Great book. I don't recall a discussion.

Well, it looks like there aren't many people on this list who read the book and can remember it. I would recommend it as a very thought provoking story of the lives of rural people in Germany who didn't really know, or maybe want to beleive what was going on during the Holocaust until the war was ending.
Nancy

Shortly after I read it, I met a man who had experienced very similar things at the end of the war.

I am 66 and have a friend who is about 72. When her adult daughter learned about the Holocaust she asked her mother, my friend, why she had never told her about it. My friend says she never really heard about it so she couldn't have told her daughter. I found the book interesting because some of the characters insisted they didn't know about it. I can't imagine how an American, now 72, never learned about it in school. I told her there were numerous television documentaries about it, as well as Ann Frank, and I wondered how she never had ANY awareness of the subject. She just shrugged it off and said her family never talked about such things. My friend is a devout Catholic and in no way an anti Semite, and though she has some German blood there was never any talk about Germany and the war in her family. I continue to be amazed that my friend was so unaware of such a famous part of history. I think she would never have known if her daughter hadn't married a Jew and was then wondering why her family had never mentioned the concentration camps. I am going to ask her to read this book and tell me her reaction to the story. I will also have my son read the book because he is an avid history reader and I think he will enjoy the historical implications of the book.
Nancy

But didn't your friend listen to radio in the 1940s? After the II WW, it was made public (about the concentration camps) when the US troops freed the poor people still inside those places, and discovered the mass graves. I'm sure there must've been photos and many articles, too, in U.S. newspapers.

I really can't fathom how she never was aware of the numerous factual and fictional coverage on TV. She is at least 5 years older than I so she must have heard information on the radio. I was too young then to undestand the subject. Maybe they didn't have a TV until she was older, but for so many years there were programs about the "Diary of Ann Frank" I can't believe she totally missed the information.