Branded by the Pink Triangle

July 1, 2013

Gr 9 Up-Stories from the Holocaust are universally heartbreaking and horrifying, and this one is no different. The pink triangle was used by the Nazis to identify homosexual prisoners in the concentration camps, and here Setterington shows how it has been adopted by the gay movement as a symbol of strength and pride. He describes how German society's relatively tolerant attitudes of the 1920s grew less so as Hitler and the Nazis came into power and began a quest to purify the "Aryan race." By weaving the individual experiences into a broader account of the treatment and persecution of homosexuals by the Nazi regime, the author provides a compelling and evocative narrative. Culling first-person accounts from concentration camp survivors, he is able to paint a picture of the fear and harassment (and for some, ultimately death) that these individuals and their families endured. The writing is succinct but detailed enough to satisfy researchers. Period photographs, a lengthy time line, and an extensive bibliography round out the strengths of this thoughtful, informative work.-Jody Kopple, Shady Hill School, Cambridge, MA

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

An impassioned and cogent history of the persecution of gay men during the Holocaust. Setterington opens with the riveting anecdote of a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz who was rescued and nurtured by a man with a pink triangle on his uniform. From this beginning, he moves back in time to introduce readers to early-20th-century Berlin, a bastion of gay tolerance despite the anti-homosexual law known as Paragraph 175. He goes on to chronicle the Nazis' crackdown on gay men, their deportation to concentration camps, the experiences of both Jewish and Gentile gay men, and the aftermath of the war. Most cruelly, gay survivors were treated as criminals rather than victims, since their liberators viewed homosexuality as a crime. Illuminating the historical overview are stories of specific young (mostly teenage) gay men, taken mostly from memoirs. They are related with immediacy, personalizing the potentially mind-numbing catalog of horrors that make up any Holocaust account. Details, too, take readers into the heart of the insanity: Paragraph 175 was enforced in Western European "Aryan" territories such as the Netherlands but not in Poland and Eastern Europe, where they were seen as part of the strategy to undermine the already-"degraded" Slavic peoples. Never downplaying the appalling cataclysm that was the murder of 6 million Jews, Setterington nevertheless effectively makes the case for history's need to remember Hitler's other victims as well. Despite its brevity, a remarkably informative and necessary work. (notes, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 12 & up) COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2013
Grades 7-12 Though homosexuality had been illegal in Germany since 1871, Berlin was widely regarded as the gay capital of Europe in the early twentieth century, when attitudes toward homosexuals were generally relaxed. All that changed with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Persecution of gays became the order of the day, and, with the creation of concentration camps, many were remanded to this living death, forced to wear pink triangles on their clothing to identify them as being homosexual. No one knows how many gays died in the camps, but the mortality rate is estimated to have been as high as 60 percent. Setterington, a librarian, has written an informative, well-researched, and well-documented history of the brutal treatment of homosexuals at the hands of the Nazis, humanizing his account with stories of survivors who have written about their experiences. He also includes an overview of the distressing condition of being gay in postwar Germany and, finally, brings the story up to date with a hopeful chapter titled, It Gets Better. Setterington's is a significant contribution to LGBT history and one that deserves a wide readership.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)