Three Tearless Histories

Stirring, poignant stories humanize great historical tragedies with interviews and accounts of individuals affected by the clashes of communism and fascism.

“Powerful inquiries spurred by photos—history made flesh, the untold lives of the mostly forgotten.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A missionary voice of human dignity.”
—World Literature Today

Erich Hackl, 2017 recipient of the internationally-recognized Human Rights Award of Upper Austria and winner of multiple literature prizes, brings three little-known and inspiring biographies to light: young Gisela Tschofenig’s hidden life in the Austrian resistance and her fate; a fragmented interview with Wilhelm Brasse, the Polish political prisoner who photographed Auschwitz inmates and saved evidence of Mengele’s horrific crimes; and the multi-generational story of the Klagsbrunns, who fled Nazism in Vienna only to find another kind of terror in the fascist dictatorship of 1950s Brazil.