The lice even infested their eyelashes. So writes Anne Berest in her roman vrai bestseller, The Postcard, describing the camp conditions her grand-aunt and grand-uncle endured on their way to their deaths in Auschwitz, followed by their parents. It is the incidental detail – the image of parasites crawling in the eyes of the doomed – that can haunt a mind all too familiar with the facts of the Nazis’ barbarity. Jacques, the younger of the siblings, was 16 when he entered the gas chamber to join six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Noémie, an aspiring novelist aged 19, died days later.

“If we’d been born back then, we’d have been turned into buttons,” Berest’s mother, Lélia, tells her. Or soap, she could have said. Or slippers and socks for German soldiers.

Only a heartless or brainless reader could dismiss Berest’s fact-based account of the hell her family suffered as mere fiction, or propaganda, or – most pervertedly – just deserts for being Jewish. Yet, even as Irish booksellers restock their shelves to satisfy customers’ requests for The Postcard, Ireland and its people stand accused by some prominent commentators of being anti-Semitic. It is a vile accusation, and as effective a tactic as the one that claims we’re all racists now. The guilting of Ireland is in full throat.

“It’s what most people think,” ventured a friend, more out of worry than conviction, after Bertie Ahern intimated that African immigrants – specifically, those from Congo – are unwelcome here.

Enoch Burke’s dismissal from Westmeath school confirmed amid end of appeals process

‘It was embarrassing........

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