The Holocaust

In the novel, The Holocaust — also called the Shoah — is not a historical event that the characters directly experience, but rather a shocking rhetorical figure used by the father-in-law. Confronted with the moles that have dug deep holes across his land, turning it into a minefield, he declares that definitive action needs to be taken by putting gas bottles at the entrance to the animals' homes. He names this proposed extermination "the Shoah of moles." The phrase transposes the vocabulary of genocide onto a domestic pest problem, collapsing the catastrophic and the trivial into a single grotesque utterance that reveals the family's profound moral disorientation.

The Father-in-Law's Rhetoric of Extermination

The father-in-law's phrase emerges in the context of his broader attitude toward the land and its non-human inhabitants. The moles, he insists, are digging on "their land" as much as his, and he frames their presence as an invasion requiring a definitive, violent solution. His plan — placing gas bottles at the entrances to their burrows — is a method of mass killing that mirrors, in miniature, the industrial extermination techniques of the twentieth century's worst atrocities. The casualness with which he deploys the term "Shoah" indicates not malice toward the moles specifically, but a deeper incapacity to register the weight of historical horror. For him, genocide becomes a handy metaphor for any annoyance requiring decisive action, a linguistic currency spent without regard for its value.

The Narrator's Ironic Distance

The narrator reports her father-in-law's phrase without overt condemnation, yet the very act of recording it in her fragmented, associative narrative carries an implicit judgment. Her own sensibility throughout the novel is marked by a dark, carnivalesque humor — she reflects that the more serious things are, the more she wants to laugh — and the "Shoah of moles" fits precisely within this register. The phrase is both horrifying and absurd, and the narrator lets it stand in all its dissonance. She does not moralize about it, but her placement of it within a passage describing the mother-in-law's grief-stricken deterioration creates a stark contrast: the father-in-law's glib rhetoric of extermination sits alongside his widow's perpetual limbo, her sleeplessness, her sleepwalking, her conversations with God through a shoe. The man who could joke about genocide is gone, and the woman left behind cannot even check the expiry date on her medication.

The Shoah as Symptom of a Broken Moral Universe

The phrase functions as a symptom of the family's larger failure to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate responses to the world. The father-in-law's casual invocation of the Holocaust belongs to the same moral universe as the novel's other inverted maxims — the assertion that a normal family is the most sinister kind, the observation that someone else's misfortune is a swift kick from a horse. In this universe, the language of ultimate evil is available for everyday use, drained of its historical specificity and emotional weight. The narrator's decision to record the phrase without commentary mirrors her broader narrative strategy: she presents the family's grotesqueries with a flat, unflinching gaze, allowing the reader to feel the horror that the characters themselves cannot register. The "Shoah of moles" thus becomes a key to the novel's moral vision — a world in which the distinction between the catastrophic and the mundane has collapsed, and where the living and the dead, as the narrator elsewhere observes, will become indistinguishable.