By Bill Simons

The obligation of witnessing and telling “The Truth” is heroic, painful and imperative. Lies and truth – and their consequences – invest Mitch Albom’s 2023 novel “The Little Liar” with embattled themes.
Books about the Holocaust fill library shelves. But “The Little Liar” is one of the relatively few works about the impact of World War II on Greek Jews, more specifically those from the great port city of Salonika. Spanning the years from 1936 to 1983, the 300-plus page novel finds its roots, foundational events and penultimate episode in Salonika. 
The story’s three Jewish protagonists, Fanny Nahmias and brothers Sebastian and Nico Krispis, first appear in the waning days of their innocence. Sebastian and younger brother Nico both had an unspoken crush on Fanny. 
Christians, Muslims and Jews lived amicably in prewar Salonika. The venerable White Tower and the sheer robustness of Salonika nurtured optimism in the three young friends. And tightknit families, synagogues, traditions and Sabbath observance contributed to their strong Jewish identities. Lazarre, grandfather to Sebastian and Nico, took the trio to the Jewish cemetery, the largest in the world, where they practiced kindness washing tombstones of family and strangers alike. 
In 1941, the Salonika idyll started to crumble for Sebastian, Nico and Fanny. The Germans seized control of the city and put it under the military command of Nazi SS officer Udo Graf, an ardent disciple of Adolf Hitler. Graf, the antagonist of the novel, is its fourth major character. First, the Nazis seized the businesses of Salonika’s Jews and then their homes. Fanny’s father was shot dead defending his apothecary. Armed soldiers prohibited Jews from entering padlocked synagogues. Then the Jews were rounded up and deported by train to the Dachau concentration camp. By the end of World War II, Salonika’s 1940 Jewish population of 50,000 had dwindled to approximately 2,000. 
On the train platform, our story’s defining episode took place and the novel acquired a name. On March 15, 1943, 11-year-old Nico, blond and innocent of look, roamed up and down the train platform. He had never yet lied. As railroad cars beckoned, Nico told frightened and confused Salonika Jews that he had overheard Nazi officials talking amongst themselves and learned from their conversations that the trains were taking the Jews to a good place where families would be reunited and prosper. Nico’s words were strategic, reassuring and false, marking him forever as the little liar. Those words effectively calmed many Jews, inducing them to docilely enter railroad cars destined for the Dachau killing machine. Graf followed the Jews, assuming command of the Dachau camp. 
Several factors converged to prompt Nico’s big lie: his age and accompanying immaturity, his initial belief in the words he spoke, promises that his family would be well treated and his manipulation by Graf. The relationship between Graf and Nico was cruel, yet ambiguous, rooted in the Nazi’s recognition of the boy’s talents and strange interest in him. 
Graf allowed Nico to live. The boy was not sent to Dachau. Nico came to understand that his words hastened the journey of Jews to gas chambers and crematoriums. Despite the passage of decades, Nico never forgave himself. Nor did his older brother Sebastian, 14 in 1943, ever forgive Nico for his duplicity. Formerly hailed for this transparent truthfulness, Nico was never again able to tell the truth, formulating future lies about all things, small and great. 
Fanny also survived the Shoah at great cost. To save her from Dachau, Fanny, 12, was pushed through the vandalized window of a crowded cattle car as a fellow Jew commanded, “Tell the world what happened here.” At risk to her own life, Gizella, a Hungarian woman – a compassionate Gentile – hid Fanny from the Nazis, and through bribes, a Jewish actress also prevented the girl’s capture. 
At war’s end, Fanny returned to a devastated Salonika, encountering an equally traumatized Sebastian who lost most of his family at Dachau and performed wretched tasks at the camp. Fanny, 16, and Sebastian, 18, married and a baby daughter soon joined them, a course dictated not by love, but by the need to confirm their survival. Their marriage failed. An obsessed Sebastian joined an individual, resembling Simon Wiesenthal, in hunting down escaped Nazis. 
All of this was recorded by “The Little Liar’s” fifth and final major character, The Truth, a fallen angel, who acts as the novel’s narrator. Realism is the dominant tone of this well-researched historical novel, but The Truth interjects asides, commentary and Jewish parables at discrete intervals. 
Handsome, charismatic and tortured, Nico, an antagonist to his own identity, assumed a variety of names and migrated from job to job in the postwar world. Moving to America, he emerged as a successful and very wealthy film producer. A compulsive liar and quasi recluse, Nico avoided deep friendship and meaningful romance, not even with Fanny who came to serve as his private projectionist. Yet, he covertly visited Jewish cemeteries to clean gravestones. And on March 15 every year, Nico would anonymously oversee the delivery of large amounts of money to Holocaust survivors and their families, and to the brave and righteous Gentiles who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. 
Due in fair measure to Sebastian’s advocacy, a great march was held in Salonika on March 15, 1983, to mark the 40th anniversary of the first train to depart the city for Dachau. During the pre-march oratory, Nico dramatically co-opted the sound system to announce his presence and apologize for his Judas-goat lies. Graf, still dreaming of restoring the Third Reich and outraged that his achievement in eliminating so many Jewish vermin was not honored, fired shots aimed at Sebastian, whom he feared as a relentless Nazi hunter. Nico shielded Sebastian, taking the lethal fire himself. As Nico died in the arms of Sebastian and Fanny, he received a brother’s forgiveness and confirmation that he was Fanny’s true love. Subsequently, Fanny would fatally poison Graf. In the end, readers learned that Fanny was The Truth, tasked long ago to “Tell the world what happened here.” 
“The Little Liar” is a cautionary tale for today. Lies fueled the Nazi ascension and consolidation of power. Castigating inconvenient truths as fake news, aspiring absolutists shout that the 2020 election was “stolen”; that the January 6, 2021, insurrection was a “tourist visit”; and that Ukraine started the war with Russia. History demands that we “tell the world what happened here.”