Holocaust – Novel Readings

“This Past”: Bart Van Es, The Cut Out Girl

March 16, 2019March 17, 2019Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

cut out girl As with the earlier news that Lien stayed with the neighbours, this information comes as a shock. So there were other Jews in hiding right where Lien lived on Algemeer. When she meet Maartje or Hester Rubens, as Lien must have done if she stayed here in this house, she could have had no idea of who they really were. The notion that Bennekom was a Jewish refuge comes as a total surprise to me. I have spent a lifetime visiting this village and, even now, though I have talked to my mother and her family about the work that I am doing, no one has ever mentioned this past.

Bart Van Es’s The Cut Out Girl is remarkable as much for Van Es’s thoughtful diffidence as a narrator as it is for the story he so carefully pieces together for us, a story that includes both intimate and often heartrending details about individual lives as well as broader historical explanations about the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation. On the train home after a day of research in the National Archives, Van Es begins “to question myself about the work I am doing:

Lien asked me about my motivation. There are so many stories like hers and, besides, the bare facts have already been recorded for the Shoah Foundation archive, which was set up by Steven Spielberg soon after he completed his film Schindler’s List back in 1994. Is there anything that I could add to that?

It’s a fair question–what more do we need to know?–but also, as his book goes on to show, the wrong question. There are always more stories to be told, or more ways to tell the stories; we can never work too hard to counter the dehumanizing mass persecution and murder perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators by giving the people they persecuted and murdered the kind of dedicated attention Van Es gives Lien.

van-es Van Es pursues Lien’s story initially because it is also the story of his family: his paternal grandparents sheltered Lien, absorbing her into their family in Dordrecht as the lives of Jews in the Hague, where her parents lived, became increasingly precarious. One of the most painful documents in a book full of wrenching details is the letter Lien’s mother wrote to the unknown recipients of her 9-year-old daughter in August 1942. “She has been taken from me by circumstance,” wrote 28-year-old Catherine de Jong-Spiero;

May you, with the best will and wisdom, look after her. . . . I want to say to you that it is my wish that she will think only of you as her mother and father and that, in the moments of sadness that will come to her, you will comfort her as such.

Catherine died in Auschwitz in November 1942; her husband died in Auschwitz in February 1943. Lien survives, but the story of her relationship with the Van Es family is a complicated one and full of different kinds of sadness beyond the one her mother no doubt foresaw most clearly. For one thing, she has to leave them and go into hiding elsewhere when her secret identity gets out. Then, when the war is over and it is time to reunite hidden children with their families, the Van Esses turn down Lien’s initial request to return to them. Though they change their mind and take her back, that first rejection is a significant blow to a young girl already at a loss to know where she belongs. Eventually Lien and her foster parents break ties altogether; when Bart meets Lien for their first interview, it has been thirty years since the breach.

The Cut Out Girl alternates chapters about Lien’s experiences during the war with chapters recounting Van Es’s research, including interviews with Lien herself, visits to archives and to places Lien lived while in hiding, and meetings with everyone he can find with something to tell him about Lien or about occupied Holland. He shows us Lien as part of the bigger picture, as one girl among many thousands, but also as profoundly individual, as a very particular young girl suddenly removed from everything familiar and having, over and over, to adapt to new people and new expectations, all under a cloud of fear and secrecy. The people who took care of her also are presented with great distinctness. Because most of what he knows about them comes from Lien, it is easy to lose track of the courage these people showed and the fear they must have felt for themselves. Though, as some of their actions show, they were far from perfect, still they rose to the moral occasion at great personal risk and they and people like them saved thousands of lives. “At least 166 Jews spent time in hiding in Bennekom,” Van Es learns, for instance, “a village of just 5,000, and more than 80 per cent of them survived. This is the opposite of the national picture.” It is hard not to be awed at the actions of Jan and Dieuke Heroma, for example, key parts of a large network “constructed to resist the Nazis.” It was Mrs. Heroma who came to take Lien away from her parents, cheering her on the train to Dordrecht with funny place names: “Double Sausage Street,” a road called “Behind the Wild Pig.” Nothing about the kindly face shown in this photograph of her seems extraordinary, but that’s one of the points a story like Lien’s makes for us: ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things.

The Heromas’ antagonists are those like Harry Evers, one of many Dutch police officers who eagerly enforced Nazi policies, tracking down Jews to meet “the targets set by their German masters.” Evers too is otherwise ordinary, “unremarkable, modestly educated, fond of a drink …. not especially political.” He turns in the opposite direction to Mrs. Heroma, though, joining the Fascist Union and then flourishing in the Political Police, tracking and capturing the same people the Heromas and their allies are working so hard to protect. Van Es goes through boxes of files about Evers, including hundreds of witness statements about his appalling actions. “As I read these things,” Van Es comments quietly, “I think of Lien in hiding.” He tells us about one particular case very close to hers but with a different ending. Miepe Viskooper, age 7, was also sent by her parents into hiding with sympathetic people, in the hope that she would be safe. Discovered, Miepe is caught by Evers and his colleagues as she tries to run from them: “Evers came in right behind her, pointing his revolver, shouting ‘It’s the choke hole for you’ at the little girl.” She was brought to join her parents, who had also been arrested, at Westerbork. “As I read this,” says Van Es,

I think of my own wife and children and imagine that unwanted reunion. I can see the smile of recognition on the face of the child.

Miepe’s father survives, “but he returned to Holland alone.”

As a story of loss and survival during the Holocaust, The Cut Out Girl is engrossing, moving, and sometimes surprising and infuriating. Lien’s particular hardships, it sadly turns out, go beyond the loss of her parents and her constant danger and displacement: there are other villains in her world besides the Nazis and their agents. All the traumas of her childhood play a part in the complications that develop in later years between her and the Van Esses, and Lien also implicates Henk Van Es, the man she calls “Pa,” Bart Van Es’s grandfather, in a further offense, recalling a terrible day when “before she knows what is happening, he is kissing her and stroking her hair.” It is another later incident, though, a seemingly innocuous miscommunication, that leads Lien to write what her foster mother Jans Van Es calls “the terrible letter,” which in turn prompts Jans to sever ties with her. Lien spent years after that, Bart learns, trying to come to terms with her own history and her relationship with the earlier generations of his family.

The Cut Out Girl is not a triumphant story: one thing it drives home is that survival by itself is only part of the battle. On a personal level, though, it does end on a hopeful note: Lien has found happiness in a new phase of her life, and gradually new bonds are being formed between her and the family she was first pasted into then cut out from. There is something lovely about the book’s cautious movement towards this happy ending and the self-effacing way Bart reveals that, in ways he could never have anticipated, his work finding out Lien’s story has done more than fill in a gap. The process has led him to think hard about history but also about his own immediate family, especially his relationship with his stepdaughter Josie. Van Es never presents himself as any kind of heroic discoverer: he is learning as he goes, about himself as well as about Lien.

This inviting diffidence–this care to avoid grandstanding or moralizing–extends to his understated observations about parallels between the time he is researching and the time in which he is doing the research. A different (a worse) book might have made this the pitch. Instead, Van Es just quietly points them out as they occur to him, and as a result their implications linger. Driving to Bennekom one night in 2015 he hears on Dutch radio the news of the shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, which is followed by comments and speeches connecting the attack to the shooting of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004. As he drives along,

the radio shifts to a panel discussion in which the phrase ‘Islamic fascism’ recurs. Tomorrow there will be new developments in Paris: a siege at a kosher supermarket that ends in more killings, this time directly targeting Jews. As I pick up speed in the darkness, I am struck again by the obvious overlap between the present epoch and the last one: absurd conspiracy theories, economic recession, and a loss of faith in moderate politicians, who seem to many people to be irrelevant and corrupt. The little car pulls past container lorries that carry goods into Europe: fridges, televisions, furniture, plastic shoes. From the look of these roads nothing is left of the old Europe, but its ghost remains.

Dordrecht-Town-Canal There have been some shifts, though, some changes in who is feared or hated and how. One day, looking for the exact location of Lien’s first residence in Dordrecht, Van Es realizes his pacing and staring have attracted attention from the current residents: “a middle-aged man in a kameez comes towards me, asking suspiciously, with a heavy accent, what I am doing. . . . ‘You ought not to be spying on people,’ the man tells me.” As he walks away, Van Es is

reminded of the obvious fact that the Muslim community, in terms of the hatred directed towards them, is probably closer to the Jews of the previous century than any other. There are no easy parallels but, all the same, the language of Geert Wilders (whose Party for Freedom has hit 15 per cent in national elections) has an air of the 1930s to it . . . He has spoken of the threat of an ‘Islamic invasion’ and wants no more Muslims to enter the country at all.

50 people were murdered in New Zealand yesterday by someone wielding the same hateful rhetoric along with his high-powered weaponry. Thinking of the suspicion and scrutiny the new inhabitants of the Bilderdijkstraat endure, Van Es is ashamed that he came by “pointing a camera, only to look and not tell.” The project he is there to further, though, is surely part of the larger responsibility we all have not to look away, and then to reflect on the meaning of what we have seen.

“A Gnat Against an Elephant”: Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone

December 8, 2018December 9, 2018Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

fallada

“What did you expect anyway, Quangel? You, an ordinary worker, taking on the Führer, who is backed by the Party, the Wehrmacht, the SS, the SA? The Führer, who has already conquered half the world and will overcome the last of our enemies in another year or two? It’s ludicrous! You must have known you had no chance! It’s a gnat against an elephant. I don’t understand it, a sensible man like you.”

For a novel about courageous resistance to tyranny, Every Man Dies Alone has surprisingly few moments of high drama or eloquence. The low key at which the novel is pitched, however, is what makes it so effective and, ultimately, so devastating. None of its motley array of characters are boldly heroic–or, on the other side, particularly villainous (with some exceptions): most of them are just painfully ordinary people with common garden-variety needs, hopes, flaws, and grievances. They become extraordinary only because they are all living under the Third Reich, a context which changes at once nothing and everything. Once upon a time they didn’t have to consider the moral implications and personal risks of mundane activities such as going to work, visiting a relative, or helping out a friend or neighbor. Now the pervasive possibility of surveillance, betrayal, accusation, and punishment strips them of the privilege of living an unexamined life–at least if they have even a lingering shred of conscience. But even for the thoughtless grifters, liars, and weasels among them, the natural instinct for self-preservation puts them in constant creeping contact with deeper moral corruption. One way or another, knowingly or not, for all of them a day of reckoning inevitably looms.

One of Fallada’s memorable achievements in Every Man Dies Alone is to immerse us completely in the minutiae of this world that is rotting from the inside out. He never attempts to paint with a broad brush, to pull back and show us the big picture. Instead, he helps us grasp the scale of the decay through the Dickensian device of minor characters spiraling outward from the central plot, their stories at once individual and intersecting. The overall effect is of a vast web in which they are all entangled and by which they are all contaminated. No one in the novel is free of the sticky strands of fascism: playing along with the Nazis gives you only the temporary illusion of control or power, while fighting them may tear at filaments but cannot destroy or even damage the ruinous system itself.

hampel_otto1 — Otto and Elise Hampel, the real-life Quangels

Or can it? What is the value of individual resistance amidst such an all-encompassing catastrophe? And does resistance have to be effective to be meaningful? These are the questions at the heart of Every Man Dies Alone, embodied in the story of Otto and Anna Quangel, who are roused to belated opposition to the Nazis by the death of their soldier son in a war they never really believed in. “Isn’t this thing that you’re wanting to do, isn’t it a bit small, Otto,” Anna asks when Otto reveals his plan to scatter subversive postcards around the city. “Whether it’s big or small,” he replies, “if they get wind of it, it’ll cost us our lives.” What, after all, can anyone risk beyond that? “The main thing was,” Anna concludes, “you fought back.”

The writing of the first postcard is their declaration of war: “war between, on the one side, the two of them, poor, small, insignificant workers who could be extinguished for just a word or two, and on the other, the Führer, the Party, the whole apparatus in all its power and glory.” The victories they hope for are indirect and individual: to change minds, perhaps inspire similar small acts of opposition to the regime, and–most important of all–stay themselves. “The main thing,” as their son’s fiancée (herself a member of a small resistance cell) says to Otto even before he has committed to his own rebellion,

“is that we remain different from them, that we never allow ourselves to be made into them, or start thinking as they do. Even if they conquer the whole world, we must refuse to become Nazis.”

Much later, in prison, Otto meets Dr. Reichhardt, a conductor who has “not very actively opposed the Hitler regime, nor conspired with others, nor put up posters, nor plotted assassinations, but had simply lived in accordance with his principles,” a simple-sounding resolve which has led him, among other things, to speak frankly about “how disastrous the course was that the German people were taking under their Führer.” To Otto’s lament that his postcards ultimately made no difference–“and then they kill us, and what good did our resistance do?”–Reichhardt replies, “it will have helped us to feel that we behaved decently till the end,” a moral imperative that Otto eventually echoes to his lawyer, who wonders if he isn’t “sorry to lose your life over a stupid stunt like that.” “At least I stayed decent,” Otto rebukes him:

“I didn’t participate. . . . What was your price for turning into such a fine gentleman, with creased trousers and polished fingernails and deceitful concluding speeches? What did you have to pay? . . . You know perfectly well that the man behind bars is the decent one.”

alone-in-berlin The main driver of the novel’s plot is less the distribution of the postcards themselves than the investigation launched to discover the writer of these ineffectually seditious messages. It is led by Inspector Escherich, who pursues the criminal he dubs the ‘Hobgoblin’ more out of stern professionalism than any particular dedication to the Führer. When he finally has the Quangels in custody, though, Otto “vanquishes” him with the reality of this long-awaited victory: in “just” doing his job, he has been willingly complicit in the regime’s cruelty and injustice. “You’re working in the employ of a murderer,” Otto points out, “delivering ever new victims to him. You do it for money; perhaps you don’t even believe in the man.” Pressured by the celebratory SS to join them in “baptizing” Otto by smashing their glasses over his head, Escherich has “the sense that he was hitting out at himself, striking with an ax at the roots of the tree of his own life.” Unable to bear what he has done and who he has become, Escherich–“Otto Quangel’s only convert”–takes his own life.

There are ways in which a novel about a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler or sabotage a munitions factory or otherwise cause disruption on a much bigger scale would be more exciting than one about a middle-aged couple leaving postcards around. Yes, Fallada was telling the Hampels’ story, but he made other changes to it and could always have raised the stakes in the service of melodrama, after all. In the end, though, I think it is precisely the small scale of the Quangels’ activism that makes Every Man Dies Alone so powerful. For one thing, as Otto points out at the start, even that minor infraction is enough to cost them their lives; the disproportion of the risk and then the punishment is itself a grim measure of fascism’s violence, of the extremities required to maintain its totalitarian order.

More than that, though, there’s something so disarmingly and deceptively manageable about the postcards themselves. Fallada’s tone throughout the novel is so prosaic and matter of fact, and his Quangels are so very low key themselves, that I nearly made the same mistake as Escherich, underestimating their accomplishment because I measured the scale of their resistance against the vastness of their enemy. Then I saw the reproductions of some of the Hampels’ actual postcards (included in the Melville House edition of Every Man Dies Alone) and found myself affected more powerfully by them than by the novel’s account of the Quangels’ deaths:

That laborious lettering is at once unbearably humble and unthinkably heroic. Anyone could do such a thing–it takes no special skills, no fancy equipment, no elaborate conspiracy, no great physical strength–but how many people would? Would you? Would I? Would we stay decent, even if writing a postcard was “all” it took? In putting the means so close to hand for all of us, Fallada makes it painfully clear that the smallest act of resistance is much more difficult and thus much more precious than we thought.

Sad, Beautiful, Absurd: Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

August 30, 2018August 30, 2018Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

suite

How sad the world is, so beautiful yet so absurd . . . But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique according to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others . . . yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this. This is for ever . . .

There are two aspects to Suite Française: the (unfinished) novel itself–two parts of an imagined five–and the story of its author, whose arrest, transportation, and eventual death at Auschwitz haunt her fiction about occupied France. It is difficult for me to disentangle my reading of the former from my response to the latter. I was interested enough in Suite Française, which is almost uncomfortably cool and acerbic in its depiction of its characters’ various trials and traumas. There’s no room for sentiment or heroism in Némirovsky’s portraits of people under extraordinary pressure–almost everybody is to some degree petty and self-absorbed, but her upper-class characters in particular are more afraid of losing their luxuries and privileges than they are of the larger and more dire implications of the German occupation.

I found Part I (“Storm in June”), about the flight from Paris as the Germans approached, more gripping than Part II (“Dolce”), about the uneasy relationship between the French characters and the occupying forces: the drama was more overt. Part II is more subtle, both morally and emotionally, as it deals with the difference between “the enemy” in the abstract and the all-too-real human beings sharing homes and gardens and public spaces with the vanquished. One thing that particularly struck me about Part I was that Némirovsky mostly avoided clichéd wartime melodrama: although the evacuees are bombed, for instance, the carnage seems almost incidental, and the two most shocking deaths in that part are only indirectly caused by the war. Part II is primarily about character and atmosphere until near the end, when it turns out Némirovsky has been laying the groundwork for a plot twist that, as her notes show, was going to drive a lot of the action in the subsequent parts.

suite-2 I was interested, as I said, yet I wasn’t really captivated. The novel has a rather flat affect–perhaps the result of translation, but also reminiscent of Olivia Manning, who writes about war and violence and what survives with similar restraint. Némirovsky’s novel follows a cast of loosely or incidentally connected characters; the overall effect is somewhat like a sampler, or (as the title suggests) a “suite.” If Némirovsky had been able to finish the novel, the cumulative effect might well have been more than the sum of its parts; it seems shoddy to judge what seem like imperfections knowing that what we’ve got is only a fragment.

Having said that, I did appreciate the novel’s long descriptive passages, which–in contrast to its typically more stilted and utilitarian prose–are often very beautiful, even poetic. Here’s an example that also captures some of the paradoxes of the war-time world Némirovsky depicts. The French villagers have gathered to watch the Germans celebrate the anniversary of their occupation of Paris:

Little by little, darkness spread across the lawns; they could still make out the gold decorations on the uniforms, the Germans’ blond hair, the musicians’ brass instruments on the terrace, but they had lost their glow. All the light of the day, fleeing the earth, seemed for one brief moment to take refuge in the sky; pink clouds spiralled round the full moon that was as green as pistachio sorbet and as clear as glass; it was reflected in the lake. Exquisite perfumes filled the air: grass, fresh hay, wild strawberries. The music kept playing. Suddenly, the torches were lit; as the soldiers carried them along, they cast their light over the messy tables, the empty glasses, for the officers were now gathered around the lake, singing and laughing. There was the lively, happy sound of champagne corks popping.

“Oh, those bastards! And to think it’s our wine they’re drinking,” the Frenchmen said, but without real bitterness, because all happiness is contagious and disarms the spirit of hatred.

It is a memorable vignette, one of many such striking moments in the novel. If it sounds as if Némirovsky is holding out beauty or happiness as in any way the antidote to war and cruelty, though, that would be misleading: the aesthetic pleasure the French take in this spectacle does nothing to undo their resentment and fear at the German presence in their lives, or to compensate for their grief for the loss of their sons and husbands at German hands.

nemirovsky The individual stories Némirovsky tells all have their interesting details, but one thing I thought was missing as I read along was any acknowledgment of the specific risk to Jews. This made me wonder exactly what Némirovsky would have known while she was writing in 1941-2. The Appendices include her notebooks and then correspondence from her and her husband Michael including his letters, increasingly desperate, to friends and connections after her arrest in July 1942. It is clear that he, at any rate, did not realize what it means–that it is almost certainly a death sentence. Not only does he try every means he can think of to find her and bring her home, but he even offers to take her place: “Can you please find out,” he writes a couple of months after her arrest,

if it would be possible for me to be exchanged for my wife–I would perhaps be more useful in her place and she would be better off here. If this is impossible, maybe I could be taken to her–we would be better off together.

By the time he sent this letter Irène had been dead for over a month. Michael himself was arrested in October 1942 and sent on to Auschwitz, where he died in the gas chambers. Their daughters survived only thanks to the courageous efforts of friends who sheltered them.

Maybe if I hadn’t read these documents immediately after finishing Suite Française the novel itself would have made a stronger impression on me. I found the appendices so compelling and immediate, though, so painfully real, that they overshadowed Némirovsky’s more muted and analytical fiction. The juxtaposition did raise questions for me about the kind of novel she wrote: about whether it deliberately lacks melodrama and avoids the horror and urgency her own story evokes or whether–though the included Preface to the French edition notes that she and her family “all openly wore the Jewish star” as restrictions on French Jews increased–she was spared the full painful understanding of what was really at stake until it was too late for her to write about it. (I’m sure there are answers about who know what when, though who believed what when is probably a somewhat different question. Then as now, it would have been hard to grasp the worst realities.) In any case, it is her personal story more than Suite Française that will stay with me, I think, which seems somehow both all wrong and entirely right.

‘You were made men’: Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

April 14, 2012June 28, 2019Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

In a recent post about choosing The Road as one of the texts for my Introduction to Literature class next year, I mentioned that I’m also assigning Eli Wiesel’s Night. In the comments, Dorian said that he considered Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz “the more compelling text, both formally and conceptually.” As I said to him then, I’ve known for a while that I should read Levi, and his remark was just the instigation I needed to make it a priority.

I finished reading Survival in Auschwitz this afternoon, so it’s too soon for me to say whether I think it is better or greater than Night. It is certainly a very different book, and as I work up my notes on Night again in the fall I know I’ll be thinking a lot about the contrasts. My first impression is that it is a much less overtly literary book than Night—Night is heavily symbolic, organized around motifs and vignettes and characterized (at least in the translation I’m familiar with) by striking images and words freighted with significance. Levi’s approach is more indirect, his vignettes or episodes more elusive or ambiguous. In some ways, I think Night is more artful, but also, as a result, it feels more artificial. There’s a raw quality to Levi’s book: it’s not sleek, he’s honest about things he forgets, there are awkward but heartfelt gestures towards people he remembers. The book is unified in a different way than Night is–not emotionally or symbolically but associatively, conceptually, a section at a time. It does not conclude but ends, again awkwardly, without flourish. Though both books immerse us in the horror of Auschwitz, Levi’s account seems somehow less visceral, more appalled than angry, more inquisitive than despairing. It is not any less devastating. It is, perhaps, more morally challenging: where Wiesel deals in searing absolutes, Levi puzzles us, as he was puzzled: “We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘just’ and ‘unjust’; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outlined and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire.”

The differences between the books are not superficial, but at the same time I don’t think they are fundamental: both books are ultimately preoccupied with the loss or preservation of humanity under conditions that deliberately seek to exterminate it, conditions so psychically brutalizing that physical death seems little more than a bureaucratic afterthought. The original English title of Survival in Auschwitz was If This Is a Man, which is a direct translation of the Italian title. The current title seems apt to the book’s attention to literal survival: a lot of Levi’s attention is given to the complex economy of the camp, driven by desperation but also fueled by people’s endless ingenuity: spoons, shoes, bowls, bread–the things that mean, for just a little longer, endurance. The title has another dimension, though, more consonant with the Italian title, which is the survival of the person: memories, dreams, knowledge. For Levi, his knowledge of chemistry, which helps define him, to himself, as a man (“Yet I am he, the B. Sc. of Turin, in fact, at this particular moment it is impossible to doubt my identity with him”) also contributes to his physical survival, as his job in the laboratory protects him from a second winter of hard labor. But one of the most profound and moving sections of the book for me was section 11, “The Canto of Ulysses,” in which Levi tries to teach a fellow prisoner Italian by reciting and translating some of the Divine Comedy:

Here, listen Pikolo, open your ears and your mind, you have to understand, for my sake:

Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,
To follow after knowledge and excellence.’

As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am.

Pikolo begs me to repeat it. How good Pikolo is, he is aware that it is doing me good. Or perhaps it is something more: perhaps, despite the wan translation and the pedestrian, rushed commentary, he has received the message, he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to reason of these things with the poles for the soup on our shoulders.

Levi’s urgency increases as their time runs out and he can’t remember the lines, can’t bridge the gaps in his memory, can’t explain, can’t hold on. The poetry is unbearable because it awakens what the camp refuses–what you too must refuse to survive the camp (“oh, Pikolo, Pikolo, say something, speak, do not let me think of my mountains which used to show up against the dusk of evening as I returned by train from Milan to Turin”). But the loss of the poetry is also unbearable, because it is the negation of the camp. It is the antidote, not to the regimented brutality, the beatings and murders, the starvation, but to what Levi calls early in the book “the demolition of a man.”

Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost

June 21, 2010Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

From the Novel Readings Archive

3 Quarks Daily has just announced the winners in their 2010 Prize for science blogging, judged by Richard Dawkins. Congratulations to all the nominees, and especially to the finalists and winners. I think 3QD is doing a great thing by drawing attention to the high quality of writing that can be found on blogs: it’s still too common to hear people being dismissive of the form, rather than attentive to the content. The challenge, of course, is filtering through the overwhelming number and variety of sites, something that events such as these 3QD competitions can really help with. It’s a remarkable thing that so many people write so well and so passionately about so many subjects and share their work so freely. I submitted my post on Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost to the 3QD Arts and Literature competition earlier this year because, as I said at the time, “the book absolutely topped my list of notable reads last year, because writing about it as well as I could was important to me, and because I was reasonably satisfied that I had said what I wanted to about it. Also, one of my most trusted readers wrote me to say that she thought it was the best thing I’d ever written on my blog.” I’m proud that my post was selected as a finalist.

“So many people know these horrible stories by now,” Daniel Mendelsohn reflects near the end of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; “what more was there to say? How to tell them?” The Lost itself is, of course, his answer.

This extraordinary book, at its simplest level, is a more or less chronological account of Mendelsohn’s quest to learn the fate of his great-uncle Schmiel (Sam) Jager, his wife Ester, and their four daughters, Lorka (b. 1920), Frydka (b. 1922), Ruchele (b. 1925), and Bronia (b. 1929?). From early in his childhood Mendelsohn knows where his relatives lived, in the Polish town of Bolechow, and he knows that they died during the Holocaust, but beyond this he has only fragments of information, from stories half-heard or half-understood (“Once, I overheard my grandfather saying to my mother, I know only they were hiding in a kessle. Since I knew by then how to make adjustments for his accent, when I heard him say this I simply wondered, What castle?”), from photographs (“killed by the Nazis,” his grandfather has written on the back of a photograph of Schmiel in his WWI uniform, brought by Daniel to school for a presentation to his Grade 10 history class: “I remembered what had been written because I so clearly remembered the reaction to those words of my high school history teacher, who when she read what my gradnfather had written clapped a hand to her handsome, humorous face, . . . and exclaimed, ‘Oh, no!'”), from letters (“The date of Onkel Schmil and his family when they died nobody can say me, 1942 the Germans kild the aunt Ester with 2 daughters,” writes his Great-Aunt Miriam from Israel in 1975).

Only once he makes it his mission to fill in the gaps in his knowledge does Daniel realize, over the course of many years and many interviews with surviving “Bolechowers,” in America and Australia, Israel and Denmark and Poland, that he “knew” almost nothing. Indeed, The Lost is in large part a meditation on what nobody knows, what nobody can know: not just the facts, what happened to Schmiel and Ester and their daughters (“such darling four children,” Schmiel writes in 1939, in one of his desperately dignified letters to his American relatives, asking for money and help to get his family “away from this Gehenim,” this Hell), the facts of their deaths, but also their lives. Who were they, these six people, now almost as lost (as Mendelsohn ruminates near the volume’s close) as the many millions who, before them, lived and were lost into what is now history? What can we really know of them, or say about them?

For everything, in time, gets lost: the lives of people now remote, the tantalizing yet ultimately vanished and largely unknowable lives of virtually all of the Greeks and Romans and Ottomans and Malays and Goths and Bengals and Sudanese who ever lived, the peoples of Ur and Kush, the lives of the Hittites and Philistines that will never be known, the lives of people more recent than that, the African slaves and the slave traders, the Boers and the Belgians, those who were slaughtered and those who died in bed, the Polish counts and Jewish shopkeepers, the blond hair and eyebrows and small white teeth that someone once loved or desired of this or that boy or girl or man or woman who was one of the five million (or six or seven) Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin, and indeed the intangible things beyond the hair and teeth and brows, the smiles and frustrations and laughter and terror and loves and hunger of every one of those millions of Ukrainians, just as the hair of a Jewish girl or boy or man or woman that someone once loved, and the teeth and the brows, the smiles and frustrations and laughter and terror of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust are now lost, or will soon be lost, because no number of books, however great, could ever document them all, even if they were to be written, which they won’t and can’t be; all that will be lost, too . . . everything will be lost, eventually, as surely as most of what made up the lives of the Egyptians and Incas and Hittites has been lost. But for a little while some of that can be rescued, if only, faced with the vastness of all that there is and all that there ever was, somebody makes the decision to look back. . . .

And of course that is what Mendelsohn himself has done, to look back, to see “not only what was lost but what there is still to be found.” Though his initial interest is in just how his lost relatives died (“we did end up finding out what happened to Uncle Schmiel and his family–by accident,” he tells us early on), his preoccupation becomes something at once more expansive and more elusive: their lives, their experiences, their identities–what they lost, in becoming no longer “themselves, specific” (“I was reminded the more forcefully,” he says at a crucial moment of discovery, “that they had been specific people with specific deaths . . . they were once, themselves, specific, the subjects of their own lives and deaths”) but only six of six million, lost in the sheer magnitude of the loss of which their own deaths were specific only to them.

Mendelsohn’s refusal to take over their specificity, to presume to know them or speak for them, for me was one of the most impressive features of the book. Even when he reconstructs likely scenarios, he frames them with a respectful uncertainty. How presumptuous, after all, to think we can stand, vicariously, in the place of his sixteen-year-old cousin Ruchele, killed in Bolechow’s first official Aktion. “I have often tried to imagine what might have happened to her,” Mendelsohn remarks, “although every time I do, I realize how limited my resources are.” Not only is the evidence fragmentary and unreliable, not only can “memory itself . . . play tricks,” but “there is no way to reconstruct what she herself went through.” Still, he tries, drawing on his own interviews with survivors and witnesses but also from documents in Yad Vashem, but never presuming to know what was really only Ruchele’s knowledge (“It is indeed possible that,” “if she survived those thirty-six hours,” “with what thoughts it is impossible to know,” “Did she hear it? . . . We cannot know.”) “That is the last we see of her,” he says at the end of this section; “although we have, of course, not really seen her at all.” The sense of loss at this point is acute: the waste, the horror, the mystery, the finality of death.

These and the many other, often quite extended, meditations on the limits of our historical knowledge risk bringing a degree of narrative self-consciousness to The Lost that could turn it too far towards Mendelsohn himself. If the book had become more about the storytelling than the stories, I would have liked it far less, but I never felt that the humanity of his family was put second to intellectual gamesmanship or philosophical speculation. Even the long sections of biblical exegesis are woven, always, into his thinking about what might have happened, what it all might have meant or be made to mean, what larger (cyclical, universal) stories these individual stories might in their own ways reiterate. There are high stakes involved in his project, and his insistence that it matters how much we know, where our information comes from, how we piece it together into something meaningful–the effort he puts into questioning or undermining or revising what he learned during his interviews and travels–keeps alive for us that history is made as well as lived by human beings whose complexity cannot be reduced and should not be underestimated. Not that he is a relativist about truth: it matters deeply to him to reach as close as possible to what really happened to Schmiel and Ester and their daughters. The moments at which he comes physically closest take on a special poignancy because as he stands there–for instance, in the kestle, box, not kessle, castle, where Schmiel and Frydka hid for months, and “the material reality” allows Mendelsohn “to understand the words at last”–he is most sharply aware he will never know, really: “those lives and deaths belonged to them, not me.”

Early in the book Mendelsohn points out that “it is naturally more appealing to readers to absorb the meaning of a vast historical event through the story of a single family.” Such, clearly, is the strategy of this book. And yet we are often reminded, because Mendelsohn too is often reminded (sometimes, deservedly, harshly), that in focusing so exclusively on six of six million, others whose lives were equally “specific” are being sidelined, turned into secondary characters. He interviews Jack Greene, “born Grunschlag,” who once dated Ruchele:

I can tell you, he began, that Ruchele perished on the twenty-ninth of October 1941.

I was startled, and immediately afterward moved, by the specificity of this memory.

I said, Now let me just ask you, why–because you remember the date so specifically–why do you remember the date?

As I wrote down Ruchele–>Oct 29 1941, I thought to myself, He must have really loved her.

Jack said, Because my mother and older brother perished on the same day.

I said nothing. We are each of us, I realized, myopic; always at the center of our own stories.

There is no way, of course, to include every story, but Mendelsohn’s strategy of frequently spiralling away from the “main” narrative, following memories and anecdotes as they come into his mind or come from those he is interviewing, is a constant reminder that each story we do hear is one branch on a vast spreading tree. The sheer scope of the horror and loss would be overwhelming even if it were possible to represent it all, so instead we get glimpses, again and again, so that like Mendelsohn himself, though we are focusing on the Jagers, we can never forget that there were many, many others–or if we do, we are soon chastened:

As I looked I suddenly felt foolish for asking Mrs Begley to look in her book [of the victims] for my relatives, whom I never knew and who meant something rather abstract for me at that point, when so many of hers, so much closer to her, were there too. . . .

Then she took a breath that was also a sigh, and started telling me her own stories of slyness and survival, and other stories, too. Of, for instance, how, successfully hidden herself, she had bribed someone to bring her parents and in-laws to a certain place from which she would take them to safety, . . . and how when she arrived at this rendezvous she saw a wagon filled with dead bodies passing by, and on top of the pile of bodies were those of the elderly people she had come to rescue. . . .

And then she added this: Because she herself was in danger, was “passing” at that point, she couldn’t allow herself to betray any emotion when she saw the bodies of her family passing by in the wagon. . . .

Mrs Begley’s story of “passing” (You see, I was fair, and I spoke German) points to another issue Mendelsohn confronts, as a researcher and storyteller: all those he interviews are, necessarily, survivors. So not only do they (like Mrs Begley) all have remarkable stories of their own to tell, of hiding and running and starving, of those who helped them, or didn’t, but they also could not have been witnesses (“Had he seen [Ruchele] being taken? I stupidly questioned. He laughed grimly. If I would have seen her, I would have been dead too!“). One of Mendelsohn’s aunts, asked by her inquisitive relation for details of her own birth, replies, “I’m not going to tell you when I was born because it would have been better if I’d never been born“, and we realize that though the survivors were not lost in the same way as Ruchele and Frydka and Schmiel and Ester and Lorka and little Bronia, still, they lost everything they had and are lost as well. “‘Well,'” says Jack Greene, “‘think of Bolechow. Of six thousand Jews, we were forty-eight who survived.'”

Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost

August 28, 2009January 26, 2019Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

the-lost “So many people know these horrible stories by now,” Daniel Mendelsohn reflects near the end of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; “what more was there to say? How to tell them?” The Lost itself is, of course, his answer.

For everything, in time, gets lost: the lives of people now remote, the tantalizing yet ultimately vanished and largely unknowable lives of virtually all of the Greeks and Romans and Ottomans and Malays and Goths and Bengals and Sudanese who ever lived, the peoples of Ur and Kush, the lives of the Hittites and Philistines that will never be known, the lives of people more recent than that, the African slaves and the slave traders, the Boers and the Belgians, those who were slaughtered and those who died in bed, the Polish counts and Jewish shopkeepers, the blond hair and eyebrows and small white teeth that someone once loved or desired of this or that boy or girl or man or woman who was one of the five million (or six or seven) Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin, and indeed the intangible things beyond the hair and teeth and brows, the smiles and frustrations and laughter and terror and loves and hunger of every one of those millions of Ukrainians, just as the hair of a Jewish girl or boy or man or woman that someone once loved, and the teeth and the brows, the smiles and frustrations and laughter and terror of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust are now lost, or will soon be lost, because no number of books, however great, could ever document them all, even if they were to be written, which they won’t and can’t be; all that will be lost, too . . . everything will be lost, eventually, as surely as most of what made up the lives of the Egyptians and Incas and Hittites has been lost. But for a little while some of that can be rescued, if only, faced with the vastness of all that there is and all that there ever was, somebody makes the decision to look back. . . .

I can tell you, he began, that Ruchele perished on the twenty-ninth of October 1941.

I was startled, and immediately afterward moved, by the specificity of this memory.

I said, Now let me just ask you, why–because you remember the date so specifically–why do you remember the date?

As I wrote down Ruchele–>Oct 29 1941, I thought to myself, He must have really loved her.

Jack said, Because my mother and older brother perished on the same day.

I said nothing. We are each of us, I realized, myopic; always at the center of our own stories.

As I looked I suddenly felt foolish for asking Mrs Begley to look in her book [of the victims] for my relatives, whom I never knew and who meant something rather abstract for me at that point, when so many of hers, so much closer to her, were there too. . . .

Then she took a breath that was also a sigh, and started telling me her own stories of slyness and survival, and other stories, too. Of, for instance, how, successfully hidden herself, she had bribed someone to bring her parents and in-laws to a certain place from which she would take them to safety, . . . and how when she arrived at this rendezvous she saw a wagon filled with dead bodies passing by, and on top of the pile of bodies were those of the elderly people she had come to rescue. . . .

And then she added this: Because she herself was in danger, was “passing” at that point, she couldn’t allow herself to betray any emotion when she saw the bodies of her family passing by in the wagon. . . .