Badenheim 1939; Katerina; The Story of a Life by Aharon Appelfeld review – survivors’ tales full of beauty and pain

“God is in the sky,” the young Aharon Appelfeld’s grandfather told him, “and there is nothing to fear.” Appelfeld was born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1932 in what is now Ukraine; but by 1938 “the ground was burning beneath our feet”, and later he and his parents were taken to a Nazi labour camp. He managed to escape in 1942, aged 10; he never saw his parents again, and died in Israel in 2018.

Those short facts inform much of Appelfeld’s writing. He found it “annoying” to be labelled a “Holocaust writer”, but it was a designation supported by many of his books, including the three reissued this week by Penguin Modern Classics. But their approach to that infinite subject is always distanced, never direct.

His most famous novel is Badenheim 1939 (1980, translated by Dalya Bilu), a horribly effective analogy of the crushing effect of the Holocaust in wartime Europe that shows that hope can be worse than despair. Every line is weighted with bitter irony, beginning with the first: “Spring returned to Badenheim.” For the Jewish population of this Austrian resort town, this means preparing for an “invasion of vacationers” – and it seems natural to them that the sanitation department will want to become involved, to make sure that all is well.

But soon Jews must register with the department, to assist with relocating them. “We’ll be going to Poland soon,” one man tells his children. “Just imagine – Poland.” Through short vignettes of the town’s characters – each scene ending with another nail hammered in – terror subtly encroaches. “It seemed that some other time, from some other place, had invaded the town and was silently establishing itself.”

There is a well-judged uneasiness in Badenheim 1939 . Irony may seem a curious register for writing about the Holocaust, but if anyone is qualified to judge, it is Appelfeld. He is not accusing Jews of wilful blindness to what was coming; what was coming was far beyond human reason. “Kill your ordinary common sense and maybe you’ll begin to understand,” says one character. It put me in mind of Primo Levi ’s early experience in a concentration camp, when a guard snatched away an icicle Levi had broken off to soothe his thirst. When Levi asked him why, the guard replied: “ Hier ist kein warum .” Here there is no why.

Appelfeld’s time in the labour camp is ‘a pulsing darkness that will always be locked inside me’

Appelfeld’s 1989 novel Katerina (translated by Jeffrey M Green) is stranger still than Badenheim 1939 , but ultimately no less satisfying. It opens in simple, fable-like style – “My name is Katerina, and I will soon be 80 years old” – as it tells the story of her life as a Ruthenian (eastern Slav) growing up in the 1880s. She is taught suspicion of Jews – “there’s nothing easier than to hate the Jews” – but when she becomes pregnant and is taken in by a Jewish family, she questions her prejudices. Yet antisemitism, we know, does not lie down quietly.

While Appelfeld’s restrained style perfectly fits the evasions of Badenheim , for a novel like Katerina – filled with horror and violence – it works less well to begin with. Yet as Katerina’s story moves into the 20th century, and shifts into a chilling allegory, it attains a satisfying force that overcomes the stylistic weakness.

There’s a good deal to be learned about Appelfeld’s approach to writing in his memoir The Story of a Life (1999, translated by Aloma Halter). At the beginning he draws a distinction between memory and imagination for a writer, which, with the right handling, are not in tension with one another but in synthesis.

Appelfeld’s early childhood was a time of plenty – represented by overflowing bowls of strawberries, and Jews who “choked their rooms with expensive and cumbersome furniture” – which was abruptly curtailed. Yet we get no direct insight into Appelfeld’s time in the labour camp. He refers to “a pulsing darkness that will always be locked inside me”. What happened there is “imprinted within my body and not my memory”: a physical response, not a conscious intellectual one.

Related: One man’s road to freedom

After escaping the camp, he lived peripatetically before eventually moving after the war to Israel, where “oblivion found fertile ground”. For many Jews, the country represented “the extinction of memory, a complete personal transformation and a total identification with this narrow strip of land”. This tells us much, and explains Appelfeld’s disdain for the “idealisation” he found in much Israeli literature; he learned Hebrew there only under protest. (His family spoke German and Yiddish.)

Appelfeld’s honesty and clarity are models for other writers to emulate. Perhaps it was partly the loss of his mother tongue that locked those years in the camp away in Appelfeld’s memory. But Hebrew gave him a way to write these books – beautiful books full of pain – and for that we can be grateful.

• Badenheim 1939 , Katerina and The Story of a Life are published by Penguin Modern Classics (all £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copies for £9.29 each at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply