War narratives round-up: Corrosive family secrets in Europe's troubled past

One woman discovers that her biological grandfather was a sadistic Nazi commandant, while Dutch author Paul Glaser uncovers his Jewish heritage

War story: Auschwitz concentration camp, after its liberation in January 1945

At the age of 38, mixed race German-born Jennifer Teege's world collapsed around her when she stumbled on the information that her biological grandfather (Teege grew up in an orphanage, was fostered when she was three, and officially adopted by her new family three years later) was the sadistic Nazi commandant Amon Goeth – a man made infamous by Ralph Fiennes' depiction of him in Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List.

Written in collaboration with the journalist Nikola Sellmair, My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) is a powerful account of Teege's struggle for resolution and redemption, the book in itself a therapeutic working-through of her history, as well as a meditation on family – "Is it something we inherit, or something we build?" she asks – and inter-generational guilt. The content is shared between the two contributors, Teege's highly emotive recollections and musings cleverly offset against the more detached journalist tone of Sellmair's material.

"Family secrets are corrosive," Teege concludes. Initially floored by the truth, eventually the knowledge "released" her. Paul Glaser, the Dutch author of Dancing With The Enemy: My Family's Holocaust Secret (Oneworld, £12.99) would surely agree with the former comment, but whether the latter, I'm not so sure. Like Teege, he was forced to re-think his identity when as an adult he uncovered his Jewish heritage – a complete surprise given that he was raised a Catholic and his parents never hinted at the family's past.

Seventy-two per cent of the Jewish population of the Netherlands perished during the Second World War. It is an astonishingly high figure – in Germany itself, for example, 24 per cent died. One of the few to survive was the author's aunt, Rosie Glaser, a free-spirited dance teacher who outlived betrayals by both her husband and lover, not to mention the medical experiments and gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Rosie's story, told by her nephew – using the wealth of photographs, diary entries and correspondence Rosie kept, supplemented by information from official documents and historical accounts – is an astonishing testament to a woman who adamantly refused to give up despite her circumstances, but this isn't a straightforward celebration of resilience. There are complex footnotes to her tale that contradict official accounts of "heroic resistance and solidarity", instead exposing her country's disregard for its Jewish citizens and its rampant postwar anti-Semitism; the unearthing of which leaves Glaser dwelling in a hinterland of old hurts and betrayals, amidst a family torn apart by the tragedies it suffered.

Similar preoccupations with secrets and the ties of family can be found in Tim Clare's debut novel The Honours (Canongate, £12.99), though the end result is a very different beast. Set in Norfolk in 1935, 13-year-old Delphine Venner has gone to live at Alderberen Hall with her mother and father as part of the elite society there – a rather uninspiring cast of Cluedo-like stock characters. "War is coming," we are warned, but when it arrives it is not the conflict we have been primed to expect.

What begins as something like a cross between a country-house mystery and a John Buchan novel (the precocious Delphine suspects Bolshevik or German spies are in their midst), soon descends into a Philip Pullman/HP Lovecraft-esque fantasy full of strange creatures, complete with a grand, violent battle between good and evil. Clare, a poet, writes with a keen attention to descriptive detail, but he's slightly less convincing when it comes to the bigger picture; reading The Honours as an allegory of the impending Second World War perhaps makes the most sense.