Audiobooks have become an interesting topic in my reading groups. I’ve discussed it with a few friends in the past, but its come up again recently after a book club meeting where almost everyone listened to our Hilary Mantel book (The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher) as an audiobook. Now this has come up before with my friend (who exclusively listens to fiction and got Wolf Hall as an audiobook) but I can’t imagine listening to Mantel – when I read her on the page I often pause or re-read. She plays with punctuation and paragraph formatting in a way which I wouldn’t be able to hear and while sitting at book club almost everyone asked to look at the text on the page in my copy when I mentioned those things.

Now on the other hand One Hundred Saturdays is a book I can’t imagine not listening to. Normally when I listen to an audiobook I multi-task – cook, do laundry, tidy the house, walk the dogs – but within a few chapters I realized this book would require long solitary walks to absorb.

The real power of the book is how it is part memoir, part oral history. Michael (and Stella) begin with a detailed overview of Stella’s childhood in the Jewish community in Rhodes. They talk about everything – food, houses, religion, language. How things change when Rhodes is taken over by the Italians. How they change again as the war looms.

Ninety percent of this community was killed in the Holocaust and few of the survivors returned to Rhodes after the war so both Michael and Stella acknowledge much of this would be lost without Stella’s story. But they also acknowledge it is her story meaning her knowledge that she would not have stayed in Rhodes, regardless of the war, and how some aspects of the culture felt old-fashioned to her are also present. It’s a delicate balance that is handled beautifully.

As she says late in the book, she has thought about telling her story for a long time. She wanted help from a writer, which is how she starts working with Michael after meeting him at an event in Rome, but she remained worried about trying to start such a large and emotional project. Only time calmed those fears as she says, “when you arrive at a certain age you are no longer afraid of being ridiculous.” This confidence is key to the book – as is the trust and respect that grows between Michael and Stella. Michael is very good at bringing us Stella’s words with the addition of his notes on her – her humor, love, anger. We know what questions she answers swiftly, and which ones give her pause. Although these are conversations, he doesn’t inject himself too much into the text, instead being the messenger for Stella’s thoughts and memories.

Perhaps the clearest strength of this pairing is also the hardest part of the book.

Stella’s transportation to and memories of the concentration camps she was held in are as difficult as can be expected but the exchanges between Michael and Stella throughout the retelling is where the conversations between the two change this from memoir to an exchange between the past and the present. Together they try and bridge the gap between history and how we remember it now. Michael brings questions to Stella that will feel natural to later generations, but Stella reminds him (and us) that if you grew up after the Holocaust it will change how you react to details leading up to the war. It’s one of dozens of moments in the story where you really understand how long and hard Stella has thought about telling her story and the love and pain and trauma that go along with it.

I’m very grateful she did decide to tell her story and that she found Michael to help her do it. As a history reader I am often used to historians finding remarkable individuals in the archive and bringing them to the public but there is a different power in hearing a story from the individuals themselves. Stella may have struggled with the decision about when, how, if to tell her story but in the end, she says herself: “you tell the story. It’s all that you can do.”