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The Book of the Week is “Children of Radium, A Buried Inheritance” by Joe Dunthorne, published in 2025. The morbidly curious author wrote this book after engaging in “roots tourism” to learn about his (Jewish) great-grandfather’s and grandmother’s lives in Germany and Ankara in Turkey before, during and after WWII.
In the 1930’s, the author’s grandmother grew up in Oranienburg in Germany, the most radioactive town in the country. There was a chemical weapons factory there, at which her father (named Seigfried) worked as a creator and tester into the mid-1930’s. Just around that time, German schoolchildren were supplied with gas masks and taught how to protect themselves from wartime air-contaminants. The chemicals from the factory were disposed of through burying, burning or pouring into a river. One of the chemicals was phosgene, which smells like a freshly mowed lawn. In 1935, Siegfried’s family moved to Ankara, but he continued to test gas masks there.
In 1937, the Turkish government purchased chemical weapons from Germany to ethnically cleanse residents in Dersim in the mountains in eastern Turkey. Over the course of two years, the roughly thirteen thousand people who died presumably served as the Nazis’ preliminary test-case of the mass murder of the Jews a few years later. Toward the end of the war, in August 1944, it seemed Turkey had an attack of conscience (or else its strategic interests changed!)– because it broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and detained a couple of hundred non-Jewish refugees, but granted continued liberty to war-refugees whose passports said they were Jewish.
From the 1990’s into the dawn of the twenty-first century, the author read his family’s documents archive, met with some neighbors of his ancestors, and went to see whether his family members’ homes still existed. Most didn’t. The Russians destroyed the aforesaid factory after the war. But decades later, an entrepreneur bought the site (which was still a toxic waste dump, consisting of 26,000 tons of poisons), and built a nightclub and swimming pool on it, complete with imported controlled substances.
In the 1990’s(!), there were still homes getting destroyed and people getting killed by unexploded bombs, and homes getting built on radioactive sand dating back to WWII.
Read the book to learn much more about the author’s adventures in learning about Seigfried’s state of mind as a Jew who was (possibly initially unwittingly) aiding in the German war effort, his activities, and those of his other family members.