The Little Liar

For better or worse, I don’t take the time to read many novels. I read biographies, some history, and a good bit of other non-fiction works, mostly connected to my work as a pastor. Recently, however, a title in the book list of a club I’m in caught my eye, The Little Liar, by Mitch Albom. Not sure why it piqued my interest, but when I read the synopsis, I was hooked.

“Eleven-year-old Nico Krispis has never told a lie.…” it began.

Since I have a ten-year-old grandson named Nico—and it’s not a very common name—my interest was aroused all the more.

The synopsis continued.

“When the Nazis invade his home in Salonika, Greece, the trustworthy boy is discovered by a German officer, who offers him a chance to save his family. All Nico has to do is persuade his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading ‘north,’ where new jobs and safety await. Unaware that this is all a cruel ruse, the innocent boy reassures passengers on the station platform every day.

“But when the final train is loaded, Nico sees his family being herded into a boxcar. Only then does he discover that he has helped send them—and everyone he knows and loves—to their doom at Auschwitz.

“Nico escapes—but he never tells the truth again.”

Although A Little Liar is fiction, it’s historical fiction. Albom has crafted a believable, realistic story from the archives of one of the darkest chapters in the 20^th century. Nazis did herd Jews in boxcars, sending them to their death in Auschwitz and other death camps. They did employ naïve Jews to trick other Jews into deceived compliance. So many other details in the novel reflect historical reality.

Not only is the story true to history, A Little Liar is also true to the complexities of human nature.

In his innocent tenderness, Nico is crushed with guilt over sending hundreds of people from his community, and even from his own family, to certain death. On the other hand, the utter hardness of heart and cruel brutality expressed by the Nazi soldiers accurately reflects the final state of one devoid of moral scruples. Most poignantly is such a heart portrayed in Udo Graf—the Nazi officer charged with rounding up all the Jews in Salonika, who manipulated Nico into lying to fellow Jews, and eventually administered one of the concentration camps.

In other characters, you discover compassion (for example, the Hungarian woman who risked her life to shelter Fannie—a Jewish childhood friend of Nico’s who escaped from the death train). Others sacrificed greatly to save whom they could, such as an actress who used her wealth to bribe Nazi guards into releasing children.

You’re also confronted with the difficulty of granting forgiveness when the heart is filled with jealousy and bitterness. Sebastian, Nico’s older brother, avoids the death-camp furnace while witnessing the extermination of his mother, sisters, and father. He’s not only jealous of Nico—the seemingly favored son of his parents and preferred crush of Fannie—he also despises him for the albeit unwitting role of Nazi propagandist.

Albom also effectively depicts the craftiness, ingenuity, resourcefulness, courage, and endurance required to elude the gruesome fate of captivity. We read of Sebastian’s tactics in the “labor camp.” Much of the story follows young Fannie after she is unwillingly thrown from the train in a desperate—and successful—attempt to save her life. Equal treatment is given to Nico, who becomes an extremely effective pathological liar in an attempt to cross southern Europe to find and somehow rescue his family.

The first 195 pages that take us to the end of the war are filled with tension, heartache, grief, and curiosity. But the war’s end comes, and the balance of A Little Liar covers the next several decades, following the lives of Nico, Fannie, Sebastian, and Udo Graf. The woven web is quite elaborate, leaving the reader eager to plunge forward into the next chapter. I dare share no further details, lest I spoil a potential reader’s enjoyment.

But I will comment briefly on a couple of ideas that merit attention.

First, is the virtue of Truth.

The story begins with “Truth” personified in the narrator— “…the only thing in this world you can trust. I am truth,” she says, “and this is a story about a boy who tried to break me.”

On one hand, as a virtue, truth is extolled. On the other hand, “untruth” in various shades is represented in the form of Nico’s original innocent falsehoods perpetrated on the train platform (he truly thought he was being truthful in telling the Nazi lies), his later lies to save his life, to his pathological bent to fabricate just about everything. Then there are the cruel and barbaric lies of Nazi propaganda and Jew-hating soldiers. Sprinkled throughout are various and sundry other untruths and deceptions typical of those attempting to survive in war.

The various shades of moral culpability are never spelled out, as one might in a sermon or ethics paper. But they do tend to color the eventual outcome of the story.

Another important subject in the book is forgiveness.

Given Sebastian’s passionate efforts to find Nico and bring him to justice for “war crimes”—aiding the Nazis in the extermination of Jews—the reader, knowing the truth of the matter, wonders if he can ever find it in his heart to forgive his brother, a child-pawn of Nazi lies.

Far more poignant is Nico’s inability to forgive himself—not for his pathological lying after he realized what the Nazi’s real plans were, but for his part in propagating their lies and causing the deaths of thousands—even his own parents and siblings.

As a result, he spent decades trying to atone for his sin, while never finding any satisfaction from all his self-efforts. And they were astounding efforts, to be sure—I’ll leave it at that.

In the end, though I’m quite certain the author didn’t intend it, A Little Liar effectively illustrates the futility of all human effort to atone for one’s sins and be finally certain of total forgiveness. For that, one needs to turn to the Truth—Jesus, “in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.” (Colossians 1:14). Indeed, “the blood of Jesus Christ [God’s] Son cleanses us from all sin.” (1 John 1:7)

Although I closed the book aching for Nico to have found true forgiveness—not only from Sebastian, but from the God whom he instinctively knew he offended—I nevertheless found a bit of satisfaction in touching expressions of reconciliation and the meting out of justice. Important themes in themselves.