The Dark Room (Seiffert novel)

Despite unintentionally witnessing and photographing a violent roundup of Romani people he remains ignorant of the significance of what he has seen and dreams of joining the Wehrmacht.

In Bavaria in 1945, after Germany surrenders, Lore, the young daughter of a Nazi officer, is asked by her mother to go with her younger siblings to her grandmother's house in Hamburg after both her parents are sent to prisoner-of-war camps.

Making her way across the countryside she is joined by a young man named Thomas who bears a numbered tattoo on his arm and papers that identify him as a survivor of Buchenwald.

He sets about trying to find out about his grandfather's crimes and traces him to a small town in Belarus where he repeatedly interviews a man who lived through that time.

As he struggles to reconcile the image of the grandfather he loved as a perpetrator of the Holocaust his obsessive search begins to tear his family apart.