through nightmares, survivor’s guilt, and the fragile work of trusting people again. Dorbian keeps the focus tight and humane: small kindnesses from caregivers, a wary friendship with an older Gentile survivor, and the simple miracle of flowers in a courtyard become lifelines rather than ornaments. The book’s power is how ordinary moments carry extraordinary weight. Instead of sensationalizing trauma, it patiently tracks healing as a sequence of choices, stumbles, and second chances. That restraint makes the breakthroughs land harder, and it turns a historical backdrop into a personal reckoning the reader can feel. We follow Daniel as he forms unlikely friendships, joins a ramshackle theater troupe, and, slowly, rebuilds a family and a self.

The author frames this choice of focus as an intentional corrective: for many survivors, the “true test of survival began after the camps.” That’s the lens that makes this story feel fresh and necessary.

When we meet Daniel, he’s still recovering physically and psychologically. Under the care of Doctor Edwardson and Nurse Margaret, he’s fragile: dysentery, nightmares, and the jittery vigilance trauma hardwires into the body. In the hospital garden, the fragrance of lilacs and gladiolas triggers a flood of pre-war memory, spring days in Tante Masha’s yard in Libau. That sensory hinge, the lilacs, becomes the novel’s emotional key, beauty that presses through grief.

Here Daniel meets Tomas Silka, an older German gentile who survived Neuengamme. Silka’s urbanity, kindness, and mildly theatrical charm (he kisses hands, he flatters) disarm Daniel, complicating any easy binaries of “perpetrator” and “victim.” Their friendship, sometimes close and sometimes distant, becomes one of Daniel’s lifelines.

_____________________________________
SPOILERS OMITTED
_____________________________________

Our gut feeling about this book was that, compared to the plethora of Holocaust books we've read over the years, this one seemed a little more flat. We originally approached this book as purely a work of fiction with the author having complete and total creative control. That left us a bit bummed that the life-or-death tension we were expecting from a Holocaust novel just didn't seem to be there.

However, we had a few realizations that assuaged the way we felt and forced us to adjust. First of all, it was revealed that Daniel and his experiences aren't entirely fictitious and are loosely based on the experiences of the author's father. That actually adds a bit more weight behind what we read.  It's a reminder to readers that you can't shoehorn the experiences of all Holocaust survivors into one box. In fact, the experiences of every survivor are unique and different. Each and every one of them has their own version and their own story to tell--joining a haunting symphony of voices who once cried out for the world to hear.

And here's their chance to be heard--heard, understood, and recognized in their totality.
Their memories, experiences, struggles, and triumphs won't be tucked away and swept under the rug. They'll be remembered from beginning, middle, and end.

The author could've gone down the normal route of focusing on the suffering and struggles inside the ghettos and the camps, but they didn't. Instead, the author gave us a fresh take: the life afterward.

In a sense, this is commendable. We can now better appreciate the part of the Holocaust that doesn't get explored and talked about as much. The author chose the path less taken, accepting the challenge of writing about the part of the trauma that lingers years and even decades later.

And, perhaps just as importantly, it's an inspirational and encouraging story for others who've been through traumatic events.  It's a reminder that healing and reconciliation are possible.

Ultimately, this book is a powerful reminder for the ignorant and uneducated (the deniers) that the Holocaust was a real event with real victims and survivors, a number of which is getting smaller by the day. These victims and survivors aren't solely defined by these awful things that happened to them and their people. They are brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, shop workers, coffee drinkers, animal lovers, artists, writers, and theater performers. They are human beings. We may have not enjoyed all of this book, but we applaud that message.

Check it out on Amazon!