Full disclosure: My interest in this book was piqued enough to click the LibraryThing early reviewer request button because I had visited Dachau as a child (twice—my dad led student exchange programs to Germany), and because I’d had my own miserable bus tour experiences. But once I learned I’d won it I was filled with dread, which only got worse when the book arrived in the mail. I avoided opening it for a month because I was pretty sure I was not going to like anything about it. The glowing review I’m about to give could be a result of the book not living down to my expectations, but I don’t think so.

Stahl is a sensitive, observant, and articulate writer, and his telling is honest, disturbing, profound, and humorous. The focus is the tour, including the destinations and dynamics of his tour group. The style is informal and intimate, like reading someone’s letters—if the someone is gifted. The author is very much a part of the narrative, intentionally, and that is one of the books strengths. The attempt to make sense of the historic sites themselves, as well as the tourism that has arisen around them, is extremely personal. Stahl’s own troubled life and his family’s history provide poignant context for the surreal travelogue.

Stahl introduces himself as a hapless jerk, using the example of the purchase of expensive smart luggage he can’t afford and is clueless to operate, and continues to be frank about his shortcomings throughout the book, while being fairly generous in his characterization of those around him, even those who appear not to deserve it. The tour is described chronologically, with vignettes ranging from the amusing to the terrifying. He also includes compelling accounts of individual perpetrators and corporate facilitators of the Nazi regime, and contemplates the legacy and progeny of the population that brought Hitler to power and carried out the atrocities. Apt parallels to current events (as of 2022) are drawn.

I enjoy memoirs and travel accounts, but I was not expecting this to be the page turner (I noted this before I knew Ben Stiller had said it, so that’s 2 independent votes for page turner) that it was. However, I was most surprised by the affinity I felt for Stahl. I appreciated his critical self-awareness, his honest account of what he saw and how he felt about it, and his insights on hatred, evil, and suffering. Although a pretty odd and unlikely work, I would not consider Nein, Nein, Nein! a weak or trivial contribution to the Holocaust literature, and it is worth reading. ( )

I had some trouble getting through this book. I was interested in the history of the camps and did find some of his humor to be funny. What I didn't like was that the story seemed to be a platform for his political views. His personal issues, drug use and failed marriages, seemed also to be a main focus. The book was just not what I expected. ( )

In the early autumn of 2016, Jerry Stahl, journalist, television and film writer, went on a bus tour of the Holocaust in Poland and Germany. It was both a professional assignment and a personal pilgrimage to the world in which so many of his family had been murdered by the Nazis. And it was a form of therapy for dealing with his own existential demons, his depression, his grief at his failed marriage, his separation from his daughters, his former life as a drug addict.

He begins by telling us how much he hates traveling by bus, especially as a member of a tour group, and that's before he gets to the grim subject of the tour, the worst, most hellish places on earth, the chief scenes of the Holocaust. The tour begins in Warsaw and continues to Krakow, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Nuremburg, Munich and Dachau.

The wonder of it is that Stahl infuses this travel guide from Hell with a lot of humor. It is very dark humor, to be sure, and much of it is self-deprecating. He tells us how he refused to eat at the cafeteria in Buchenwald, but was not above walking through it and taking photos of those crass enough to eat in such a place. He was feeling all smug and self-righteous, until he walked into a plate glass door and a fellow tourist had to bandage his bleeding forehead.

Stahl was at first profoundly uncomfortable among the other tourists on his bus, he was one of the only two Jews in the group, the only vegetarian, the only guy who didn't drink (not even in Munich in Oktoberfest!), but he came to feel an affectionate bond with his fellow travelers. He has a gift for seeing the best in humanity, even when constantly confronted with evidence of cruelty and depravity on an industrial scale. But he is keenly attuned to the universality of evil and our need to be ever vigilant to its existence and threat, including today and here in the MAGA Land of the Proud Boys and their fascist brethren. He ends on a chilling note, "It is not the Holocaust" that is the exception, it is the pause between holocausts that is the exception". ( )

This author writes an observational dark humor travel book about a guided group bus tour of concentration camps in Poland. This irreverent account poignantly explores how the author grapples with the horrors and atrocities of the Holocaust. If you thought you had read and seen all the films depicting this subject, this author's approach focuses on his own reactions that lends a fresh approach. It's not the facts but the experience of facing and standing where the horrors occurred. I recommend this book for understanding the human condition.

If you have a dark sense of humor and can tolerate learning that someone is making money off the Holocaust, then this book is for you. Jerry Stall goes on a bus tour that visits sites of the Holocaust and just basks in the environment that this bus tour can create. This book is an eye-opener for sure.