In Brief
- Narrator: Bill Marchant reads a single-voice production for Second Story Press, working from a text assembled out of survivor testimony and archival research rather than continuous narrative.
- Subjects: persecution under Nazi law, the pink triangle as a marker, postwar silence and recovery
- Tone: Plain-spoken and unsparing, pitched squarely at younger listeners
- Bottom line: The shortest serious introduction to this history you are likely to find, and the closing chapter is what makes it usable in a classroom.
Holocaust history has a canon, and this book sits outside it deliberately. The pink triangle sewn onto a prison uniform marked men imprisoned for homosexuality, and their part of the record took decades longer than others to reach general readers. Ken Setterington wrote a version for teenagers, published by Second Story Press, and the audiobook runs two hours and forty-four minutes in Bill Marchant's reading. Short enough to finish in an afternoon, and long enough to change what a fifteen-year-old understands about the camps.
What Ken Setterington Delivers
Setterington states the method plainly in the description: historical research braided together with first-person accounts and individual stories. A November 2025 response describes the result as balancing historical detail with personal testimony in a way that reads as educational and human at once, handled with respect, clarity and compassion. That is an accurate account of the register. The book does not sensationalize and it does not soften, which for a title aimed at teenagers is a harder line to hold than it sounds.
Panels rather than arguments: that is what chapters become at this length. The running time covers the legal apparatus, the raids and arrests, the camps, and a closing chapter on the decades of progress that came afterward, which is an enormous amount of ground for a book this size. Setterington opens with a single story, a young Jewish girl kept alive in the camps by a fellow prisoner wearing the pink triangle, and lets it carry the weight an introduction normally carries. Brevity is a choice here, and for the intended reader it is the right one.
One March 2022 response reaches for the word causation, and it is the right one: the book explains how a legal category became a prison sentence and how a prison sentence became a badge sewn onto cloth. The same response calls the narrative well written and the effect eye-opening, which is a striking verdict to still be earning on a subject most readers assume they already know. Setterington gets there by refusing to treat this persecution as a footnote to the larger catastrophe.
Men imprisoned for homosexuality were held in the camps alongside Jewish prisoners and marked with a different symbol, and the description makes that co-location the entry point rather than an aside. Setterington builds from archival work plus first-person testimony, which is the only honest method available when the survivors had every reason to stay silent. The triangle itself, cut from cloth and stitched to a uniform, is the object the whole account organizes around.
It Gets Better is the title of the final chapter, and it changes the shape of the thing. Rather than closing at liberation, Setterington runs forward through the decades of gay rights gains that came afterward, which converts the book for a teenage listener from an atrocity account into a history with a direction. That is a defensible editorial decision and a discussable one, and it is probably why an Education and Learning tag sits on the page. The closing chapter is the part a classroom would argue about.
Where Ken Setterington Loses Some Ground
Six years before this recording existed, the page's only four-star verdict was already posted. March 2014 is its date, and what it says is disarming: the topic was one the reader had never even heard of, and that unfamiliarity was the entire appeal. Compliment and diagnosis in one sentence. It also means the oldest opinion feeding the ninety-nine ratings on this listing belongs to somebody holding a printed book, years before Bill Marchant recorded a syllable of it.
Length costs scope. A short book on a subject this large has to choose, and Setterington chooses breadth: the legal machinery, the camps, the aftermath, each sketched rather than excavated. Anyone who has worked through a full-length academic treatment will find no new history here, only a very good compression of it. The individual stories carry what the analysis cannot, which is a legitimate strategy and still a limit worth naming before you buy.
Check the audience labeling as well. The genre slot reads teen and young adult, the tag beneath it reads Education and Learning, and both are accurate, which also means an adult browsing history will never encounter this book. The prose does not talk down. The material arrives without euphemism and includes starvation, imprisonment and death. What the label actually signals is length and structure rather than simplification, and the distinction matters if you are choosing for an adult reader.
Who Should Pick Up Branded by the Pink Triangle
Teachers assembling a Holocaust unit have the clearest use for this, because it covers a group most curricula omit and does it in one sitting. Teenagers reading independently are the stated audience and are well served by the pacing, which never stalls. Adults who know the broader history but not this thread will come away with names attached to it, which is more than most short introductions manage to leave behind.
Listeners who want the aftermath as much as the atrocity should note what a January 2025 response singles out: the different perspectives on the page, and the different paths people took once the war was over. That is exactly the stretch most accounts stop before reaching. The same response describes borrowing the book through a library service rather than buying it, which is worth knowing if you would rather sample the material before committing money to it.
Look elsewhere if you need scholarly apparatus, since this is synthesis written for young readers rather than a monograph with a citation trail behind it. Look elsewhere too if the brevity itself feels dismissive of the subject, because that reaction is understandable and the book cannot argue you out of it. Two hours and forty-four minutes is not a measure of how seriously Setterington takes this history, and the opening chapter settles the question before the second one starts.
Before You Listen
Is the audiobook appropriate for the teenage audience it targets?
It is written for that audience, but nothing is euphemized. Raids, arrests, imprisonment, starvation and death are all present, and the individual stories are meant to land hard. A younger listener will manage it; a parent or teacher choosing it should expect distress rather than a sanitized survey.
Does the audiobook assume any background in the period?
None. Setterington starts from the Nazi seizure of power and builds the legal and social situation from scratch before reaching the camps, so a listener whose knowledge stops at high school lessons can follow every step without pausing to look something up.
Is the audiobook a reasonable fit for somebody who normally avoids nonfiction?
Probably yes. The structure is built from individual lives rather than argument, the chapters are short, and the whole thing finishes in a single sitting, which removes the usual barrier. What you get is closer to linked testimony than to a textbook chapter.
