Tag Archives: Holocaust

What I Read, June 2022

Posted on by under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

Plenty busy chez EMJ last month. Two weeks studying Holocaust photographs in a faculty seminar (inspiring, transformative, draining). One week teaching an online class (enjoyable, tiring). One week doing absolutely nothing but reading and chilling (bliss). And one week trying to catch up on all the things (I know this makes for five weeks, not sure what to tell you).

Although much of my reading concerned the history of atrocity photographs, I made time for a number of other things. I got into a good rhythm: get up early, read something demanding for an hour or so; crash in the afternoon and evening, read fluff. Spent much of the month in St Louis: nice to be somewhere where you can sit outside in the summer. Also: Ted Drewes FTW!

Gilad Seliktar, from But I Live

Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger) (1945/1991)

In the first pages of his autobiography, Wright, a bored four-year-old, almost burns his grandmother’s house down, and the rest of the book is seldom less incendiary. Amazing that Wright survived not just that errant moment but his childhood at all. So much abuse, contempt, despair. Wright wanted to call the book American Hunger, a resonant title that suggests not just the hunger that African Americans have felt to belong to their country but also the hunger with which America has devoured them. Most of all, though, the title is literal: Wright was seriously undernourished much of his life, even into adulthood. (He was turned down for a good job with the post office because he didn’t weight enough.) In one indelible scene, Wright, who has been deposited in an orphanage because his mother temporarily can’t take care of him, is dizzy with hunger. He and the other children were fed only twice a day—before bed they received a thin slice of bread with a smear of molasses—but that didn’t save them from having to work. For example, they had to “mow” the orphanage’s grounds: a herd of children on their hands and knees, pulling the grass out in clumps, often too lightheaded to make any headway.

Wright changed the title to Black Boy after the Book of the Month club, which had selected the title—as it had done some years before with Native Son—declined to publish the manuscript’s second half, which describes Wright’s experiences after escaping the South for Chicago, specifically his involvement with the communist party. (I gather the party pressured the BMOC to make the changes, which suggests an America so different from the one we live in I don’t even know what to say.) I sort of agree that the parts about Wright’s childhood and early adulthood in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee are more compelling. They’re certainly more reducible to a narrative of suffering that makes sense to (white) readers. (And ending with the train ride to Chicago implies an overcoming that the rest of the book belies.) But I found the cruel political machinations described in the second half engrossing—excommunication, quasi-Stalinist show trials, oof. Wright believes there is something essential to communism that cannot be quashed by its instantiation, whether in the Soviet Union or south side Chicago. It emphasized self-sacrifice in a way his own life had prepared him to understand.

What stands out to me about Black Boy is its almost complete lack of joy. Wright’s life was hard, his upbringing mean, in both senses of the world, his horizons cramped by racism and the strict religion of his family. There’s nothing here to compare, for example, to the meaningful pleasures described in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Colored People. (Admittedly, Gates was of a different class and writing about the 1950s not the 20s and 30s.) The funniest scene concerns his job as a janitor at a Chicago hospital. Not that this was a good time. Together with three other men, all Black, Wright worked without thanks and almost without recompense: his description of mopping stairs that people immediately muck up, offering what they think is an amusing quip about how work is never done or, as is more often the case, not even seeing him at all will make your blood boil. The basement of the hospital contained a lab where white scientists performed experiments on animals (afflicting mice with diabetes and other horrors). One day, two of the janitors, who hate each other, get into a fight that turns into a brawl—the cages are knocked to the floor, and most of the animals escape. With only minutes to go before the scientists are due back from lunch, Wright and the others chase the animals, tossing the animals into cages willy-nilly. Who knows, Wright wryly speculates, what medical advances were made that day. Yet this scene, which in another writer’s hands could be laugh out loud funny, is tense, terrifying. The consequences of discovery for Wright and the others are simply too great.

Poverty is corrosive, yet Wright’s escape carries with it regret, loss, sorrow, and rage. In a riff on Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness, Wright describes his literary self-education—he used the library card of a sympathetic white co-worker to check out books—as a mixed blessing:

In buoying me up, reading also cast me down, made me see what was possible, what I had missed. My tension returned, new, terrible, bitter, surging, almost too great to be contained. I no longer felt that the world about me was hostile, killing; I knew it. A million times I asked myself what I could do to save myself, and there were no answers. I seemed forever condemned, ringed by walls.

Communist party meddling or no, I can see why white publishers were wary of the book’s refusal of uplift. To me, the characteristic Wright note here is that added “killing”—Wright suffers plenty of physical violence, but his mental anguish is even worse.

Audrey Magee, The Colony (2022)

In the summer of 1979, two men arrive on an island off the west coast of Ireland. One, an English painter, is running away from a failing marriage and doubts about his artistic relevance, and in search of fabled light. The other, a French academic, is returning to complete the field work for his anthropological and linguistic dissertation on Gaelic. The story of how their competing presences—expressed in dinner-table arguments about whether English and the modernity it is the vehicle for is ruinous—shape the lives of the family that has rented them their rooms is interspersed by short chapters that detail, in neutral language, killings perpetrated by Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries back on the mainland.

I’m a sucker for windswept northern landscapes, and any story in which the making of tea is a repeated and central element will always be meat and drink to me. But I liked Colony for other reasons too. It’s a think-y book that never feels plodding. Magee argues that the depredations of colonialism take many forms—the fantasy of linguistic purity as harmful as airy invocations of progress. The latter, so Magee, always require someone be exploited. She tackles a lot here, and I wasn’t always convinced by the juggling act (a backstory about the Frenchman’s childhood as the son of a pied noir needed to be better integrated), but I appreciated her ambition.

Thanks to John Self for turning me on to this one.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes , or The Loving Huntsman (1926)

An unmarried woman in England between the wars becomes a witch. Or decides to live as the witch she has always been. Frances, Rebecca, and I talk about this on Episode 5 of One Bright Book—I loved it less than they did, was not quite swept away with it as I’d hoped, but I definitely recommend. Warner is perhaps a little chilly for me, and I do wonder about the implications of emphasizing (only?) a magical solution to a political problem—what will it take for women to be left alone? Prefer Comyns’s The Vet’s Daughter, for a not dissimilar English magic-realist admixture.

Check out these pieces by Rebecca and Rohan for more thoughts on what Warner is up to.

Garry Disher, The Way It Is Now (2021)

Diverting crime novel with good surfing scenes. The son of a cop, himself recently a cop—he fell in love with a witness and has been suspended—has never stopped trying to find out what happened to his mother, who disappeared twenty years ago. New evidence comes to light, and things look even worse than ever for his father, who has always maintained his innocence.

Not the best Disher I’ve read, but he’s so damn competent, not sure he can write a bad book.

Charlotte Schallié, Ed. But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (2022)

[Created by Miriam Libicki and David Schaffer; Gilad Seliktar and Nico & Rolf Kamp; Barbara Yelin and Emmie Arbel]

Beautiful & moving collaboration between child Holocaust survivors and graphic novelists, with impressive critical and historical appendices. Libicki fittingly illustrates Schaffer’s story of hiding in the forests of Transnistria—what horrible things happened in that benighted territory—in the style of an edition of the Grimms. The minimalist Seliktar (he reminds me of Manuele Fior) uses a palette of purple/blue + yellow/brown and delicate shading to accompany the story of the Kamp brothers’ time in hiding (in thirteen different lodgings, including a chicken coop) in Holland. Yelin, whose marvelous Irmina I raved about last year, tells the bleak story of Emmie Arbel’s terrifying experiences as a five-year-old in Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen, where she had to watch her mother starve to death as a result of dividing her meager rations among her children (all three survived, miraculously). After a long recuperation in Sweden, the siblings immigrated to Israel, where Emmie struggled again, especially in the kibbutz system of education/neglect. All three artists include their exchanges with their subjects in their comics, but Yelin’s self-reflection is the most extensive. In the process she shows how thoroughly Arbel was damaged by her experiences, to the point of passing her trauma on to her children.

The project is a triumph. Schallié deserves credit for bringing together survivors, artists, and scholars—and for securing the funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Reseach Council of Canada that supported the collaborative project of which this book must be the centerpiece. In addition to the three comics, there’s a further comic describing the artists’ cooperation, a brief statement from each of the survivors themselves, and lucid, informative short essays expanding on the context of each survivor’s experiences by scholars. I especially appreciated Alexander Korb’s piece on the Holocaust in Transnistria.

Did I mention that But I Live is gorgeously produced and printed, too? A must read if you have any interest in the topic.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora (2015)

Excellent novel about a spaceship—outfitted with twenty-four complete biomes and about two thousand people—on a mission to an earth-like moon in the Tau Ceti system. Despite having been slingshotted from Saturn at who knows how much the speed of light (Robinson does know, and goes into detail, but I can’t follow him when he gets all engineer-y), the trip takes 160 years, and so the people on board as the ship approaches Aurora are several generations removed from the ones who set off.

Two women are at the center of the novel—Devi, the ship’s de-facto chief engineer, and Freya, her daughter. (Robinson’s great theme is the power of the engineering mindset, its ingenuity and improvisation, when tied to a politics of care.) The other protagonist is Ship itself, whose AI comes to self-consciousness through long conversations with Devi, and her command that Ship write a narrative of the voyage. (The meditations of the relation of narrative to consciousness are the least successful part of the book.)

The travelers begin the process of terraforming the moon, but it turns out that it is inhabited, at minimum, by a prion that is fatal to humans. The crew faces a decision—turn their efforts to a nearby moon in the hope that it’s more hospitable, or return to earth, something Ship was not designed for. The dilemma almost leads to civil war—only Ship’s intervention as The Rule of Law permits a non-violent resolution of the situation. Most decide to return, but a large minority opt for the unknown. We never learn what happens to them. Probably nothing good, but Robinson leaves their experience as a tantalizing possibility and a symbol for all that can’t be known.

The voyage home is perilous for many reasons—the biomes are failing, the crew is starving, authorities on earth respond too late to slow Ship down, necessitating a dangerous twelve-year journey through the solar system where, theoretically, the gravitational forces of the planets create will enough drag for the crew to splash down.

Aurora is moving, suspenseful, and thought-provoking. As a book about politics and the insatiable human demand to make and do—which, Robinson suggests, ought to be confined to our own planet—it made a fascinating and unexpected pairing with the other book I was reading at the same time, namely…

Guido Morselli, The Communist (1976) Trans. Frederika Randall (2017)

Published after his death, like all his novels, Morselli’s The Communist was written in 1964 – 65. It’s set a half-decade earlier, at a time when the Communist party in Italy boasted the third-largest membership in the world, after only the USSR and China. Its success stemmed from its active role in the resistance to fascism, and translated, in the first decade or so after the war, into parliamentary success, although its members were divided about participating in the act of governing. Would that not legitimate the system they wished to overthrow? The Communist is about one of these new parliamentarians, Walter Ferranini, a man whose life has been devoted to the left, even if the left has not been devoted to him. The son of an anarchist railwayman, Ferranini served in Spain before finding his way to the US, where, despite himself, in a manner that seems to emulate the bourgeois striving he abhors, he marries the daughter of his boss and allows himself to dream of the family’s place in the country. But when his wife turns reactionary, throwing herself into a nativist movement, and with the war over, he returns to Italy and throws himself into labour activism in Reggio Emilia.

It is on the basis of his success in these practical matters, and his genuine commitment to improving the lives of the workers, that Ferranini is elected a deputy in the national parliament. Although he lives to serve, he is unhappy: his dream of introducing a bill to expand worker safety is met with hostility and derision by members of his own party; he feels increasingly unable to discipline colleagues who call out hypocrisy among party leaders; he falls afoul of party orthodoxy when he writes an article for a journal headed by Alberto Moravia; and his affair with married but separated single-mother is used by the party as an excuse to discipline him. No wonder his health is so bad. And then comes a telegram from the US—Nancy, his wife (they never divorced), is seriously ill. He gets a flight, arriving in Philadelphia in an epic snowstorm that incites the novel’s satisfying denouement.

Ferranini is a sad, lonely, and, yes, noble character (he’d despise that description, though, and the book sympathizes but never romanticizes him). Morselli writes with deep interest, if not tenderness, but entirely without sarcasm or satire about the tendency of belief systems and institutional structures to obscure the insights that sparked them. Ferranini’s article, the one that gets him in trouble with the party bosses, is about the inescapable reality of toil. Contra Marx, he argues, not even achieved socialism will be able to undo this reality. (Hannah Arendt would approve!) Workers don’t feel alienated; they feel tired. As he says:

Admit it, there are things that technology cannot achieve. There is a law that can’t be breached, a physical and biological law that says life can’t arise and survive without sweat and struggle. And especially not without struggling against the environment, the surrounding material reality, and labor is part of this.

The Communist, one of the best books I’ve read this year, so thoughtful and, oh I don’t know, solid, though never turgid, presents activism and labor organizing as real labor, less exhausting and dangerous than work in a mine or factory or agricultural cooperative, but exhausting and dangerous nonetheless. Most of the people who do that work are not dedicated to it—some are outright cynics, former fascists who became fervent communists when they saw which way the wind was blowing; Ferranini is exceptional. Morselli allows us to believe in his integrity even as he also shows us that the system the man works within ultimately holds him in contempt. It would be easy to conclude that Ferranini is a dupe. Morselli refuses that temptation. Neither does he make the man a true believer. He is something rarer: someone who does the work, because the work is good, if, as it is supposed to, it eases our exhaustion.

Nora inspired me to read this, and am I ever glad. Grateful too to the late Frederika Randall for bringing this book into such lovely English.

K. C. Constantine, The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself (1973)

The second Mario Balzic mystery is a step-down from the first—less interesting, plot-wise, and dismayingly retrograde in its use of slurs, to say nothing of its portrayal of queerness—but Constantine is good with the snappy dialogue and Balzic is shaping up to be a great character. I’ll give the series a little more rope.

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where are You (2021)

Loved it! Still think Conversations with Friends is the one to beat, but I’m appreciating the maturing of Rooney’s characters as she herself ages, and I just think she gets “the whole meeting smart friends when you are young and then sticking with them for years even as your lives change” thing. Also, a great writer of sex.

Setting down to write what became The Rainbow, Lawrence said in a letter that he was going to follow the master, Eliot, and do what she did: take two couples and set them against each other. Rooney does the same here. Of her four protagonists, the non-intellectual Felix interested me the most, there’s a Mephistophelean quality there that is directed outward rather than inward (most of the bad things in her other books have involved self-harm), though I think Rooney took the easy way out at the end and tamed him, made him just curmudgeonly when he might have been something else.

This was great on audio, by the way, Rooney’s Irishness much more evident.

Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train (2010) Trans. Sam Malissa (2021)

Extravagant thriller with more plot twists than any five books need, let alone one. The premise is cool—a bunch of assassins and other thugs are stuck on a bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka. Their various errands center on a suitcase full of money and the son of a mobster who winds up dead a few pages into the book. At first I was into it, the reversals were clever and the characters intriguing. But then the book spoils the fun by taking take itself seriously—there’s a running question of why people think it’s ok to kill other people, what makes for evil in the world, etc. Because I don’t respect myself, I finished it, all 432 pages.

Barbara Yelin, from But I Live

There you have it, folks. Began with a bang, ended with a whimper, but, really, this was the most solid reading month in ages. Almost everything was good, but special shout-outs to the Wright, Robinson, and Morselli. Three best-of-the-year candidates right there. Marginal consolation in a time of the rampaging new American illiberalism. I hope you all are well and not too disheartened.

Cutting Across Lines: Teaching Holocaust Literature in Arkansas

Posted on by under Holocaust, judaism, personal, self-promotion, teaching, Uncategorized

My personal essay on teaching Holocaust literature in the South has appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of The Oxford American.

Regular readers of this blog know how much I love Ruth Kluger’s memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. In the essay, I begin by describing how differently Kluger’s shocked response to segregation in 1950s Texas registered for me once I started teaching her work in a classroom filled with students from Texas and across the South.

Vienna, 1938

“Cutting across Lines,” as the essay is titled, is about belonging. I consider three times and places that have shaped me–the Canada of my childhood, the Eastern and Central Europe before, during, and immediately after the Holocaust, and the South today. I reflect on how each of these worlds shapes my understanding of the others. I worked hard on the essay, helped by stellar editing from the folks at the OA and my wife, who helped me see what the essay was really about.

You can read it here, but I encourage you to subscribe to support this valuable magazine.

Gordon Parks’ “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956). Credit for all images must say: Photograph by Gordon Parks, Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation, Courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery.

“It Screamed in its Own Blood”: Poems by Henia and Ilona Karmel

Posted on by under book review, Holocaust, judaism, review, Uncategorized

Henia and Ilona Karmel grew up in a cultured bourgeois family in Kraków. Photos show them together, always touching: an arm around the shoulders, a hand clasped. In one from 1938 Ilona, wearing a polka-dotted top and flowers in her hair that almost obscure the braid tied around her head, kisses Henia on the cheek, a full-on “come here, you” kiss that Henia responds to with a frozen smile that combines pleasure at the experience with irritation at the camera.

Ceija Stojka, “Los, Los, weitergehen! Damals 1943-1944. Auschwitz ist kein(e) Lüge. (Move, move, keep moving! In the years 1943–44. Auschwitz is not a lie),” 2006

I don’t know enough about them to say that they lived with an “us against the world” mentality—Henia remains a complete mystery; this remembrance offers insight into Ilona—but I can certainly say they went through an awful lot together. In 1940, the sisters, 18 and 14, travelled with their parents to eastern Poland, now held by the Soviet Union, in search of relatives who might take them in. But their mother, Mita, got cold feet, saying she would rather be killed by the Germans than saved by the Russians. (Regrettably prophetic.) In the end, she got her wish.) The family returned to Kraków, which meant German rule but also familiar faces. One of these would prove to be consequential. One day Henia ran into Leon Wolfe, a young man with whom she had begun a short, intense relationship at a resort in the Tatra mountains the year before; before long they were together again. When the Germans established the ghetto in early 1941, Leon insisted they move to a nearby village; Henia persuaded her family to join them. For a short time, life seemed about to improve—Henia and Leon were able to get married in June 1941—but the idyll didn’t last. The Karmels were forced out of the village, lived for a time in the forest and then on a farm where they narrowly escaped death after being mistaken for partisans (only the last-minute intervention of a relative in the local Jewish Council saved them), before making the difficult decision to split up. Leon accompanied the women back to Kraków; the girls’ father, Hirsch, went elsewhere. (Unclear where or why, but Ilona blamed herself for her father’s decision for the rest of her life. All that is known of Hirsch Karmel after that moment is that he was murdered at Treblinka.)

In the ghetto, Leon and Henia worked at a paper company, Mita nursed typhus patients, and fifteen-year-old Ilona joined a Zionist resistance movement, gathering information and passing messages. In March 1943 all four were sent to Plaszow, the camp depicted in Schindler’s List, which had been built on the grounds of a Jewish cemetery. (If you’ve seen the film, you might remember the car taking Commandant Amon Goeth to his villa along a road paved with headstones.) After a few months, the family underwent another separation. The sisters and their mother were sent, away from Leon, to a forced labour camp at Skarzysko-Kamienna. There the Germans had taken over an existing ammunitions plant, which they contracted out to a company called HASAG. Mostly the factory produced bullets, but one section—where the Karmels ended up—made underwater mines. These were filled with picric acid, a terrible chemical that poisoned many of the workers after turning their skin yellow.

Yet Skarzysko-Kamienna, like all camps, especially forced labour camps, was also a site of resistance—sometimes political but more often cultural. Prisoners prayed, danced, drew, and sang. The Karmel sisters began writing poetry, using bits of paper and pencil stubs slipped to them by a non-Jewish worker. In the summer of 1944, as the Germans began to retreat from the Red Army, the Karmels were shipped to another HASAG factory, a satellite camp in the Buchenwald system. The poems accompanied them, sewn into the hem of their clothing. (In later years survivors would remember the girls reciting their texts.) The poems were still there when, along with thousands of other prisoners, Ilona and Henia were sent on a forced march through the forests and fields of Germany in the catastrophic final days of the war. Along the way many prisoners died, killed by shooting, hunger, disease, or exhaustion. Some were deliberately run over by tanks and left for dead. This was the fate of the Karmels. As the woman lay in a pile of victims, the dead mingled with the nearly-dead, Henia saw a cousin march by in another set of prisoners. She managed to hand off the poems, begging the woman to pass them on to Leon, who would surely return to Kraków if he had survived. The next day—the last day of the war in Europe—the Karmels were rescued and taken to a field hospital. The women were barely alive, so badly had they been mutilated. Henia and Ilona each lost a leg; their mother did not survive.

Eventually the sisters were taken to a proper hospital in Leipzig, though given how ruinous conditions were in Germany at the end of the war, care was erratic, even dangerous. Henia and Ilona lay there for six months. Amazingly, Leon had survived the war (how I do not know, but I’m sure his story is equally remarkable) and duly returned to Kraków. More amazingly, he met the cousin who had been entrusted with the poems. Most amazingly of all, word of a memorial service held for the girls in late September (Leon, convinced they were still alive, had given only grudging consent) reached Leipzig. A man who knew the Karmels sent word to a refugee commission, which sent a telegram to Leon (still extant), who drove the 500 dangerous miles to Leipzig to be reunited with the Karmels in a scene that I imagine was similar to the emotional one depicted at the end of Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

Although they had survived, the sisters were in poor health and badly needed reconstructive surgery. Leon desperately searched for help. Back in Kraków he happened to meet a Swedish naval officer attached to the Red Cross. After learning of their predicament, the man, who was on the point of returning to Sweden, promised to arrange visas. In the final amazing turn of the story, he kept his word and before long the sisters were in Stockholm, where they found themselves in one of the best rehabilitation facilities in the world.

In 1948, Henia and Leon immigrated to New York. Ilona, whose injuries had been more serious, remained behind, but joined them the following year. She enrolled at Radcliffe, met her future husband Francis Zucker, a philosopher and physicist, and even moved with him to Germany for a number of years during which she worked at an orphanage and wrote the novel that would make her name, An Estate of Memory. Later the couple returned to the US; Ilona taught writing at MIT for years. Henia wrote two novels herself and many short stories. The poems were forgotten, although they had in fact been published by a Polish organization in New York in 1947 under the title Song Behind Barbed Wire.

After Ilona’s death in 2000 the manuscript passed to the poet Fanny Howe, a longtime friend of Ilona’s, who began the process of bringing the poems into English. As she notes in her introduction to a volume called A Wall of Two—from which I have taken these biographical details—the task grew into a complex creative endeavor. Translators Arie A. Galles and Warren Nieschłuchowski rendered the texts into English; Howe selected her favourites and adapted them, aiming to remain true to the originals while also shaping them for more powerful effect. The Karmels, she observes, were young and living in conditions of extreme duress when they wrote these texts, which she describes as awkward and unpolished. The versification drew on a culture that was being destroyed along with the writers; Howe sought to make the poems more modern, never adding but cutting repetition and avoiding poems “that used high and archaic language.” She sent her versions back to the translators whose comments inspired her final versions. A bold but also fraught strategy, which risks implying that the sisters did not quite know what they were doing. Leon Wolfe, who gave his blessing to the project, suggests something similar when he writes that “the essence [Howe] conveyed was truer than the original poems.”

Howe argues that the art made in the camps took two forms: it either looked back to the lost world of its makers or it depicted their new one. In making her selections, Howe concentrated on the latter. She gets a little high-flown explaining this decision, explaining that she avoided using the word “death” because it is “the end of language.” (I’m reminded of Poe’s remark that grammar can do what reason cannot, allowing us to write the impossible sentence “I am dead.”) But Howe has earned our good will: her project is a great success. Her versions are generous and generative. In an afterword, she considers three of the poems, comparing her adaptations to the originals. In each case, hers is indeed more powerful.

That’s especially true of my favourite poem, “Procession,” written by Henia. (The sisters later decided that Henia was the better poet and Ilona the better prose writer; although I’ve yet to read their prose, I agree about Henia as poet.)

Procession

By Henia Karmel, translated by Arie A. Galles, adapted by Fanny Howe

Two marched by

in striped prison garb

then two more in rags.

After them came four

on stretchers.

Their bodies jerked up

comically at the night sky.

Half-naked with broken legs.

A frozen cadaver and then

just beside the prison gate

came four more stretchers.

One pressed a blood-soaked cloth

across his face.

The parade went on

while we watched in dread.

The rag man on the litter was dying.

And at the end, four from a nightmare

lugged on their heavy shoulders

a bundled body.

They couldn’t cope and let it drop.

It screamed in its own blood.

“Procession,” a word that doesn’t appear in the poem, connotes something more stately, more subdued, and, aptly, more funereal, than a word that does, the ironic “parade.” A procession is solemn. (I’m reminded of Woolf’s “procession of the sons of educated men” from Three Guineas, her passionate condemnation of masculinity, violence, and fascism, that is, the things the Karmels would suffer.) But the title puzzles me, because I don’t think this is a solemn poem. It is more terrible than that. At first it seems flatly descriptive: here is a typical camp scene, probably from the end of the day, when the work details would return to barracks. It is observed by some unknown group, a “we” presumably comprised of other inmates, though as readers we too watch the scene in dread. But as it goes on, the poem becomes less observational and more expressionist. More hallucinatory. More pointed. The final, terrible image, in particular, belies the affectlessness of the opening. (Of course, any Holocaust representation is bound to show horror as inextricable from description.)

In some sense “Procession”—preceded by no article, neither definite or indefinite, as if the event described here were unending or, worse, coterminous with the world—is an account. I mean this literally. It counts victims. Two, then two, then four (although these, on stretchers, must surely be carried by others), then one, then four more, then a final four that carry one. Eighteen in all. In Hebrew, eighteen is lucky; it shares a name with the word for “life.” But there is more than easy irony here. The eighteen are a mix of the living and the dead. And they aren’t just eighteen, either. They must be accompanied by some shadowy, unknown carriers, to say nothing of the numberless, observing “we.” Perhaps Karmel is offering her own account, in order to challenge the counting that prisoners suffered each evening, the nightly roll call that sometimes went on for hours.

That challenge mingles precision with confusion, which befits the world of the Lager, which was at once regimented and chaotic. A similar, but even more consequential blurring concerns the relationship between the living and the dead. Are the bodies on the stretchers alive or dead? Presumably alive, otherwise why would the speaker describe a cadaver in the next lines? (Unless the difference is that one is frozen and the others aren’t, yet. What, incidentally, is the difference between a “cadaver” and a “corpse,” which is the word I would expect in this context? Will this cadaver be used for some kind of experiment? Does cadaver connote death more fully than “corpse”? Or does it imply, via its future utility, something less completely dead?) But if those stretchered bodies aren’t dead, how alive are they? “Their bodies jerked up/comically at the night sky”: the phrase “jerked up” is, to me, really strange. Presumably this is an adjective phrase not an action—it’s not that the bodies are convulsing (right?), but that their limbs, perhaps, are akimbo. This gruesome scene is made even worse, in my opinion, by that distressing adverb “comically,” which intimates the onlookers the speaker hasn’t yet referred to. After all, someone has to find their state comical. But what the hell does that mean? Are the bodies funny? Surely only despairingly so. But maybe we shouldn’t foreclose the possibility of humour so quickly. We wouldn’t want to enforce our pious sense of how the experience should be understood.

Besides, the poem soon leaves humour far behind. Horror is coming soon enough for those onlookers. Their distance from the procession only increases as the poem ends. What they see is awful. “The rag man” is dying; note the difference between this description, which seems to speak to his essence, and the more idiomatic “the man in rags.” Howe’s choice of “litter” is inspired. We can’t help but hear the implications of waste—in keeping with the language of the perpetrators, which routinely called the victims Figuren (puppets), Stücke (pieces) or Schmatte (rags).

And then comes the worst part, the final horror, the “four from a nightmare.” (Again, the implication is that these figures are themselves fundamentally nightmarish, although the reference is most likely to their situation.) Is the “bundled body” dead or alive? Dropped, it “scream[s] in its own blood.” So that means alive, right?  It screamed in its own blood. This vivid, terrible expression makes me think of someone screaming through a mouthful of blood, though I admit I’m influenced by the earlier image of another victim pressing “a blood-soaked cloth/across his face.” (That “across” subtly implies the face itself is bloody, some injury more devastating than the one the more idiomatic “to” would suggest.) But screaming in the blood is hard to imagine. If the victim is not in fact gurgling from a bloodied mouth—and could they really be screaming if their mouth were so full?—then maybe the description is metaphorical. (Even if yes, this poem is remarkable at evoking bodily pain.) Maybe to scream in the blood is to scream inside? From the depths of one’s being? How would the onlookers know, though? The end of “Procession” seems less psychological than existential. Beyond an individual who suffers at least twice-over—in addition to their initial injuries they are dropped by their fellows—this final line offers a howl of despair, pain, and abandonment. One that is decidedly not universal, but perhaps the unhappy fate of all the camp’s victims.

The cover image shows Ilona (in the wheelchair) and Henia in the garden of the clinic in Stockholm, 1946

Descriptions and judgments. Living and dead bodies. Physical and psychological pain. Observers and participants. “Procession” makes us wonder whether any of these oppositions stand. Fanny Howe has done English speakers a service bringing it and the other poems collected in A Wall of Two to our ears. I hope they will find many readers.

Spindle, Scissors, Thread

Posted on by under Holocaust, judaism, personal, teaching, Uncategorized

I wrote this essay for a Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) ceremony organized by the Jewish Federation of Arkansas. For the past three years, a grant from Hendrix College has allowed me to train a small cohort of students as future Holocaust educators. As part of the commemorative programs, this year’s students and I read personal reflections about what we’ve learned studying and teaching the Holocaust.

Gerda Weissmann was 18 years old in 1942. That was the year when, having already suffered the German occupation of her hometown in southern Poland, she was deported to Bolkenhain, a subcamp in the Gross-Rosen concentration camp system. Bolkenhain was the site of a weaving mill; in a perverse way, Weissmann was lucky to end up there, as it was considered one of the best labour camps for women. Which didn’t mean it was easy or pleasant. Weissmann and her fellow internees were expected to run four looms at a time—”experts who had spent their lives weaving never handled more than three,” she later wrote, not without pride—and the work was grueling: the women were on their feet for hours, deafened by the noise of the machines, suffering from eye-strain that must have been exacerbated by the threat that any mistake would be punished as an act of sabotage.

Still, as Weissmann recounts in her memoir, All But My Life (1957, revised 1995) she came to enjoy the work: “the intricate process of weaving gave me a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.” These were emotions she would need to hold close when, in August 1943, she was sent to another camp, the notorious Märzdorf. After she rejected a supervisor’s demand for sex, her life became a living hell. He ensured she was put on so-called flax detail, a chain of women who unloaded enormous bundles of flax from freight trains for hours at a time until their bodies were bloody from the prickly fibers.

Weissmann considered killing herself, so profound was her misery, but before she could put her head on the rails she was transferred to yet another camp where she made silk parachutes that would be used by the soldiers fighting to destroy her, her family, and her people. That was merely a brief stop, though, on the way to her penultimate destination, yet another textile mill repurposed as a camp. In the recent past, Grünberg had been a model factory, designed for the well-being of its workers. But in its terrible new incarnation, that care had become a mocking façade: “The camp was modern, well scrubbed, clean, and filled with suffering.” Most of the suffering took place in the Spinnerei, the spinning hall, where a giant machine shredded finished material into a kind of mash that was then spun into yarn. Some of the material had been donated by German civilians; but other material had been ripped from the backs of those who arrived at Auschwitz. The spinning room was a terrible place. The women who worked there were soon as destroyed as the old clothes they repurposed. Weissmann describes them as:

Living skeletons with yellowish-gray skin drawn tight over prominent cheekbones; there were gaping holes in their mouths where teeth had either been knocked out or rotted out. These girls ran to and from huge spinning machines, repairing broken threads with nimble fingers. Their tired eyes and sallow jaws seemed to belie the swiftly running feet and dexterous fingers.

This mixture of life and death horrified Weissmann—not least because it prefigured her own fate. Before long she too was a living skeleton, though not nearly to the extent she would become when, after nine months in the Spinnerei, in the freezing cold of late January 1945, she and 4,000 other prisoners were forced by the SS away from the advancing Red Army and deeper into Germany. (You can read more about the infamous Death March to Volary here.) For more than a hundred days she and the rapidly dwindling prisoners (many froze, starved, were shot by callous, anxious guards, or succumbed to illness) marched over 300 miles, eventually ending up in a town in Czechoslovakia where they were liberated by American troops on May 5, 1945. At the time, Weissmann weighed 68 pounds. Only 120 women survived the march.

*

Gerda Weissmann was just one of the millions of victims of Nazi persecution. We know some of their stories. We know little, almost nothing about many others’. Most Holocaust stories did not end as Weissmann’s did. Most ended in the mass graves of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia; the steadily accumulating piles of corpses in the ghettos of Eastern Europe; or the gas chambers of the extermination camps. For the past 15 years I have made it my self-appointed task to read as many of these stories as I can, and to learn as much as I can about the conditions of the lives and deaths of those whose stories must go untold. I am often asked how I can spend so much time reading, thinking, and teaching about the Holocaust. Isn’t it depressing? How can you take it? Doesn’t it make you despair for humanity?

I understand these questions. In fact, a few times a year, without fail, I feel the same way. A great weariness comes over me, repugnance, sometimes even disgust. I’ll sink into depression, overwhelmed by the enormity of the event. I’ll say to myself: no more histories or novels or memoirs, not even ones as engaging and moving as Weissmann’s.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern to my depression. I’ll feel it mildly in January and strongly in June. It took me a long time to realize what should have been obvious—those are the times after and between academic semesters. That, in turn, helped me realize that I seldom feel despair about the Holocaust when I’m teaching it. On the contrary, teaching the Holocaust energizes me. It’s even, and I know it is weird to say this, affirming. How can I say that? Because in doing that work I am not so different from Gerda Weissmann—my satisfaction and accomplishment comes from an analogous work of weaving, unweaving, and weaving again: placing one story next to another, juxtaposing, comparing, adding, measuring, bringing this fact together with that, paying out these threads to my students, who are themselves individual strands whose various abilities and experiences I braid into the accomplishment that is a successful class.

*

The work Gerda Weissmnan was forced to do was always dangerous, always backbreaking, destructive of her body and her spirit, but occasionally, and certainly contrary to the intentions of the perpetrators, satisfying. Remember what she said: “the intricate process of weaving gave me a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.” That work also offers a metaphor for how we might think and teach about the Holocaust. Think about what Weissmnan did. She bound. She tied. She created. She spun yarn. She wove fabric. She brought different strands together to create something new. I’m not suggesting she should have been grateful for the work; I’m not transforming her slavery into something good. I’m suggesting that even in oppression there will be resistance, however slight or ultimately futile. And that making something new from diverse strands offers a model for such resistance, a model that we in our different time and place might emulate. “The intricate process of weaving gave me a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.” What was true for her might be true for us.

Literary people like myself love to talk about weaving. From Homer onward, with the story of Penelope’s secret resistance to her importunate suitors, weaving has offered a powerful metaphor for creation and destruction. Literature is itself woven; in fact, the words “text” and “textile” have the same root. They both refer to tissues and webs, to the activity of tying strands together in order to make something greater than the sum of the parts. You make an essay like you make a carpet. You write a memoir like you shuttle a loom. You study the past like you stitch and unstitch and re-stitch a garment. And when you are a maker, even one persecuted by a terrible master, some Pharaoh, some Nazi, you have just the tiniest bit of control over your situation.

In the Classical tradition of Greece and Rome, in fact, the person who weaves—I should note that it is almost always a woman who weaves: I don’t have time to talk about it here but the study of the Holocaust has for decades been imbalanced when it comes to gender: that’s a story for another day—the woman who weaves is the greatest maker of all, has the greatest control of all. A similar idea struck the writer W. G. Sebald, who, at the end of his remarkable book The Emigrants (1992) recalls his time in Manchester, the city he moved to in the mid 1960s in an attempt to escape the stifling amnesia of postwar Germany, where he grew up, having been born in a village in the Alps in 1944, and which he couldn’t wait to leave. Manchester, of course, was for a long time one of the greatest manufacturing centers in the world. Mostly it manufactured fabric made from cotton and flax, which was mostly brought across the Atlantic as a result of the slave labour and indentured servitude of African Americans.

There were other manufacturing centers across Europe, of course. One was the Polish city of Lodz, which the Germans renamed Litzmannstadt when they occupied it in 1939, but which in earlier decades had been known affectionately as the Polish Manchester. That infrastructure was the reason that the Lodz ghetto—one of the most crowded places in human history, where 165,00 Jews and Roma lived in 1 1/2 square miles, a dense landscape of suffering, illness, despair, and death—became home to dozens of workshops, in which Jews made among other things uniforms for the German army.

The Lodz ghetto was a terrible, terrible place, but you wouldn’t know it from the most famous pictures of it that have come down to us. These were taken by a man named Walter Genewein, a Nazi accountant, sent to Lodz as financial manager of the German ghetto administration, and a passionate amateur photographer, perhaps as much as, across Europe, in an utterly different situation, a man named Otto Frank had been. Genewein’s ghetto photographs are tinted pale blue or green, which gives them an otherworldly air, as does the absence of crowds. His photos are staged, not state-sanctioned propaganda exactly but saturated in the Nazi worldview nonetheless. In the last lines of his book, Sebald describes a single photo taken by Genewein, one of many the accountant took of the metalwork shops, basket-weaving ateliers, and nail factories that constituted the futile hope of the Jews of Lodz that their essential labour would protect them from death. The photo Sebald fixates on is of a textile workshop. Three women, probably about 20 years old, the same age as Gerda Weissmann, sit behind a loom. Here’s how Sebald describes them, in a beautiful translation by the poet Michael Hulse:

The light falls on them from the window in the background, so I cannot make out their eyes clearly, but I sense that all three of them are looking across at me, since I am standing on the very spot where Genewein the accountant stood with his camera. The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women’s names were – Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of the night, with spindle, scissors, and thread.

Nona, Decuma, and Morta: in Latin, the Parcae, in Greek, the Moiri, in English, the Fates, who spun the thread of life, measured its length, and cut it, thereby determining the length, time, and mode of a person’s death. Women who meted out life and death. Weavers, writers, creators. Like Gerda Weissmann, the unnamed women in the photo are victims of particular circumstances, and emblems of suffering more generally. But like Weissmann they take on at least some of the power of the Fates. They are helpless, determined, accomplished. Unknown yet not forgotten. In weaving their stories together with those of others—just as in pacing my classroom like Weissmann among her looms—just as in sending the students you heard from tonight out into the world as weavers themselves—I hope in some small way to do their example justice.

Understanding the Butcher: Philippe Sands’s The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive

Posted on by under book review, Holocaust, review

Philippe Sands first met Horst Wächter in 2012 as a result of his first book, the acclaimed East West Street. This hybrid of history and memoir centered on the city of Lviv (also Lvov, Lwow, and Lemberg) in the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, where Sands’s own (Jewish) ancestors had lived, and where the two (Jewish) men who gave the world the contrasting concepts of genocide (Rafael Lemkin) and crimes against humanity (Hersch Lauterpacht) also grew up. A big part of that story was Hans Frank, the Nazi ruler of Galicia, responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. In writing his book, Sands became friendly with Hans’s son, Niklas Frank, who had written a memoir condemning his father. Niklas told him about Otto Wächter, Frank’s second-in-command, and about Horst, the fourth of Otto’s six children, whom he knew slightly. Horst, Niklas warned, had a friendly view of his father—but he added that Sands would like him.

Horst Wächter, at his home (the Scholss Haggenberg) in 2013

Niklas was right—an initial meeting with Horst led to a public discussion with the two sons of prominent Nazis, which was made into a film. As Sands continued to learn more about Otto, he turned his findings into a podcast for the BBC, using Otto’s post-war experiences to discuss the so-called Ratline, the help the Vatican provided former Nazis in fleeing Europe to the Middle East and South America.

The podcast in turn led to further discoveries (as listeners wrote in with information) and to a sharpening of the tension between Sands and Horst. The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive thus necessarily focuses on the many layers of its coming to be; alas, Sands is not always a good enough writer to pull off the complicated structure required by a story about the telling of a story. Many of the turns in his investigation are introduced awkwardly. Chapters regularly end with clunky “cliffhangers” like this one: “Who was Bishop Hudal, and what exactly was his relationship to Otto? It was to that question that I would now turn.”

Still, Sands (and his team of researchers and assistants) is a good investigator. He describes Otto’s early days in the (then-banned) Austrian Nazi party, his role in the attempt to assassinate the Chancellor Dollfuss, his years in exile/hiding in Germany, followed by a triumphant return to Austria after the Anschluss, and meteoric rise in the apparatus of the Final Solution, first as a state secretary in Vienna (he fired hundreds of civil servants for being Jews, Mischlinge, or otherwise “politically unsound”), then as Frank’s number 2 in Kraków, and finally as governor of the District of Galicia, based in Lemberg.

Yet for Sands Otto’s wartime record matters primarily because of what happened afterward. In May 1945, Otto went underground; Sands finds out where he was, who he was with, and how he managed it. He tracks his movements in the years from 1945 – 49 (sussing out all his hiding spots in the Austrian Alps, including secret conjugal visits) and learns his daily routines after making his way to Italy in the last year of his life. He knows where Otto hid in Rome, under what name, and who he saw. To do so, he relies on Otto’s address book (cracking its rudimentary code), but mostly relies on his wife Charlotte’s papers, all of which Horst lets him see. (They are extensive: almost 9,000 pages of letters alone.) Charlotte destroyed her husband’s papers at the end of the war, which of course frustrates Sands, but he makes good use of this seeming obstacle by making the book as much about Charlotte as Otto. The portrait of their marriage is fascinating: Charlotte was tormented by her playboy husband’s many affairs, yet she was also his staunchest defender. She had been a committed Nazi from the early days; students in the ramshackle language school she ran decades after the war testify to Sands that she was not shy with her opinions.

Sands really homes in on Otto’s last days, in July 1950, when he suddenly fell ill and died from a mysterious illness. Horst, after a lifetime of hearing it from his mother, believes his father was poisoned. By whom? Maybe the Americans, maybe the Soviets, maybe the Jews. (That phrasing tells you everything you need to know.) Horst knows from his mother that the corpse, which she saw shortly after death, turned mysteriously black. How could a man like Otto—fit, a keen sportsman, who exercised every morning and swam in the Tiber—suddenly fall deathly ill? Surely it means something that he wrote to Charlotte about the enemies he suspected were following him. Horst is convinced that his father was murdered, and that he didn’t deserve it. After all, he was “a fine and decent man,” as a Ukrainian veteran of the Waffen-SS Galicia Divisions says, at a reunion attended by Sands, Niklas Franks, and a “beaming” Host.

At the very last stage of his lengthy investigation, on a visit to Rome to see the places Otto frequented in his last months, Sands is joined by another friend, a Spanish writer of nonfiction novels about the repercussions of the war. It’s pretty clear this must be Javier Cercas, and I don’t know why Sands is so coy about it, since he cites Cercas by name in one of his epigraphs, right below a typically forbidding passage from Isiah about the way violence will be passed down to the children of those who perpetrate it. Sands asks his friend why he came along. Why has he made Sands’s obsession his own? “It is more important to understand the butcher than the victim.”

Sands’s gloss—“A pretty phrase, and one that seemed true”—is evasive in a way belied by the doggedness of his investigation. He clearly believes in understanding the butchers, and I don’t know why he feels the need to hedge. Me, well, I think Cercas and Sands are full of shit. It’s sentiments like this, usually accompanied by a dutiful nostrum about knowing the past to avoid its repetition, that have led to our culture’s insatiable Nazi thirst.

Besides, Sands learns almost nothing about Otto’s motives. The villain of the story remains opaque. We learn as clearly as we can what Otto did during the war, how he came to his conviction in the cause, and how he spent his years on the run. But what he was thinking of when he organized the ghetto in Lemberg and oversaw the deportations and murder of so many thousands of Galician Jews is a mystery. Did he believe what he said to Charlotte and what she said to Horst, that he felt a duty to handle the situation he was entrusted with as efficiently and humanely as possible? Is this nonsense self-delusion or cynicism? Sands understands what a butcher can do, but not why they did so.

Otto Wächter with his wife Charlotte and their children, late 1940s. Otto was in hiding and visited as an Uncle. Horst is on the left.

The person whose motivations we do know something about is Horst, who comes across as a riveting and exhausting combination of reasonableness and monomania. He deplores the genocide, and he is willing to look into his family’s past, to the point of being shunned by his siblings and cousins. But he doesn’t deplore it that much. What he really hates is his father’s being lumped in with obvious criminals like Frank, Himmler or Arthur Seyss-Inquart (Reichskommissar of Occupied Holland, and Horst’s godfather). Horst is boring the way only someone who cannot come unstuck from a belief system can be. He insists that his father was a different kind of Nazi, who never had anything to do with the unpleasant aspects of genocide (and merely accepted the benefits that accrued to him from it as compensation for his mission) and sought only to make life more bearable for those terrible sufferers. To his credit, Sands is infuriated by this equivocation, and his portrait of Horst, who can’t help but come back to Sands every time he has pushed him away, is fascinating. Every time we think he is deserving of sympathy, Sands shows that he is not.

His portrayal of the Vatican is less compelling. Clearly Bishop Hudal, who befriended Otto and helped various other Nazis escape Europe, was at best a disreputable figure. And the Vatican’s stonewalling of Sands’s request to consult Hudal’s papers does not inspire confidence that it is willing to deal with its past in good faith. Sands never makes a blanket statement about the Vatican’s relation to Nazism—possibly because there isn’t one to make, and possibly (rightly) because doing so would result in a different kind of book. Sands has more to say about the Vatican’s ambiguous postwar relationship to American intelligence than about what the Church did or didn’t do during the war. Otto, it turns out, was spying for the Americans, through the intermediary of Hudal, further evidence of America’s immediate post-1945 pivot to the Cold War. In those first years after WWII, being anti-Soviet (and Otto was more enraged by communism than by anything else) was a lot more important to the US than having been a Nazi.

I appreciate what Sands has found out about Otto’s life and death. But I did weary of Sands himself. Although I read The Ratline avidly—it is as suspenseful as John Le Carré suggests in his blurb—I was irritated by the privileged world Sands inhabits, which he flaunts at every occasion. He gains access to every institution, consults with every kind of specialist, finds every door open to him. All in a good cause of course. But it’s all very Davos, if you know what I mean; it got to the point where I wondered about the patients the various liver specialists Sands consults weren’t seeing when they were being interviewed by him about the body’s metabolism of poisons. Put it this way: Le Carré doesn’t just blurb the book; he was Sands’s neighbour, too. I started to find the British and European elites of Sands’s milieu uncomfortably similar to the Nazi elites that had such a marvelous time enjoying the best of all things and thinking the best of all thoughts. Not that Sands and his peers are fascists. They definitely are not; I recognize that I am doing him an injustice here. But they too have drunk the Kool-Aid of their own specialness, it seems to me. Had I sensed that Sands had any self-awareness about this possibility I would have felt better about the dark fascination—the consumption of atrocity; the butcher love—that The Ratline too often incites.

What I Read, February 2021

Posted on by under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

Strange little month. Epic snow storm (20 inches!) and record cold snap (below freezing for a week, pretty intense for these parts) kept us busy frolicking in the snow and dealing with burst pipes. A week later 70 degree temps reminded us of the hot weather coming. I flailed in my writing, though I did manage to publish this piece I was proud of. As pleased to get my second shot as frustrated that my parents, in Canada, have yet to have even the first. Our daughter turned 10, a happy-making and bewildering occurrence. And of course I read a few books.

Georges Simenon, The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (1931) Trans. Linda Coverdale (2014)

A group of men, friends since their student days, are haunted by past misdeeds. Maigret traipses around Europe to solve the case. You can’t expect me to remember more than that, it’s been four weeks!

David Shneer, Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Picture (2020)

Dmitri Baltermants (1912—1990) was a Jewish Soviet photojournalist who took iconic pictures at Stalingrad and in newly liberated Berlin, edited a prestigious photography magazine, and successfully navigated life under Stalin and Khrushchev. Despite a long and storied career, he is best known for one photograph, which came to be known as “Grief.” Sent to the Crimea in January 1942 after its initial liberation from German occupation, Baltermants photographed relatives grieving over the corpses of their loved ones on the site of a mass grave near Kerch. These were victims of Nazi reprisals, shot when the Germans retreated from the city in late December. (They would retake Kerch in May 1942, before the Soviets expelled them for the last time in April 1944.) In the six weeks of this first occupation, the Germans executed about 7000 Jews, both locals and refugees from Poland and elsewhere in the Ukraine, turning a Soviet anti-tank trench near the city into a five-kilometer-long mass grave.

As Shneer (z”l) shows, Baltermants took several striking photos that cold January day. But state media seized on one in particular and made it central to Soviet commemoration of Nazi atrocities. In keeping with Soviet refusal to recognize the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy, “Grief” depicts non-Jewish survivors and victims. (Jewishness is literally the photo’s invisible substrate: by the time it was taken, the region’s Jewish victims were already buried in the mass grave, with no one left to search for them.) Yet it was increasingly marketed and understood as a Holocaust photo, especially once it was exhibited around the world in the 1960s and 70s, where it segued from historical document to artistic commodity.

The photo that impressed so many curators and art lovers was not the one Baltermants first took. As he prepared his work for exhibition he was increasingly bothered by blemishes in the sky on the original negative. In keeping with the norms of Soviet photojournalism—in which montage and editing was an accepted, even admired way to tell a greater truth—he revised the image, producing a new one “by overlaying a second negative with an undamaged sky to replace the flaw in the exposure” and then retouching the composite. What this means is: the dramatic clouds, so central to the power of the image as it has come to be known, are from somewhere else altogether. (The actual day of Baltermants’s visit was overcast: leaden rather than anguished.) This needn’t be understood as falsification or ideology. In the conclusion to his book, Shneer argues:

the tension between documentation and aestheticization demonstrates why Grief is the ideal image to serve as an iconic Holocaust photograph. … Its inclusion in the icons of Holocaust photographs broadens what we mean by the Holocaust and chips away at the term’s parochialism and nationalism.

Shneer comments intriguingly on the Kerch memorial today, caught up in Russia’s annexation of Crimea, arguing that the memorial to the atrocities has both been reclaimed as a public Jewish space while still being embedded in a broader pan-Soviet context (Jews finally get to be recognized as a victim group, but only so much). But his conclusions about contesting Holocaust parochialism remain entirely suggestive. He never develops what this would mean and how to navigate the ethics of using a photo without any Jews in it to comemmorate a primarily Jewish genocide.

Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph is frustrating and disappointing, from its subtitle onward. (How can a photograph have a biography?) It flirts with being many things—a biography of Baltermants, a history of Soviet photography, a disquisition on the Russian art market after the collapse of the USSR—without actually becoming any of them. And cultural history/cultural studies, Shneer’s preferred methodologies, are not for me. I wanted to blame the publishers for falsely marketing the book as Holocaust scholarship, but the final chapter proves that Shneer wants to own the designation But he simply never convinces.

I feel bad saying this, as Shneer, who I met once and found delightful, as I think did everyone who knew him, was ill with brain cancer as he completed the book. He died weeks after its publication. But I also don’t think he’d want readers to give him a pass. So I’ll say it again: this book is a mess.

Dominique Goblet, Pretending is Lying (2007) Trans. Sophie Yanow in collaboration with the author (2017)

After many years, Belgian comic artist Dominique Goblet (or at least the version of herself featured in this brilliant comic) takes her daughter to visit her father and his second wife. While the father finds ways to disparage Goblet and insult his wife, the little girl amuses herself by drawing a picture of her friend. The step-grandmother—drawn by Goblet as half alien, half Edvard Munch Scream figure—remarks on the friend’s long hair.

She doesn’t have long hair, little Nikita offhandedly remarks.

But look at the picture, replies the woman, already disproportionately angered. In the picture she has long hair.

Oh, that’s just a character, says the child. (Precocious!)

Which prompts the woman, in a fit of Platonist totalitarianism, to rage: “PRETENDING IS LYING, IT’S LYING! PRETENDING IS LYING!”

Aside from making it chillingly clear how messed up the father’s household is, this scene also alerts us to the text’s interest in creation. That self-awareness isn’t cerebral, though. Or if so then only as a necessary, self-preserving response to strong, often violent emotions.  

Pretending is Lying considers various moments in Goblet’s life, from her childhood with her blustering, abusive father and her creative yet fragile and, in her own way, punishing mother to her own life as a parent via the story of a once-promising but soon-floundering love affair. Although the father takes up the most oxygen, I found the mother more interesting. The same person who, by a magical sleight of hand, diverts young Goblet from a meltdown when she trips on the sidewalk and rips her tights (she whips them off the sobbing child and puts them on backwards—the child, none the wiser, is amazed) later locks her daughter in the attic on a rainy day when the restless child won’t settle to anything. This traumatic experience is juxtaposed to the father’s absorption in the 1973 Dutch Grand Prix, in which Roger Williams’s car overturned and burst into flame: only one other driver, David Purley, stopped and tried to rescue him almost by himself, to no avail. Apparently, Purley and the ineffectual race marshals could hear Williams screaming as he burned alive. The event is horrible, both in Goblet’s remarkable rendering and in this video, mawkish music aside.

The terrified child, the crazed mother, the raging father (a fire-fighter, he is convinced he could have saved the day): everything’s going wrong at once; the scene is one of the most harrowing things I’ve read in a while. And yet there is also so much tenderness in the book: in one scene, Goblet’s daughter is scared to sleep in a strange bedroom, mostly because it has a giant graffiti of a snarling man on the wall. Goblet tells Nikita, “You have to laugh at the things that scare you, you’ll see, it works with everything!” What follows is a lovely row of panels in which the little girl tentatively thumbs her nose at the image, giggles to herself, and falls asleep smiling.

As befits the book’s emotional scope, Goblet draws in all kinds of styles, from careful line drawings to expressionist exaggeration to washes of abstraction; she accompanies these images with gorgeously varied and expressive lettering (she hand-lettered the English translation herself). The result is beautiful; a book you could read many times and keep finding new things to notice, a triumphant rebuke to the argument that imitation is dangerous because it falsifies.

Andrea Camilleri, The Safety Net (2017) Trans. Stephen Sartarelli (2020)

After reading almost 20 of these, I’ve finally noticed how often the Montalbano books begin with the detective surfacing from a dead sleep. That struggle seems to be harder to overcome as he ages, as if Camilleri had been preparing for his detective to die. (I gather he deposited a final installment with his publisher before his own death in 2019.) The Safety Net offers more of the usual complicated to-ing and fro-ing and mixing of cases, all of which is mere background to Camilleri’s specialties: describing food and fulminating against Italian governments. In this investigation, Montalbano has to spend time with teenagers and that could have gone badly, but Camilleri gracefully lets his character value what contemporary technology allows rather than bemoan the hell it consigns us to.

Andrea Camilleri, The Sicilian Method (2017) Trans. Stephen Sartarelli (2020)

A meatier plot than usual, which turns on the similarity of dramaturgy to detection. What, Montalbano wonders, does it mean to be the one pulling the strings? And who is doing the pulling? The detective/director, or the suspects/actors? And where is the audience in all of this? Ends with a surprise; curious to see if this development is followed through on in the remainder of the series.

Rachel Howzell Hall, And Now She’s Gone (2020)

PI novel with a twist. Rader Consulting has a secret mission: most of the time its agents look for missing people, but sometimes they help people go missing, specifically women who are escaping abusive partners. Grayson Skye, newly promoted to investigator from desk work, is herself one of those women. (That explains the preposterous name.) Still recovering from a burst appendicitis (not to mention some pretty serious PTSD) Grayson suddenly has even more on her plate: her first case proves more complicated than she’d like (the woman she is supposed to find begs to be left alone—but is she telling the truth?) and the worst part of her past catches up with her. Very busy, this novel, too much so. The jagged chronology is more irritating than effective. Yet I still devoured it over a weekend, especially enjoying its depiction of some unglamorous neighbourhoods in LA and Las Vegas.

Minae Mizumura, A True Novel (2002) Trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter (2013)

Brilliant retelling of Wuthering Heights replete with unreliable narrators in the Ishiguro mode. (At least three main ones, not counting many small instances of gossip and storytelling along the way.) The outermost of these nested tellers is Mizumura herself. At one point she considers the Japanese tradition of an “I Novel,” comparing it to the invisible, omniscient narrator more prominent in Europe. (I summarize badly.) The main thing I disagree with in this fine summary of the novel is the reviewer’s suggestion that this digression is dull. To my mind, it’s central to the book’s project. Are writers supposed to tell us about themselves or about others? To tell what they know (the truth, their own perspective) or what they surmise, imagine, make up (the novel)? If the latter, how do we do justice to others? Can we overcome our prejudices toward them? These are the big questions of narrative, art, and politics that A True Novel explores. The main prejudices in evidence in the story concern family background and economic status. What happens when those don’t align, as is the case of the Heathcliff figure, Taro Azuma, who is born poor and of “mixed stock” in Manchuria but who becomes hugely wealthy?

I know I’m not doing A True Novel justice. Suffice it to say: I adored the book, raced through it (even though it’s 850 pages), and was sad when it ended. In fact, I haven’t found anything to match it, even though I’ve read a fair few good things since. It was even more fun reading alongside some smart, knowledgeable, and generous Twitter friends. Shout out to translator Juliet Winters Carpenter, too, who has done amazing work here, as best I can tell. I’ll be reading more Mizumura soon, that’s for sure.

Joan Silber, Improvement (2017)

A novel with as many strands as a Turkish kilim, one which belongs to one of the characters at its center. (The point, though, is that there isn’t a center to either rug or novel but rather a web of relationships, some clear and some glimpsed only in passing.) The story moves from New York to Turkey to Berlin: the mish-mash of locales could have been a mess, but it works. Or at least it did for me as I was reading it. I was reminded of Tessa Hadley, Esther Freud, a little of Laurie Colwin, and talked it up on social media. But now, a couple of weeks later, I can hardly remember a thing about it. (There’s a good bit about a woman who visits a man in prison, I remember that.) I’d been keen to read Silber’s backlist but now… *looks at piles of unread books climbing like mould spores up the walls * probably not.

Francis Bennett, Making Enemies (1998)

Terrific spy novel set in 1947, when the West begins to realize how different the Soviets’ beliefs and methods are from their own. The rest of the great powers are trying to catch up to the Americans and create a hydrogen bomb. Britain, though, is broke and would really prefer not to devote resources it doesn’t have to the project. What if the Russians felt the same? Is someone in the government sending them coded olive branches to this effect? The novel has two plot lines: one following a widowed atomic physicist in Moscow; the other concerning a young British political influencer, recently returned, disillusioned, from Berlin. These characters turn out to be connected; Bennett convincingly melds personal and political.   

This thriller is more chess-game/byzantine bureaucracy than cool gadgets/explosions. The best part of the book, though, is a section set in Finland, featuring a thrilling chase on skis. In general, Finland comes across very appealingly. As does Making Enemies. Well written without drawing attention to itself; complicated without being ridiculous. (Impressive for a spy novel, in my experience.)

In keeping with his debut’s ethos of modesty, Bennett only wrote three novels. I’ve managed to track down used copies of the other two (together they form a trilogy) and can’t wait for them to show up. Thanks to Retroculturati for the tip.

Sarah Moss, Summerwater (2020)

Summerwater is not as good as Moss’s two historical novels, Signs for List Children (2014) and Bodies of Light (2016), or 2018’s Ghost Wall (with which it pairs nicely), but it’s really good. The setting is a holiday resort on a loch in Scotland. (But because UK “resort” means some not especially amazing cabins in the middle of nowhere.) It’s the beginning of summer: the day is long, but not bright, in fact cold, rainy, and thoroughly miserable. The holidaymakers are questioning their decision. In a series of short sections, we move among several perspectives—a husband and wife with young children, a husband and wife with really young children, the teenage daughter and son of an older couple, an elderly couple who are the only ones to actually own their cottage. At one point each thinks, usually darkly, about the extended family of foreigners whose nightly parties torment, or bemuse, them. (The foreigners are variously described as Romanians and Bulgarians, but at least one of them is from nowhere more glamorous/threatening than Glasgow.) These sections are interspersed with even shorter ones written from the perspective of trees, birds, and animals. Even more than the human characters, these nonhuman beings experience the deluge as dangerous; the possibility of starving to death recurs.

As usual in Moss, violence—threatened and actual; physical, emotional, and sexual; hidden and open—is everywhere, not least in a dramatic conclusion. There are also many more ordinary events: the effort required to shepherd bored or fretful children through a wet day, the various negotiations couples navigate at various life stages, the secrets people keep from each other, especially regarding their fantasies. (A minor thesis of the book is that the older women get the fewer fucks they give that their men know their fantasies don’t include them.) I love how Moss leaves things unsaid: how exactly did a child’s shoe end up on the shore? What will happen to Justine’s health? What’s the deal with that guy in the tent?

My only criticism is that Moss’s control over the various voices felt uneven. The free indirect discourse changes to match each character, as it should, and yet the prose mostly feels the same. It sounds more like Moss than like any of her characters. I mean, that’s a contradiction built into free indirect discourse, but at times Summerwater exhibits a lack of control in a writer who otherwise feels fully in control of her descriptions of how little control we have over our lives. (I wouldn’t mind if Moss were a little wilder, honestly.)

A final word: the jacket of the US edition is gorgeous, a scene wrapping across front and back covers of a black loch against even blacker mountains with only an initially puzzling scrawl of red in the center of the image. The design is by June Pak, who I have now followed on Instagram. The image doesn’t reproduce well and I had to return my copy to the library anyway, and for some reason I can’t find the whole thing on line, but here is the front bit anyway.

Marga Minco, An Empty House (1966) Trans. Margaret Clegg (1990)

Moving and effective novel about the aftermath of the Holocaust, even better than Minco’s quasi-autobiography Bitter Herbs. Set on three days—June 28, 1945; March 25, 1947; April 21, 1950—it follows Sepha, who, alone of her family, has survived the war in hiding, and who falls into a hasty marriage with a man she meets in the resistance. He plunges into a career in journalism, she flounders except for an interlude in the south of France, entering into various affairs that she enjoys but not enough to keep up for long. Throughout she visits with her friend Yolanda, another survivor. Yolanda is tormented by guilt at surviving; Sepha is sympathetic but unmoved. Readers, however, will be moved by their relationship—especially its ending—for Minco manages to keep their disagreement from feeling schematic. To that end, she deftly uses motifs and time shifts, which challenge the idea of continuous experience without making a big deal about it. As its title suggests, the novel is filled with empty houses—whether the various places in hiding Sepha recalls, a cherished bolt hole in France, the new house she and her husband are set to move into at the novel’s end, or, most powerfully, her childhood home, now inhabited by someone else, to which she returns like a criminal to the scene of the crime—only the crime, as she reminds Yolanda, was perpetrated by others on the likes of them.

Hans Keilson, Da steht mein Haus: Errinerungen [There Stands My House: Memories; alternatively, My House is There: Memoirs] (2011) Hrsg. Heinrich Detering

Keilson began this collection of autobiographical fragments in the 1990s, when he was in his 80s and beginning to wind down his long-running psychoanalytic practice. He’d written three novels and some poetry, but that was long ago. A decade later, now almost blind, he returned to the pieces, pruning and ordering them for publication. With the help of the literary scholar Heinrich Detering—whose conversation with Keilson ends the volume—the book was released soon after Keilson turned 100 and had become the subject of renewed interest in both Germany and the US. (I wrote about Keilson’s wartime diary a few years ago; that book too is worth reading.)

In short sketches that make full use of the roving quality allowed by German-language syntax, Keilson describes his childhood in Freienwalde an der Oder, a town near the Polish border where lumber and small-time health spas were the main industries. Keilson’s father managed a store (his wife ran it ably, maybe better than he did when he served on the western Front in WWI). Keilson’s parents were active in the local Jewish community, although her education, in her hometown at the foot of the Silesian mountains, a place now in Poland, was much stronger than his. (Keilson recalls her prompting him for the weekly Shabbat prayers and describes his ambivalent feelings about her unselfconscious voice in the women’s choir.) Keilson was a sporty kid—there are some great passages on ice skating—and also musical. Both experiences came in handy later, when he taught at a Jewish sports club in Berlin and paid his way through medical school by playing trumpet in a jazz band.

Despite his late success as a doctor and therapist, Keilson had never been particularly scholarly, though he vividly remembers presenting a Heine poem only to have a classmate student object: a Jewish student reciting a Jewish poet was “fouling the nest.” That moment, in the late 1920s, marked the first time Keilson sensed the change that would envelope him, his family, and his community. The memoir is filled with little but telling moments like this. By contrast, Keilson says little about his flight to Holland in 1936, at the urging of his non-Jewish wife, and his time living under a false identity during the war, where he first encountered the orphans he would make his postwar analytic reputation helping. He does describe how he managed to get his parents to Holland right before the war and how they decided against going underground, citing age, ill-health, and general exhaustion at a world that had so betrayed them. They were murdered in Birkenau.

In the afterword, Detering asks Keilson if he ever thought of going back to Germany. He did, after all, continue to write in the language. Keilson answers that he couldn’t. The moment he learned of his parents’ murder, he stopped being a German. Moreover, he knew he couldn’t work as an analyst for German patients. Regardless of their personal culpability they would always feel too guilty towards him; that would be fatal for successful therapy. At which point Detering expostulates, “Das klingt alles so vernünftig” [That sounds so reasonable]. Keilson responds: “Aber ich bin so vernünftig, Heinrich, sonst hätte ich nicht überlebt! [“But I am reasonable, Heinrich, I wouldn’t have survived otherwise.”] Reason was a gift, a talent [eine Begabung] that he used to help himself.

This exchange gives a good sense of Keilson: a similar calmness and wisdom, maybe evenhandedness is the best description, colours these reminiscences. He writes about his parents as if they were people he had known long ago—not that he is distant to them, his whole life was ruled by their loss, but he is so fair to them, so loving in his equanimity, presenting their kindnesses and their cruelties (especially on the father’s part). Even a brief scene describing a time when, aged 10, he caught a glimpse of his mother’s half-naked body is anything but prurient. He and Detering talk a lot about what it’s like to be so old, so close to death. Keilson knows he had a good life, despite everything; knows too what he did to further that sense of satisfaction.

In the last section of the memoir, Keilson describes an encounter on his daily walk—he was 91 at the time and could still get around. Only a few hundred meters from his house he meets a child playing in the street. The boy says to him, matter of factly, You are very old. Keilson agrees. And how old are you? Three, the boy proudly responds. Without warning, he picks up his toy to run home, but not before pausing to yell, Where do you live?

Right near here, Keilson shouts back.

Where?

Just straight ahead, then turn left and go up the street. My house is right at the intersection.

The boy is satisfied. In the distance a woman’s voice calls him home.

Keilson walks straight ahead, turns left, and, at the intersection, finds his house, here, in Holland.

A lovely end to a lovely book of a lovely life.

I didn’t mean to read two books by Dutch survivors preoccupied by houses back-to-back: sometimes the reading life has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. An English translation of the memoirs was published in Australia, but I couldn’t get it: no library in North America either had it or was willing to lend it to my college’s library. Shame.

Barbara Yelin, Irmina (2014) Trans. Michael Waaler (2016)

Nineteen-year-old Irmina von Behdinger arrives in London in 1934, thrilled to escape her stultifying home in Stuttgart and excited to study typing. For a while, she lives with a host family. Later she is taken on by an eccentric Countess, a former Suffragette who buys her a bicycle and takes her to various Labour party events. One day, a distant relative takes her to a cocktail party, where she’s prickly and bored stiff until she meets Howard, a student from Barbados on a full scholarship to Oxford. They become friends—punting on the Cherwell, strolling through Hyde Park (where, as a mixed-race couple, they narrowly escape a gang of Blackshirts)—and inch toward becoming lovers. But then the Countess asks Irmina to find somewhere else to live—she feels obliged to take in a Jewish refugee—and Irmina has no choice but to return home. She settles in Berlin, putting her English to use as a translator in the Reich Ministry of War. All the while she writes to Howard, dodges the advances of ardent fascists, and angles for a posting in England.

A series of events conspire to keep her in Germany, where she eventually marries one of the ardent fascists, has a child, looks the other way at things she doesn’t want to deal with, and enjoys the advantages that come from having a husband in the SS. By 1942 she is a single mother (her husband is on the Eastern Front) seeking refuge from bombing raids and roughly answering her son’s questions about an impromptu auction in the street over the goods from an expropriated house (What are they doing? What is a Jew?) with Nazi vitriol: “The Jews are our misfortune.”

Decades later, in the early 1980s, Irmina, now widowed, receives an official letter from Barbados. The secretary to the Governor General, Sir Howard Green, writes on behalf of his employer: would the esteemed Mrs. von Behdinger consider visiting? The trip—centered on a birthday party for Howard’s adult daughter, herself named Irmina—is a mixed success. The past can’t be overcome, but old ties still mean something. Everywhere she goes the now grey-haired woman, in her sensible outfits, is introduced as “the brave Irina.” Howard has described her that way for decades, partly because he doesn’t know what became of her life and partly because he can’t let himself think about that life.

Hamburg-based bookseller Buchi, as she is known on Twitter, recommended Irmina to me, and I’m so glad she did. It’s smart, beautiful, moving: really impressive. Yelin’s delicate lines, and subdued palette (all greys, blues, and sepia yellows) demand that we linger on her images, even as the story pulls us forward. The panels create alternating rhythms, with regular small boxes interspersed with gorgeous two-page spreads. A fine afterword by the Holocaust and genocide scholar Alexander Korb fills in some of the historical background. (Irmina is based on Yelin’s grandmother, though it’s unclear how closely.) An excellent book for anyone who has ever wondered, How could so many ordinary Germans be drawn to National Socialism? Yelin’s answer is particular rather than general; it has no sweeping thesis. She never gives Irmina a pass, never lets us think, Well, she’s just an old woman now, no harm done. But she also has sympathy for roads not taken, missed encounters, and wrongs that can’t be apologized for. Check out Yelin’s site for more of her work: I especially enjoyed this short film about her current project, illustrating a Holocaust survivor’s memories.

A good reading month. A True Novel was the best, no question. That will be on my end of year list, I’m sure. But Yelin and Goblet, the two graphic memoirs, were great. Keilson, Minco, Bennett, and Moss too.

What I Read, January 2021

Posted on by under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

A few days of quiet, lingering feelings of winter break. (Eat the extra chocolate, have a glass of wine at dinner.) Then the fear and anger at the insurrection. Later the bated breath about the inauguration, the mixed feelings about applying for an American passport, the horror at the passport photos. Then calm: the relief, the joy at not having to hear a certain name. And then malaise, something like despair, exhaustion, ennui: no energy, writing difficult. Finally, the amazingly good fortune at being able to get vaccinated, thanks to Arkansas state policy of including teachers in the second group.

Among all this, of course there was reading, including a long book I’d long wanted to read.

Jean-Claude Grumberg, The Most Precious of Cargoes (2018) Trans. Frank Wynne (2020)

Strange little book that tells in fairy tale-fashion—it is subtitled “A Tale”— the story of a husband and wife and their twin infants who are deported from Drancy to some ominous point in the East. On the train, the woman’s milk has dried up; the hungry babies scream inconsolably; the others in the sealed railway car glower when they aren’t staring dejectedly into space. In a forest somewhere in Poland the man makes an abrupt, terrible decision. He rips one of the children—the little girl—from his wife’s breast, wraps it in his prayer shawl, and squeezes the parcel through the barred window. He cannot know that a peasant, a woman who has prayed for a child that has never come, will find the baby and raise her, over the objections of her husband and at risk to her own survival. How she loves the child, barters for milk, runs away when someone informs the occupying forces about the Jew Child—these descriptions make up the bulk of the novella, which is told in a quaint, implausible style. Even more impossible is the story of the father, who, unlike his wife and son, having survived the camps, stumbles into a village where a woman and her young daughter are selling cheese in the local market. Yes, it’s her, his daughter, he’s beside himself—his plan worked—but with a suppressed cry he leaves without a backward glance. And nobody knows, the narrator concludes, if they ever met again.

Preposterous and kitschy, monstrous even, this story. Yet Grumbach (b. 1939)—many of whose relatives were murdered in the Shoah and who himself survived as a hidden child—has a trick up his sleeve. In an epilogue he addresses an imagined reader who wants to know whether this is “a true story.” Over three pages he arraigns the question—why challenge the veracity of the story when so many question the veracity of the events?—concluding that fiction can tell a truth that history cannot. I happen to agree, but I’m unconvinced by Grumbach’s example. It lacks the sophistication of, say, Ida Fink, whose own short works incisively probe the limitations of the historical record, limitations that fiction can redress. I appreciate how Grumbach pulls the rug out from the heartwarming story many readers might have been moved by—but he’s too self-congratulatory and not all that smart about what his rug-pulling means.

Yishai Sarid, The Memory Monster (2017) Trans. Yardenne Greenspan (2020)

Novella about an Israeli academic who is groomed by the head of Yad Vashem—to whom the book is written as a letter after an eventually specified moment of disgrace; a conceit I’m unconvinced is effective—to lead Israeli tour groups through Holocaust sites in Poland. At first he works with school groups, but his self-loathing and contempt for/fear of the young people becomes too much, and he starts working with dignitaries, who care about photo ops instead of information. He knows too much, is the problem, and he needs to tell it all. But no one wants, or is in position, to hear it. The narrator begins to disintegrate, a process mimicked in the text’s ambiguous syntax. Here, for example, he is with his flock at Birkenau:

I stood before them over the underground undressing hall with the shaved roof, like a picked-over scab, underneath all rot.

Do the last clauses describe the roof, or the narrator? For he has become a memory monster, and as such must be banished. But it is equally true that memory itself is the monster. What is memory for? Does it cause more harm than good? Why do the visitors he ferries around—students, teachers, and politicians alike—say, with varying degrees of explicitness, that “to survive we need to be a little bit Nazi, too”? Sarid is excellent at skewering complacencies and false piety, whether Israeli or Polish. I agreed with so much in this book, was made nervous by the parts of myself I could see in the narrator. And yet The Memory Monster has not stayed with me. Maybe I’d need to read it again. For now, at least, I much prefer David Albahari’s Götz and Meyer, which covers some similar ground, but which has more to say than this book about teaching traumatic history.

Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve: A Memoir of Auschwitz (1981) Trans. Ruth Feldman (1986)

Late work by the Italian master, a collection in which each essay focuses on someone Levi encountered in his eleven-month incarceration in the Monowitz subcamp of the Auschwitz complex. To call this a memoir as the English-language publisher does might seem misleading, but Levi was always more interested in others than himself. At first blush these pieces are primarily anecdotal, but they use obliquity and juxtaposition to create their own arguments. And Levi does open up about himself a little, although always indirectly, as we see in particular in his portrait of Lorenzo Perrone (the Piedmontese forced labourer who regularly slipped Levi extra rations), and in general in the fascinated way the essays return to allegorical stand-ins for the writer (conjurors, carpenters, violinists). I read this slim collection with some students and we agreed it packs a punch far beyond its size. If you’ve never read Levi, start with his classic first book, If This Is a Man but don’t sleep on this one. Underrated.

A weird thing: I don’t know whether the collection was conceived as such by Levi—as best I can tell, most of the pieces included here were in the original Italian, but one or two others have been added to this edition—a shame the Complete Works published in English a few years ago has such a terrible critical apparatus. Does anyone know?

Étienne Davodeau, The Initiates: A Comic Artist and a Wine Artisan Exchange Jobs (2011) Trans. Joe Johnson (2013)

Keith tipped me off to this in his year-end review, and I’m glad he did. The subtitle tells the story, mostly: Davodeau helps his friend, Richard Leroy, a biodynamic wine producer in the Anjou, prune, harvest, decan tinker, while Leroy reads the comics Davodeau assigns him, visits a publisher, other artists, a comics con, even the press where the books are printed. Each learns to appreciate the labour that goes into the other’s work, and to think about what it means to be creative, have a passion, challenge expectations, respond to failure. It’s a generous book (it helps that people are always drinking wine, though a running joke is how few wines Leroy will agree to drink—not because they’re not famous enough, but because they aren’t interesting enough for him). Oddly, the winemaking comes across as much the more interesting of the two enterprises. Maybe that’s not odd at all: Davodeau is a realist and realism has always shone at explaining how to do things. You’d think a book like this would be plenty meta, but because that’s not Davodeau’s approach (he’s no Art Spiegelman, though he rightly admires him) his own métier comes across as a bit dull.

Anyway, lovely conceit, beautiful drawing. My only complaints: (1) the translation seems awkward (a typical sentence: “Marc-Antoine’s garden juxtaposes the deep blacks and sharp whites of his books by the moving affability of its shadows”—moving affability??) and (2) it’s so overwhelmingly guy. The book includes almost no female characters, and doesn’t find this as ridiculous as it should. Maybe the idea of métier is gendered in ways Davodeau misses the chance to explore. Indeed, the whole idea of métier could be complicated in relation to capitalism. Is the idea of vocation one that capitalism promulgates to further enslave us? Or is it a challenge to capitalism? There’s more to be said here.


Peg Kehret, Escaping the Giant Wave (2003)

My daughter was assigned this for school, and we read it together. It’s a lot worse than Hatchet. A teenage boy and his irritatingly quirky little sister accompany their parents on a working vacation to the Oregon coast. (The parents are in real estate; their firm is holding a retreat for its best agents.) Everything would be great except the lodge is under construction and they have to stay instead in a rickety old place, also there’s a tsunami warning out for the coast. No bigs. Oh yeah, Kyle’s nemesis, the school bully, comes along too. (His parents also being ace realtors.) Thalia and I agreed that the chapters describing the tsunami are by far the best. Kyle and his sister, who have been separated from their parents for reasons of plot rather than plausibility, run inland and uphill, just as they have been told. Even so they barely escape. Who knows what happened to the bully, who predictably poo-pooed the safety instructions. Afterward I asked Thalia if she wasn’t bothered that none of the books she’d read for school this year were about female characters, but she ignored my righteous indignation, concentrating on the fact that the book was finished and she could now read something else. Escaping the Wave isn’t entirely pointless—I’d no idea tsunamis ever hit Oregon. But yeah I don’t recommend this book.

Caroline Moorehead, A Train in Winter: A Story of Resistance, Friendship, and Survival (2011)

On January 24, 1943, a convoy left the internment/transit camp at Compiègne for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Among those deported were 230 French women, all associated with the resistance in some way, almost none of them Jewish. It was the only transport of its kind to leave occupied France. Moorehead has written a popular history of these women, the best known of which was the writer Charlotte Delbo. It’s a big task—that’s a lot of people to keep track of—and Moorehead doesn’t really succeed. She wants to do justice to these women, fair enough, but it’s hard to write a group portrait when you’re beholden to an idea of narrative history centered on the individual.

I read A Train in Winter with four students and we agreed we couldn’t keep anyone straight. Perhaps more importantly, we were frustrated both by the book’s structure and its lack of analysis. The first half considers Vichy France, the activities of the resistance, and the deplorably avid willingness of the French security apparatus to do the Germans’ dirty work for them; useful enough background, but nothing Moorehead has to say here is new, and into this general material she has to shoehorn the clandestine experiences (sabotage, resistance, betrayal, arrest) of her protagonists. The second half shifts to the women of the convoy and their experiences in the concentration camp system (first Auschwitz, then Ravensbrück). It is more focused, more dramatic, and more successful.

Yet here the failures of analyses become most apparent. Moorehead asserts—to be fair, on the testimony of the surviving women themselves, whether in the interviews she was able to perform with the handful still alive at the time of writing or in written documents (Delbo’s books again playing an outsized role)—that women experienced the camps differently than men. There’s plenty of evidence to support this idea, but exactly how and why is more complicated than Moorehead admits. She relies instead on gender essentialism, though she vacillates on whether she’s quoting the women themselves or affirming the idea herself: “Their own particular skills as women, caring for others and being practical, made them, as they told themselves, less vulnerable than men to harsh conditions and despair” (that “as they told themselves” reads like a hedge—Moorehead cites no source here; impossible to know if she’s speculating or transcribing). She similarly makes general statements about group solidarity without telling us why they might be true:

those who came from recognized groups—the communists, the Catholic Bretons, the intellectual bourgeoisie—were team players … the French, as a national group, were more cohesive than the other nationalities, more prone to look after their own.

“Recognized groups” is doing a hell of a lot of work here. (The part in the ellipsis disparages rich Parisians as the most selfish of the prisoners—isn’t that a “recognized group” too?) And Moorehead conveniently leaves out the fact that as political prisoners, these women had a better (though still terrible) experience than Jewish ones, which surely contributed to their “national” solidarity. In fact, the whole idea of nationalism verges uncomfortably on the longstanding rootlessness canard of antisemites everywhere, not least the Nazis. As if that wasn’t enough, Moorehead too often implies that survival was a matter of willpower (“Even as the French women reached Birkenau, it was clear that not all would, or could, or would choose, to survive”—I’m allergic to this language).

I’m glad to know about the existence of this convoy, am impelled to finally read Delbo, and was fascinated to learn about the experimental farm at Raisko/Rajsko, a subcamp run by I. G. Farben where inmates (including some of the French women) cultivated an Asian dandelion whose roots the Nazis hoped to synthesize into rubber. (Conditions on the farm were positively human compared to Birkenau: the women slept in beds with sheets, were able to wash regularly, ate meals rather than watery cabbage soup.) But all told I regret the time I spent reading A Train in Winter. Moorehead has written three other books about fascism in France and Italy, styling them into a loose quartet. After this one I’m in no hurry to read the others.

Georges Simenon, Night at the Crossroads (1931) Trans. Linda Coverdale (2014)

Maigret is called to Arpajon, about an hour south of Paris, to investigate a strange crime. The location is a busy crossroads just outside town, uninhabited except for a gas station, the villa of a parvenu insurance salesman, and a cottage that a reclusive Danish designer and his sister have recently rented. A man has been found dead in the salesman’s car—but the car is parked at the designer’s house. His, meanwhile, has been moved to the salesman’s. The foggy, bleak atmosphere is good, but there’s not enough eating and drinking to make it a top-notch Maigret. Throughout, the inspector seems unaccountably weary—an emotion that might be ascribed to the near-ridiculousness of the plot. Maigret’s response to a kerfuffle between two suspects could describe the book as a whole:

For some strange reason, this entire episode had not risen to the level of tragedy, or even drama. It was more like buffoonery.

Mary Kelly, The Spoilt Kill (1961)


I had been spying on Corinna for two weeks; spying on her for pay.

Good first line, right? The narrator is a PI specializing in industrial espionage. Corinna is a designer at a Staffordshire pottery firm called Shentall. Its owner hires the narrator to find out who is passing on the company’s designs to an American competitor. As the opening makes clear, though, the narrator might not mind spying on the woman. Indeed, in a manner beguilingly at once sinister and generous, he soon falls for Corinna.

In Staffordshire, centre of the British pottery industry for two centuries, kiln is pronounced kill. A “spoilt kill” is a firing that’s gone wrong, preserving some blemish immutably, such that the product can only be smashed and thrown away. A spoilt kill is an expensive mistake.

There are expensive mistakes aplenty in this excellent crime novel, especially in the narrator’s mishandling of his relationship to Corinna, who doubles as the prime suspect and his love interest. Kelly uses the plasticity of clay—the way shaping and heating turns brute material into beautiful but fragile pottery—as a metaphor for the hardening of human relationships. In a typical passage, the narrator dissects a heightened moment with the object of his desire and suspicion:

The look she gave me then. Joyful, triumphant, and aghast, How can a look be all that at once? I don’t know. I know nothing, nothing. These moments, these glances, flash past too quickly for analysis. Besides, I turned away. One always turns away. If one didn’t, all would be well.

This is real Ishiguro stuff: a narrator trying but failing to understand other people, and, in the process, failing to understand himself. In so doing, he reveals to readers things he himself doesn’t know. We read “against” him, even if doing so doesn’t eventuate into any clear understanding. In this example, the tell is the narrator’s recourse to “one”—a failed attempt to universalize his own failure.

Here’s another unwittingly offered revelation, this time about the narrator’s snobbery. His cover at the factory—he’s meant to be writing a history of the firm—means he’s welcomed into the social life of its tightly knit workers. Invited to a party by a hale, conventional, but kind and lively young man, a favourite at work, the narrator is surprised by the man’s home:

The house was in good repair, spotless, decorated throughout in slightly off-key colours, startling, unusual and weak: ‘contemporary’ intentions, diluted by time and democracy, and even then imperfectly grasped.

Unpleasant, right? Interestingly, though, Kelly holds back from making him thoroughly disagreeable. For me, much of the power of the book comes from a female author writing a male character. Not that Kelly is breaking new ground here or anything, but I was struck by several moments I doubt a male writer would have included. Here, the narrator, who has been married before, takes Corinna back to her flat. She doesn’t feel well because she’s getting her period. The narrator settles her for the night:

How strange, yet how mustily familiar, like coming home after a long holiday, to light the geyser, run the bath, fill the hot water bottle, put on the gas fire, turn down the bed—to do these things for a menstruating woman was the fabric of marriage, one of its few memories that was not unhappy but quiet, neutral, steadying in its ordinariness.

I’m not sure, exactly, that this response is nice. (Maybe a little self-satisfied? What do you think?) But I’m fascinated by its inclusion. All in all, The Spoilt Kill is suspenseful, well-written, and interesting. (You’ll learn a lot—but not too much—about making pottery.) An unusual, and unusually successful, book. Kelly didn’t write much, but I look forward to reading more. Fortunately, the British Crime Classics series, edited by Martin Edwards, is reissuing another one later this year.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869) Trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, Revised Amy Mandelker (2010)


This one needs a post or two of its own. For now I’ll tell the story of my previous attempts to read it—and my fantasy of how I thought I eventually would.

First attempt, late 1990s, twenty-hour train-ride from Toronto to Halifax. I bought a lovely Everyman Library hardcover of the Garnett translation, with a forbiddingly unvarnished, minimalist dust-jacket. Like Charlie Brown in the tv special, I dragged it around a whole winter’s vacation (my girlfriend and I were spending Christmas with her family). I abandoned it pretty soon after arriving—in fact, there is still a bookmark at p 186 (Pierre has just been nudged into convincing himself he loves Hélène)—but I guess I read it on the train. I say I guess because the only thing I remember about the trip—something I do remember quite often, it was so remarkable—is waking up in the early morning, the train chugging through New Brunswick, along the Miramachi, I think, with absolute piles of snow flanking the tracks. More snow than I’d ever seen before (which is saying something). Snow towering on the rooftops, snow drifting almost up the rooftops, that kind of thing. It was sunny and cold, that sunshine-y cold that is marvelous and crisp but also really fucking cold—and just magical. We had breakfast in the dining car and my girlfriend persuaded me to order fishcakes and a pot of tea and it was absolutely delicious. Maybe I gave up on the book because I had the Russian winter of my dreams right outside the window.

Years later, now living in a different country, married, a father (I think, I actually can’t remember if this was before or after we had T—an event that destroyed my memory, possibly for good), I made my second attempt. Now I had a different hardcover, the Peaver & Volokhonsky translation, an even bigger, more unwieldy book—its size being, I maintain, the main reason I didn’t persist past the first few dozen pages. Not that I wasn’t enjoying it, but it was kind of hard keeping everyone straight, and it was the winter vacation (I associate the book strongly with winter, even after having read it), and so I quietly set it aside.

I’d see them on the shelf, though, those War & Peaces, and they just kept forbiddingly insisting themselves on me. I’d sometimes lugubriously think that if I were diagnosed with cancer or something I would immediately take them up again to be spared the indignity and wasted life of dying without having read War and Peace. (Of course when I did later have a cancer scare that was the last thing on my mind.) But as time passed and my current sabbatical crept into view, I concocted a plan, the kind that keeps you going in tough times, like when you’re grinding up a hill into a headwind late in a run. I would spend a week all by myself in the Canadian Rockies. It would be fall, late September maybe, the most glorious time in the mountains but one I never get to experience anymore because of the academic calendar. I would take only War and Peace, so I wouldn’t be tempted to read anything else. I’d live without internet in a bee-loud glade. I’d hike every day, admiring the turning larches, while also finishing the novel, I saw no problem there. I pictured myself reading late into the night after a simple but satisfying supper of all the things no one else in my family likes to eat, sipping scotch. (This is how I know this scenario was pure fantasy, I do not much care for scotch, it just seems like something I should like.) How this was all going to work in reality was of no concern—and when the pandemic arrived it became clear that I wouldn’t have to worry about turning fantasy into reality.

In the end, reality was less triumphant than imagination—but it had the benefit of being real. I did, once again in winter, though not in a single immersive burst but instead over eight weeks, sometimes more intensively sometimes less, what with all the bits of daily family life to manage, actually read War and Peace. And it’s terrific.

Paraic O’Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands (2018)

Enjoyable 19th-century pastiche, bit of a Wilkie Collins vibe. Unusually, it’s as interested in the supernatural as in crime—I guess you’d call it urban magic—though its alternate-reality, speculative aspects aren’t as developed as they could be. In O’Donnell’s Victorian London, certain women emanate a kind of half-physical, half-psychological vibrancy that select others can perceive. And now someone is killing them. It’s up to Inspector Cutter, a gruff genius with a nice line in cursing the limitations of his juniors; Gideon Bliss, a disillusioned divinity student with a personal investment in the situation; and Octavia Hillingdon, a tyro journalist, to solve the case. The House on Vesper Sands is that rarest of books: one I wish had been longer, so that it could have fleshed out the implications of its scenario. As it is, it has strong characters, who exceed the caricatures they initially seem to fall into and whom I can absolutely imagine carrying a long-running series, and excellent writing, which never feels forced and is often genuinely arresting. A mournful Ben Aaronovitch, a fantastical Sarah Waters: take your pick.

Georges Simenon, The Yellow Dog (1931) Trans. Linda Asher (1987, revised 2013)

In a small town in Brittany, a man on his way home from a night out with the boys at the local café is shot while stopping in a doorway to light his cigar. A mysterious yellow dog is spotted at the scene of the crime. The next day it shows up in the café itself. Before long—everything happens fast in a Simenon—bad things befall the man’s friends: one turns up dead, one narrowly escapes poisoning, one disappears leaving only a bloodstained car. And that animal keeps showing up: is the yellow dog a red herring? Maigret sorts things out, which mostly means avoiding reporters and telling the mayor to shut up. Great opening scene, decent ending: absolutely serviceable.

On the whole, an underwhelming reading month—except for War and Peace. Genuinely titanic, worth every minute. That Mary Kelly’s good too, though. See you next month.

“Life is Complicated”: Marie Jalowicz Simon’s Underground in Berlin

Posted on by under Holocaust, judaism, review, teaching, Uncategorized

Marie Jalowicz Simon (1922—1998) was the only child of accomplished, elderly parents. Her father, a lawyer interested in jurisprudence but uninterested in the day-to-day aspects of being a lawyer, let his brilliant wife run the practice. Jalowicz Simon’s beloved uncle, perhaps her closest confidante, a man seriously committed to silliness, was both a communist and a deeply Orthodox Jew who basically starved to death once Nazi regulations prohibited kosher slaughtering practices. Her mother died of cancer in 1938; her father in 1941, possibly of a stroke. In the last few months of his life he had unwillingly become involved with a woman named Johanna Koch, an old family friend, who, together with her husband, Emil, would later help Jalowicz Simon survive, despite complicated mutual hate-love.

In 1940 Jalowicz Simon was sent to Siemens as a forced labourer. She became close with many of her coworkers, both Jewish and not, and was even accepted into a saboteurs’ ring at the armaments factory. She avoided deportation in 1941 by telling the postman who brought her notice that the woman under that name had disappeared, and then, in June 1942, dressed only in her petticoat, slipped past the two SS men who had been sent to pick her up. At that point she “went under,” becoming, like Inge Deutschkron and about 1500 other Berlin Jews, a so-called U-Boot.

Marie Jalowicz Simon, circa 1944

She was briefly engaged to a Chinese man (they could not speak to each other), and later went to Bulgaria with another man she had fallen in love with; in Sofia a sympathetic German official gave her a false pass to enable her to return to Berlin rather than be arrested. A family friend, a doctor who performed abortions and together with his hated wife helped out many Jews in hiding before himself disappearing in mysterious circumstances, placed her in various safe homes, but she could never stay in any of these places for long. For a time she stayed in a villa outside the city with a former circus performer. In the most grotesque and extraordinary moment of these dramatic years, she was sold for 15 Marks by a scurrilous associate of the abortionist to a syphilitic ardent Nazi who boasts of his ability to sniff out a Jew and who paid handsomely for a hair from Hitler’s dog, which he framed and hung on his walls. (Even as I write this I can’t believe what I’m saying, but it’s all true!)

Through Hannchen Koch Jalowicz Simon was introduced to an important player in the communist resistance; this woman, Trude Neuke, in turn passed her on to a Dutch volunteer worker with whom she shacked up in an apartment owned by an old woman. Jalowicz Simon came to both love and loathe this woman, a “repellent, criminal blackmailer with Nazi opinions”; as she later put it, with characteristic insouciance, “life is complicated.” Jalowicz Simon stayed in this curious ménage—the Dutchman would occasionally beat her, but she was grateful for the bruises as they helped her blend in to the neighbourhood—from late 1943 until early 1945. She spent the end of the war and the months immediately after it in far-eastern Berlin, at great risk from the Russian soldiers who had ostensibly liberated her, not to mention the increasingly paranoid fantasies of Hannchen Koch who was convinced the young woman was out to steal her husband.

After the war, Jalowicz Simon decided to stay in what became East Germany. A member of the Communist party, she became a professor at the prestigious Humboldt University, where she taught classics and the history of philosophy. She almost never spoke of her wartime experiences to her son, the historian Hermann Simon, until the very end of her life, when she recorded 77 tapes’ worth of reminiscences, which came out, her son tells us in his foreword, in elegantly phrased lectures, with almost no uncertainty. Hermann Simon was able to confirm almost everything in her story; together with the writer Irene Stratenwerth, he turned the tapes into a memoir, Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany, capably translated into English by Anthea Bell. (It has a wonderful map of the city, showing the locations of all her safe houses; I wish more books did this.) The book is particularly valuable for its frankness on sexual abuse, which is only now becoming a significant topic in Holocaust Studies.

I recently read and discussed Underground in Berlin with some students who are working with me on a Holocaust education project. Before we talked I circulated some questions about the text—which, I hope I’ve made clear, is well worth reading, both a fascinating and suspenseful narrative—and I’ve copied these here, in case they are of interest.

  • Most of you have read at least some Holocaust memoirs. How does Underground in Berlin compare? You might answer this question by thinking about material you expected to find but didn’t, or, conversely, material you didn’t expect would be included but is.
  • Jalowicz Simon grew up in mostly left-wing circles at a time when one’s political affiliations really mattered. She later spent most of her life in a communist country (East Germany). No surprise, then, that class is so important to her memoir. But what about cultural background? (I’m thinking of what the sociologist Pierre Boudieu called “cultural capital.”) What is the relation, for Jalowicz Simon, between cultural capital and class? Take a look at pp. 258 & 308 for just two examples.
  • I’m interested in Jalowicz Simon’s interest in excretion—what she with bracing directness calls shit and piss. Finding somewhere to relieve yourself is a big deal in the memoir. And on a couple of occasions, excretion is disgustingly related to eating, like the chamber pot that becomes a dish. How do such moments contribute to our understanding of the text? (Some examples: 100, 142, 151)
  • Sex is central to Jalowicz Simon’s wartime experiences. Sometimes she uses sex or its promise (flirting, etc.) to get something she needs (72, 87, 143). Sometimes sex is a price she has to pay for staying alive (25, implied on 326, the whole Galecki experience). And sometimes sex is violently forced upon her (i.e. rape on 99, 314, 323-4, or the threat on 125). Sometimes it is replaced by violence (238). When she meets a man who has no sexual interest in her she finds it noteworthy by virtue of being so unusual (192). What did you make of Jalowicz Simon’s portrayal of sex? When is she overt and when is she covert? When does she tell us straight out, and when do we need to read between the lines? What difference does this difference make?
  • You surely noticed how many places (apartments, cottages, sheds) Jalowicz Simon stayed, and, correspondingly, how many people were responsible for her survival. You also doubtless were struck by the varying motives of her helper/rescuers. (Is that even the right term?) Her experiences support the historian Mark Roseman recent claims that we like to think of rescuers as being altruistically motivated, and clearly motivated (not changing their minds, not being ambivalent); we similarly like to think of victims as being helped by a single person over a sustained period. (Think Oskar Schindler.) These fantasies are not borne out by the historical record. To save a life required a network of actors, many of whom did not know each other or think of each other as being involved in a common enterprise. What are the consequences of rethinking rescue?

“A Berlin Without Jews”: Inge Deutschkron’s Outcast

Posted on by under German Literature Month, Holocaust, judaism, review, Uncategorized

“You’re Jewish. You must let the world know that that doesn’t mean you’re not every bit as good as they.”

So begins Inge Deutschkron’s Outcast: A Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin (1978; translated by Jean Steinberg, 1989). The memoir mostly concerns her time as a so-called U-Boot—a Jew in hiding during the war—but it begins on March 31, 1933 with these words, urgently spoken to her by her mother. Hitler has taken power the month before; being Jewish suddenly matters a lot. At the time, ten-year-old Deutschkron knew neither that she was Jewish, nor what that meant. She doesn’t ask, either: “I sensed that it would upset [my mother], and me too.” Deutschkron, who honed her sense for when people were equivocating during her nerve-wracking hears of hiding in plain sight, must have caught the hesitancy, even the internalized prejudice in her mother’s command: “You must let the world know that that doesn’t mean you’re not every bit as good as they.” However unconsciously, the mother’s double negative frames the experience of being Jewish from the perspective of the antisemite.

But the world wouldn’t let Deutschkron ignore her newly revealed identity. The upshot might be good for the writer, but it’s hard for the person. She is positioned as an outsider and an observer. Turning away from her mother’s demand, the child directs her attention to the world outside her window:

What interested me was what was going on outside in our corner of Berlin, on our quiet street. I liked looking out of the window of our apartment on Hufelandstrasse. It may have been nothing more than a sleepy little corner, yet for a ten-year-old there was much to see. I could watch the other children play. I was not allowed to play outside, my parents thought it wasn’t safe. I, of course, didn’t agree. I knew all the children by name, but I wasn’t allowed to play with them. All I could do was watch. It hurt.

This passage is typical: neither showy in style nor demonstrative in tone. Deutschkron is smart, capable, forthright, gently ironic. She often holds her feelings in reserve. Perhaps she thinks that although her experiences were exhausting, frightening, debilitating, and risky they weren’t representative of the persecution of the time. It’s true, this is a Holocaust story without trains, camps, or ravines (even though these elements hover at the margins of her tale, where lurks the suffering she knows she is always only one step away from, even if she can’t quite fathom its exact form). Yet one of the salutary aspects of Outcast is to expand our sense of what the Holocaust was, and what we expect of those who survived it.

I said reserve is characteristic of Deutschkron’s self-presentation. But I don’t mean she’s unfeeling. Look again at that opening anecdote. Yes, her separateness gives her a certain power: where others might see nothing, she sees a whole world, the better for being barred from it. But turning suffering into wisdom isn’t much fun. Deutschkron first says she liked to look out the window. But she ends by reversing course and admitting the harder truth: “It hurt.” The emotion stings the more for the effort of trying to hold it in check.

A few pages later, Deutschkron admits that she has not even especially been looking at the neighbourhood kids. In fact, she’s not looking at anything. She’s pretending to look as a cover for her real activity: waiting. Her father is late, should have been home long ago. Word has gone around that the Nazis will be boycotting Jewish-owned businesses the next day. People talk of arrests and violence. Deutschkron’s worry is fueled by her sense that her mother, too, is worried. She keeps sticking her head out the door and looking down the stairwell. The doorbell rings. A friend has come with a warning: “‘Your husband must get out of town immediately.’”

Eventually the anxiety subsides—for now. He is safe with friends for the night, mother and daughter learn, and returns the next day full of laughter: the man he stayed with, a doctor, put him up in his office, where he slept under the watchful eye of a skeleton. But Deutschkron’s mother doesn’t think it’s funny. All day she burns papers and sorts books. The Deutschkrons are committed socialists, everyone in the neighbourhood knows this, including the child herself, for whom socialism was her earliest identity. (If she’d been born in the US a decade later, she would have been a Red Diaper baby.) And it is being a socialist, more than a Jew, that, for the time being, is most dangerous. The family takes precautions, but they feel they are safe enough, things will blow over. They spend a few nights with relatives across town, and later move to a different neighbourhood where nobody knows their political affiliation, but they don’t pursue emigration. Even a couple of years later, when the father has the chance of a job in Australia, he doesn’t leave: “‘After all, I’m a Prussian civil servant; I can’t just run away.”

Claude Lanzmann, who interviewed Deutschkron for three hours during the making of his epic film Shoah (1985), sadly leaving all but a few minutes of their conversation out of the final nine-and-a-half-hour cut, notes that by equating leaving with running away the father reveals how much he felt he belonged to Germany. Like so many assimilated German Jews, the Deutschkrons story is a story of betrayal, of failed belonging. In this sense, the memoir’s English title is quite accurate. Germany’s Jews were indeed cast out. (The original title, Ich trug den golden Stern, I Wore the Yellow Star, references this exclusion more obliquely.) In this regard their persecution was different from that of Jews elsewhere, especially in Eastern Europe, who had never been allowed to feel they belonged.  

As Deutschkron grows up, she responds to her increasing feelings of alienation by resisting however she can, saying Aufwiedersehen instead of Heil Hitler, declining to give to “the countless collections for various national and social causes.” But even though she is undoubtedly correct when she tells Lanzmann that she is “a fighter,” her resistance can opnly go so far. Little things get to her. Sitting for a portrait at a photography studio, she is asked to tuck her hair behind her ear. The photographer had no ulterior motive, Deutschkron says, but the girl bursts into tears anyway: Nazi “race science” claimed you could tell a Jew by their ears. (I’m reminded of Carlo Ginzburg’s brilliant essay “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” which takes the study of ears as an index for modernity’s various ways of knowing, among which, Ginzburg would surely insist, we must include phrenological racism.) Deutschkron doesn’t tell her parents what happened, fearing that they will only laugh (shades of her father’s return from his night at the doctor’s office) and retell the story, which circulated among Jews at the time, about the man pulled from the crowd at a Nazi rally to demonstrate Aryan typology: unbeknownst to the Nazis, the man with the perfect German ears is a Jew. No one cared if the story was true: “Jews loved it because it helped them bear the humiliation of this particular indignity.” Deutschkron is unconvinced, though—just as she is unimpressed by the tenderness of the policeman at her local precinct as he wiped her fingers when the family are forced to comply with a fingerprinting decree. Yes, the officer might have been more embarrassed than her by “this demeaning procedure,” and, yes, the ear joke is a way for those who have suffered to claw back a brief moment of control over their lives, but Deutschkron implies that these moments don’t amount to anything significant.

They don’t, for example, keep the family together. In April 1939, her father leaves for England. After Kristallnacht, England eased its immigration policy slightly, granting visas to those who had relatives in England and could prove they had applied for admission to other countries. Her father had a cousin in England, and he had applied to go to Palestine. But the cousin could only sponsor him; Deutschkron and her mother would have to stay behind. Fitting, then, that she’s alone with her mother in the book’s opening scene, for this will be their fate throughout the war. The father is absent from the rest of the book (his story too must have been interesting); even when they are eventually reunited, Deutschkron says almost nothing about him. Hard for me to read this elision as anything other than judgmental.

From the time the war begins, Deutschkron’s memoir might have taken the title of Lore Segal’s own description of her wartime experience, Other People’s Houses. For the next five years, Deutschkron and her mother will shuttle through a series of rooms and other, less orthodox, hiding places. Their experiences support Mark Roseman’s claim that those who survived relied mostly on a network of helpers, some of whom they knew, and others they didn’t, some of whom provided long-term assistance, and others who helped spontaneously or briefly. The Deutschkrons relied on their friends in the socialist movement. One man had a grocery and gave the women fruit and vegetables; another, a butcher, sold them cuts of meat without ration cards. Still others offered places to stay or let them work off the books.

Deutschkron’s formal education had ended in April 1939 when the Nazis closed all Jewish schools. Her options were either to work in a Jewish household or in a factory. But for some reason the Jewish training school for kindergarten teachers had not yet been closed, and so she enrolled for the one-year course. The school was run by a highly educated woman who offered her students a much more wide-ranging humanistic education than would have been expected. Deutschkron appreciated the opportunities, yet she did not find early childhood education to be her métier the way one of her fellow students did. This a beautiful girl from the Ruhr valley was Marianne Strauss, the subject of two books I’ve recently been reading—this connection impressed me in a spooky, almost mystical way, as if even in the midst of destruction all manner of connecting webs still existed.

After graduating from the course, Deutschkron took a job in the household of Dr. Conrad Cohen, head of the welfare department of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany. As such, he and his family still lived in relative privilege. Deutschkron did cleaning, laundry, childcare for the family until April 1941, when a new edict declared that Jews could no longer keep household help. That left only compulsory factory work. Through her connection to Cohen, Deutschkron was sent to see Otto Weidt, who ran a workshop in which blind and deaf workers, most of them Jewish, made brooms and brushes for the army.

Weidt might be the most remarkable person in the memoir, which is saying something. Legally blind, at times reliant on an oxygen machine, active before the war in pacifist circles, aided by his competent and shrewd wife, Elise (regrettably absent from Deutschkron’s account), Weidt routinely defied the Gestapo. “He was a gambler and a risk-taker and liked a good fight.” Thanks to his army contracts Weidt had been deemed essential to the war effort. He obtained extra materials on the black market (paying policemen to cut hair from their horses’ tails, for example) so he could exceed his production quota and sell the extra illegally. That allowed him to hire more workers, almost all of them Jewish. Contrary to regulations, he even let able-bodied Jews work in the office as secretaries and accountants. Weidt offered one such place to Deutschkron, where she worked closely with Alice (Ali) Licht, a young woman with whom she became close and who, thanks to Weidt, would survive the war in the most extraordinary way. The 60-year-old Weidt became a surrogate father for Deutschkron, though one more kindly and less threatened by his daughter’s sexuality than most. When Deutschkron fell for a man named Hans Rosenthal, who worked as a purchasing and distributing agent of the Jewish Community (which meant relying on black market connections), Weidt would facilitate meetings between them. He even arranged dinners for his favourites at the factory. When the Gestapo descended on the workshop, as they regularly did, Weidt would pretend to curse his employees for their laxness, though always ending by noting to the Nazis that he could never fill his army orders “without these Jews.”

Otto Weidt, left, with Alice (Ali) Licht, and Gustav Kremmert, whom Weidt was unable to save

Outside the workshop, the situation got worse and worse. The first deportations left Berlin in October 1941. Over a thousand people, one of whom had for a time lived with Deutschkron and her mother in a shared apartment, were corralled in a synagogue before being shipped east. Deutschkron and her mother walked by the building in case they could catch a glimpse of their friend. Thinking of the mostly elderly people inside, they felt at once relieved and guilty: “We breathed a sigh of relief that we were still able to work, and we felt ashamed.” Deutschkron knew there was no good reason why they were outside the building and not with the others inside.

That conviction was reinforced when Deutschkron herself received a notice. Her mother insisted that she would voluntarily register so that they won’t be separated, an idea Deutschkron furiously rejected. At their wits’ end, they went to see Dr. Cohen for advice, who angrily tore up the notice. There had apparently been a mix-up; it was meant for someone with a similar name. “For a while I was haunted by the thought that someone else was going to take my place,” Deutschkron says. Note the temporariness of her feeling (“for a while”); it was difficult to worry about others.

By mid 1942 the Deutschkrons moved into a Judenhaus, apartments in which Berlin’s remaining Jews were crowded together—eleven of them in a five-and-a-half-room flat. Friends disappeared; even the Cohens were deported. Hans Rosenthal escaped deportation by a hair’s breadth—a Gestapo officer familiar with his contacts thought it would be better to make use of them than to send him away.

Deutschkron movingly describes visiting her aunt and uncle (her father’s sister) on the day of their deportation. She and her mother consoled the couple as best they could, slipping out of the house just before the Jewish police arrive:

To this day I can hear the squeaking of the stairs. As we stepped out from the dark hallway into the wintry street we saw a police car approach. We stopped to watch. Two Jewish orderlies wearing the yellow star went into the house. They reappeared minutes later behind my aunt, who was lugging the heavy backpacks. She walked quickly, as though eager to get it over with. My uncle followed haltingly. They didn’t look back as they stepped into the car, not a single backward look at the city that had been their home for almost thirty years. I cried. My mother, although just as moved, warned me to control myself. “Suppose somebody were to see us?” We had gone out without our stars. We were the only ones on the street. Strange how the Berliners knew when to make themselves scarce so as not to have to see what was happening on their streets. It is anybody’s guess how many watched from behind their curtained windows.

It’s as though Deutschkron were a little girl again, forced to watch the neighbourhood from her apartment. Yet what she watches now is more terrible. Is her looking compensation for the backward look her relatives can’t bring themselves to give? As in the earlier scene, there is here an us and a them, yet unlike the moment a decade earlier, when “they,” the children at play, were visible in the street, here, they are invisible. They are hiding now. Notice that they are “the Berliners,” not ‘our fellow citizens.’ Notice too how Deutschkron, in a reverse synecdoche, substitutes the city for their apartment building: “not a single backward look at the city that had been their home.” It’s as if she is accompanying them all the way to the station, and beyond, as the train departs for the East. This is telling, because Outcast is more than most memoirs I’ve read, even of Jews who lived there, a Berlin story.

All the more amazing, then, what a select few of its inhabitants were willing to do. Weidt, in particular, continues to perform miracles—when his disabled workers are taken in a raid, he marches to the Gestapo and somehow gets them back. But he mutters he won’t be able to do it again. Death is all around. A friend tells Deutschkron that their neighbour’s son has come back from the east with news about what is happening there to the Jews. This corroborates what she and her mother have heard on the BBC, which they listen to in secret whenever they can: “There’d been vague allusions to gassings and executions that none of had believed, or, rather, wanted to believe.” The friend insists they must not let themselves be deported. This is January 1943. Almost no Jews are still living in Berlin; the last will be taken in February. Deutschkron and her mother will have to go underground.

The U Boots move frequently, from place to place, all uncomfortable and risky, sleeping for a while even on the floor of a stationary stop owned by Socialist friends, and, later in their boathouse outside the city. They never stay anywhere long. If they are introduced by their hosts as friends on a visit, neighbours soon say, “They’re staying a long time, aren’t they?”

In the summer of 1943 the Gestapo finally “cleans out” Weidt’s workshop—everyone is deported, though Weidt manages to get Ali Licht and her parents (who he had been hiding in a false room at the back of the shop) sent to Theresienstadt. He didn’t know that the so-called model camp was just a station on the way to Auschwitz, though Ali managed to get a note to him when she was deported there. Ali’s story is remarkable: Weidt actually travelled to Oświęcim, the town where the camp was built in a former army barracks, found out that Ali was in fact in Birkenau, and bribed a Polish worker to smuggle a letter to her explaining that he had rented a room in town and left civilian clothes there, should she ever be able to escape—which she did in the chaos of the camp’s evacuation in January 1945. Ali Licht returned to Berlin and was hidden by Weidt for the rest of the war.

Deutschkron’s path to survival was less fraught than Ali’s but still harrowing. In the fall of 1943 the Allies begin bombing Berlin regularly. A terrible time for the city’s non-Jewish citizens is a boon for Deutschkron (though still dangerous, especially since she can’t go to the bomb shelter when she is hiding in someone’s apartment). She is able to get help at the NSV (National Socialist Welfare Agency) like any other bombed out victim; she even gets a new ID, after claiming that hers was lost in a raid. That doesn’t mean she is in the clear, though. After all, she has to worry about death from above as much as denunciation from those around her. Friends take the Deutschkrons to Potsdam, just outside Berlin, where they rent a meager shed, a “former combination goat shed and laundry room.” With only a few interruptions they spent the rest of the war there, scraping together enough to eat (while foraging for mushrooms, Deutschkron dreams of being able to take a walk without having to think of survival) and dodging identity checks. Once Deutschkron is even recognized by an old acquaintance on the subway, which is almost her undoing. Later she is threatened with denunciation by a woman jealous of her husband, who is hiding Inge and her mother. Even when the war shudders to a close and the Russians appear in Berlin, Deutschkron isn’t safe. Now she needs to dodge “the Ivans,” narrowly avoiding several assaults and attempted rapes.

After the war, hungry and weary, Deutschkron falls ill; moreover, she is depressed about the news out of Belsen and Auschwitz. She finally hears from her father, but she and her mother can’t get to the UK until August 1946. The last pages of Outcast are more concerned with the machinations between socialists and communists in immediate postwar Berlin than with her feelings. The shell Deutschkron has offered readers from the beginning of the book seems to have hardened. Even her final references to Israel, where she eventually settles, are perfunctory, giving nothing away. But why should we expect anything different? Deutschkron doesn’t owe us tears. Besides, the descriptions of how the communists repressed the socialist movement she and her parents had so identified with, and her concomitant claim that Israel is the only place she can be safe (ironically the book was written just at the moment when, with the election of Menachem Begin, Israel was abandoning its socialist past) do in fact get at what eats at her most: her exile from her home, Berlin.

Still from Deutschkron’s interview with Claude Lanzmann

Describing the roundup that swept up the city’s last Jews, Deutschkron declares: “A Berlin without any Jews was inconceivable.” She was living proof that such a city in fact never existed, but not for lack of trying. Jewish Berlin persisted only in hiding, in stealth, on the other side of a window or around a corner away from the invisible prying eyes of those who did everything they could to make the inconceivable a reality. Less bitter than Ruth Kluger in her postwar response to Vienna, less ambivalent than Marianne Strauss’s postwar attempts to identify with a new Germany, Inge Deutschkron is the clear-eyed, composed, yet wounded fighter who appears not just in this fascinating memoir but also in that interview with Lanzmann, which you can watch here. (Highly recommended; she’s amazing.)

Lanzmann likely cut Deutschkron from his film because she didn’t fit the story he wanted to tell. He wanted to focus on those forced to do the Nazis’ evil work in the extermination camps; his is a more lachrymose tale. I doubt Deutschkron cared that Lanzmann had no use for her. Well, maybe she did. But she might have expected something of the sort. She was used to being on the outside, looking in. She answered her mother’s demand—she proved herself as good as the ones who wanted to kill her—but it left a bad taste in her mouth.

I read this for Caroline and Lizz’s tenth annual German Literature Month. Lots of other great posts here.

Understanding Forward: Mark Roseman’s Lives Reclaimed

Posted on by under book review, Holocaust, judaism, review, Uncategorized

A woman in Essen brings flowers to friends of her in-laws; their home, where she has enjoyed many musical evenings, was looted the night before. To get to the couple cowering in fear and shame inside she fights her way through a crowd of hostile onlookers.

A man who knows that deportations to the East have begun seeks to offer moral and physical support to the deportees, slipping into a synagogue where hundreds have been ordered to marshal. A woman—she will be sent to Minsk the following day—thanks him for his efforts. He should be thanking her, the man replies; his paltry efforts have allowed him to feel a little less guilty for what is happening “to his fellow countrymen.” The woman breaks down at this gesture of solidarity.

A woman writes to the professional association of teachers: she has lost her ID card and needs a replacement. She includes a photo not of herself but of a friend who has been in hiding for six months. The card which duly arrives, bearing the name of one woman and the photo of another, is a lifeline, not proof against discovery but enough to give the hidden woman a modicum of freedom.

A man who works for the Acoustic Institute of a university in Braunschweig is sent to an isolated site in the Harz mountains to run some tests for the military. While there he stays in an old forester’s hut. Friends ask if he can help a woman on the run; he agrees, and the woman, whom he has never met and never sees again, stays with him for several days.

These vignettes launch historian Mark Roseman’s fascinating new book. Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany tells the story of the Bund, an organization of about two hundred men and women in the industrial Ruhr valley who, beginning in the 1920s and continuing through the 60s, sought a different way of living. Their idealism led them to resist the Nazi regime in small, uncoordinated, but meaningful ways. Roseman describes this resistance, shows how those involved considered their actions both at the time and afterward, and, most significantly, offers a new understanding of resistance.

The Bund—not to be confused with the better-known secular socialist Jewish movement in interwar Poland—was “part political group, part 1960s commune, and part Quaker society.” Its full name was Bund: Gemeinschaft für sozialistisches Leben, which Roseman translates as “League: Community for Socialist Life.” Yet even though its members were close to the socialist and communist parties of the period, the Bund was never a political organization. Founded in 1924, it was one of many social movements in Weimar Germany, movements that modelled themselves on prewar youth groups, like the Wandervögel, the Naturfreunde, and even Zionist groups. These organizations believed themselves to be “natural fellowships,” in contrast to the artificial institutions of society. As Roseman nicely puts it, such organizations typically “sought freedom for the collective rather than for the individual.” Yet it was also true that they tended to be organized around a single leader, whose charisma would keep the association from splintering.

In the case of the Bund, that leader was Artur Jacobs, a high school teacher in his mid-40s, whose commitment to revolutionary pedagogy had gained him devoted followers and implacable enemies. (He once led a group of girls on a hiking trip during which teachers and students slept in the same barn. People were not amused.) Stymied by parents and superiors from bringing his teaching aims to fruition, Artur poured his passion, energy, and conviction into the Bund. He led the organization until his death, age 88, in 1968, together with his wife Dore (neé Marcus), the daughter of “two highly acculturated, educated German Jews.” (She had been one of the students on the hiking trip; maybe his critics were on to something. Their marriage was quite devoted, though.) Dore’s passion was Körperbildung, “body education,” an all-purpose name for activities—including nudism, sun worship, and primal dance—aimed at cultivating a more natural relation to the body. The most popular of these was eurhythmic gymnastics, invented by Émile Jacques-Dalcroze in the late 19th century. (It was the yoga of its day and features prominently in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.) In 1925, Dore founded a Bund school for body training and eurythmic education in Essen; many of the Bund’s core members were introduced to the organization through the school, which also provided crucial cover during the Nazi years (both literally—as a place to hide from prying eyes—and figuratively—as an activity the Nazis deemed harmless).

But even at its most corporeal, Bundist activity was grounded in core philosophical beliefs, specifically a counterintuitive attempt to blend Kant and Marx. (Marx directly opposed his materialism to Kant’s idealism.) Whereas Kant believed individuals must “learn to act in such a way so as not to impinge on others,” as Roseman puts it, Marx believed that social change would come from inescapable class conflict that exceeded any voluntarist acceptance of moral positions. Perhaps the tension between individual ethical beliefs and determinist social forces allowed the Bund able to negotiate the Hitler years as it did. In pressing “for socialist transformation at the societal level and for individual ethical improvement at the personal level” the Bund was neither an established organization nor a temporary confluence of individuals. It was something in between—flexible enough to evade easy detection yet strong enough to maintain the faith of its members. Thus, the Bund allows us to rethink our ideas of resistance and rescue, which, Roseman convincingly argues, have been narrowly conceived and overly reliant on retrospective thinking.

Before the war, the Bund sought cooperation among left-wing organizations and groups. But its main interest was to ensure members abide by Bund ideas about how to live—freedom for the self would come from freedom for the collective. Bund adherents organized camping trips and hiking excursions, celebrated the solstice, danced and trained their bodies, abjured alcohol and tobacco (caffeine, though, was a bridge too far), and generally enjoyed being among like-minded souls (so much so that their children often felt left out and later harboured ambivalence to the organization).

Thanks to Dore the Bund attracted many more women than most Weimar-era organizations. This would be important later—the Nazis certainly had plenty of rigid ideas about how women should live, but in general didn’t think of them as potential resisters. When the Nazis came to power, the Bund, like so many progressive groups, felt existentially threatened. Artur even spent several months in 1933 tramping through the countryside and hiding with friends, convinced he was on an arrest list. This fear eventually proved unfounded, but it was reasonable at the time. More at risk were Dore and Lisa Jacobs, Dore’s second-in-command at the eurhythmic school, both of whom were Jewish. In general, the pre-war Bund had little interest in Jewishness. Its spirituality, if it could be said to have any, was ill-defined and centered on nature-worship. Moreover, the small Jewish population of the largely working-class Ruhr valley tended to be middle-class: owners of the means of production, in Marxist terms, rather than workers. It is remarkable, then, and a sign of the group’s lack of dogmatism and willingness to shift to meet the needs of the moment, that many of the Bund’s wartime actions centered on helping German Jews, by expressing solidarity, sending food parcels to deportees, and even hiding Jews who had gone underground.

After the war, Bund members presented themselves as natural opponents of Nazism, suggesting that countering the regime—by providing both material aid for the persecuted and mental succor for “ordinary Germans,” as a light in the dark times and a possible way forward afterward—had been its rationale during those twelve terrible years. Roseman, who has been studying the Bund for almost 30 years, uses the group’s surprisingly large surviving historical records to show that this thinking in fact appeared only in hindsight. At the time, especially in the years after the Nazis took power but before the war, Bund members were shattered and demoralized, both scared for their safety and unsure how they could continue to live meaningfully when forced to limit their activities to secret meetings and despondent correspondence.

Paradoxically, the Bund’s postwar self-understanding obfuscated its wartime reality:

If there was one key words for the Bund in staking its claim in the postwar period, it was that it had continued to “live” in Nazi Germany—that is, it had gained vibrant, meaningful, lived experience. Yet the more the group marshaled its memories to establish its postwar fitness to lead, the more the complexity of lived experience—with its despair, fears, and more—slipped out of view.

Thanks to letters, diaries, and official documents, Roseman is able to reconstruct not just the Bund’s activities but also its members’ feelings during the Nazi era. He tracks them as they send hundreds of parcels to deported Jews, both to Poland (until 1942 when such parcels were no longer accepted) and to the way-station/giant prison of Theresienstadt. They added letters of succor and encouragement; Roseman notes that, especially “for a certain kind of high-minded, politically left-leaning German Jew, the Bund’s language and ideas were instantly recognizable and appealing, conveying the sense that the ethical and intellectual world they had felt themselves to be a part of still existed and accepted them within its fold.” As one recipient wrote from a ghetto in Poland, “to feel the warmth and proximity of people so similar to myself is like having a transfusion after losing a lot of blood—it is lifesaving.”

Bund members even accompanied deportees to holding centers, sometimes carrying their bags—risky actions, especially after a regulation prohibiting “persons of German blood” from having friendships with Jews was enacted in October 1941. Perhaps the most courageous thing they did was to help at least two and perhaps as many as five Jews survive the war. Dore was more or less protected by her marriage to Artur (though she and a dozen of the group’s core members spent the last year of the war in hiding in a house near Lake Constance, close enough to Switzerland that they sometimes risked slipping across to border to mail letters). But Lisa Jacobs had become a “non-person” by deciding not to answer her deportation notice, which meant she had to live without a ration card and at constant risk of discovery. She moved frequently from house to house—the fake teacher’s ID offering a little protection—staying only a few days at a time to reduce the risk to the person hiding her.

Perhaps even more surprising was the group’s efforts to save Marianne Strauss, who they had not previous known. In 1941-42, Artur had befriended David Krombach, a leader in Essen’s shrinking Jewish population. Krombach’s son was engaged to Marianne; the young woman, who worked in the Jewish Community office, acted as the intermediary in Bund efforts to help the Krombach family once they had been deported. When she went underground in 1943, defying her deportation order, Marianne had to trust that the kindness Bundists had shown her would hold: she showed up late one night at a member’s home, literally on the run from the SS. Until the end of the war she stayed with at least ten Bund families and made between thirty to fifty journeys across the Ruhr, each of them highly dangerous. (Not least because the Allies were bombing it pretty much every day.) Roseman gives us only a taste of this extraordinary story, having devoted his first book, A Past in Hiding, to it. (I’m reading it right now; it’s excellent.)

Importantly, although Artur and Dore and some of the others had talked about helping Marianne, they had no plan for doing so. They improvised, they sacrificed, they did what they could, never knowing if it would be the right thing or for how long they would be able to do it. They did not set out to “rescue” Marianne. Moreover, neither Marianne and Lisa—like everyone, Roseman intimates, who survived the war in hiding or on the run—were simply passive victims, mere recipients of aid. Lisa, for example, taught occasional gymnastics classes and even arranged to send packages to Poland. Marianne cooked for the people who sheltered her and even made artificial flowers from felt, which she sold for valuable ration coupons. Too often we think of survivors as either passive objects of rescue or as self-interested actors cheating fate through shrewdness and luck. Roseman complicates this view, showing us that, yes, survivors contributed to their own survival but they also helped others in need.

A similar sense of complication inheres in his argument that rescuers are not only disinterested altruists. Many of them were motivated by greed and graft, desiring money or sexual favours. (Nechama Tec’s terrific memoir of her experiences as a hidden child in Poland, Dry Tears, offers examples of both.) But Roseman also argues that “even those who made a strong and conscious decision to help Jews might have been involved in their destruction.” In fact, “some perpetrators were rescuers, and some rescuers were perpetrators”—not everyone who helped Jews did so for ethical reasons, and not everyone who helped out of moral principle could escape being caught up in the killing process. Several Bund members were conscripted into the army; one was sent to France, where at one point he was a guard on a transport that he knew carried Jews. This is a dramatic example; more innocuous is Artur’s criticism of Marianne when she got involved in a domestic dispute between a husband and wife who were hiding her. Roseman marvels that Artur could have rebuked a young woman whose parents had just been deported to Auschwitz, but he insists we need to take account, as much as the historical record allows, of realities, like this one, that “became unsayable after the event.”

Time and again, Roseman offers startling conclusions. The Bund succeeded in its resistance because it “created a collective space, a counterweight, to the world outside.” But that collectivity was loose, seemingly harmless (the camping trips, the gymnastics), and involved at least as many women as men (also deemed harmless). It had a big goal—“to create a just, socialist society”—but used small ways to achieve it, “day-to-day decisions, commitments, and practices.” Postwar German society did not think of the Bund—inasmuch as anyone thought of it at all—as a resistance organization. After all, it had predated the Nazis and had never been solely motivated by their defeat; it had rejected leafleting and vandalism as risky and ineffective; it lent its efforts to victims of the regime rather than setting its sights on the regime itself. (It was the opposite of “the Red Orchestra” group led by Harro Schulze-Boysen and Libertas Haas-Heye.) Roseman suggests that the Bund was an embarrassment to postwar Germany—it showed what had been possible but that almost no one had done.

Although Bund members continued to meet throughout the late 1940s, 50s, and even into the 60s, the movement petered out. Young people were not interested. Even though the Bund self-consciously did not criticize the younger generation that had been indoctrinated by Nazism, the hierarchical nature of the organization (Artur was still the leader) and its insistence on personal discipline (the Bund’s commitment to communal ideals did not include sexual liberation or experimentation with drugs) turned young people away. They saw it as too similar to the Nazi past they were eager to leave behind. On the face of it, the comparison is ridiculous. I was shocked, though, to read these lines written by Artur on the day when the Allies liberated the region around Lake Constance:

That we remained strong, that not a single one of us fell by the wayside, even among those who lived far from us, that is a glorious page in the Bund’s history. And that we remained alive, that we lived through this time awake, that we matured and grew—we owe that all to the Bund.

I thought immediately of Himmler’s infamous exhortation to members of the SS at Posen in 1943:

Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000. And . . . to have seen this through and—with the exception of human weakness—to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.

Both writers reference strength, pride, and, most disquietingly, pages of glory. Both allude to a difficult task not just undertaken but seen through.

Of course, the comparison is ultimately not just ridiculous but disgusting; Artur’s references to maturing and growing have nothing to do with Himmler’s mass murder. Artur was no Führer. But that young Germans could have rejected the Bund as another relic of a terrible and embarrassing past begins to be understandable.

Which was ultimately a failure on their part, for as Roseman convincingly shows the Bund offers an inspiring model for social change. In recent years, historians have emphasized the ways the Nazi regime worked to gain acceptance, binding ordinary Germans together and, thereby, ultimately eliciting their at-least tacit support for its genocidal acts and aspirations (after the Jews, the idea was to kill the so-called Slavs). Considered in light of the regime’s efforts, the Bund’s quiet refusal is all the more remarkable:

The more historians have uncovered the degree of support the regime was able to elicit in its “dictatorship by acclimation,” the more impressive the Bund’s ability to maintain its separate life becomes. Perhaps we do not quite have a category that fits this intense, self-conscious cultivation of a communal shared space. It was more than mere non-conformity, but less than active combat against the regime.

Roseman adds that we especially lack accurate ways of thinking about rescue, which for many years after the war was not thought of as a mode of resistance—nice, for sure, but not something that could bring down totalitarianism. The reason Lives Reclaimed is one of the most consequential books I’ve read this year is that it argues not just, yes, rescue is resistance, but also, and more importantly, that our definition of rescue must be expanded. The way we usually think of rescue is too retrospective and too reliant on the idea of individual will-power. After the war, more than one attempt to have Bund members declared as Righteous among the Nations failed. This is the highest honour the state of Israel, through the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, bestows on non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust.

Bund dancers; Lisa Jacobs in front

In the postwar environment of anti-communism, with Israel and West Germany locked in a delicate pas de deux, rescue meant actions done by a single person who had no self-interested reasons for helping. On this definition, Jews could not be deemed Righteous, nor could non-Jewish spouses of Jews—they were said to be acting in self-interest. Roseman asks us to shift from a psychological mode (which, by focusing on the individual, is also a capitalistic one) to a sociological one. Rather than looking for extraordinary, almost saint-like people who do good out of awe-inspiring altruism, Roseman suggests, we should look to networks of people who did good things, or things that had good results, from complicated motives. Most people who survived were helped by several, often many people, like Lisa Jacobs and Marianne Strauss who moved from house to house.

By overvaluing the individual, Roseman argues, we lose sight of what he calls rescue-resistance really happens. In the case of the Bund, then, we need to look beyond the Bund’s postwar emphasis on moral principle, which Roseman judges to be as misleading as psychologist’s insistence on empathy, and instead look at what they did and why they did it at the time. Even the term “rescue” is too retrospective, Roseman suggests—it implies a completed action; it suggests that people helped others with a definitive end point in mind. (“I will do something to save this person from the Holocaust”—a statement that makes no sense when we think that at the time no one knew, exactly, what “the Holocaust” was.) In reality, as Bund members diaries and letters suggest, people help others from much more temporary, obscure, and uncertain reasons and in temporary, obscure and uncertain ways. They were answering a knock on the door and giving someone a bed and soup for a few days, not “rescuing a Jew.”

There will always, Roseman notes, be tension between experience and memory. As Kierkegaard put it, “life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” But we would do well, Roseman argues, to reverse the dictum as best we can, to try to live in that past. After the war, people wanted heroes—and a particular kind of hero. The exigencies of the postwar moment, particularly in western Europe meant it was better for reasons both economic (we want the US to help us) and psychological (we don’t want to think about all of us as a collective) to emphasize individual responsibility. But those reasons have been falsely naturalized into unchanging psychological concepts (martyrs, saints, etc). Even the retrospective self-understanding of those who helped is shaped by those concepts, obscuring and distorting their actual motivations and actions. If we take even the Bund’s own postwar self-presentation as the truth, we will paradoxically dilute the power of what the Bund did. Taking flowers to an elderly couple the day after Kristallnacht, or thanking a woman on the point of being deported for the chance to help her, says Roseman, are not actions that “lead” to rescue. And when we look back on the Holocaust and other fascist atrocities, such actions seem insignificant. But at the time they were pretty amazing, and certainly consequential.

Lives Reclaimed really impressed me. It’s super learned but also very accessible. Roseman is a much better writer than most academics; he offers us satisfyingly detailed historical context without overwhelming his narrative drive. And even as we learn about many of the Bund’s members, he keeps his focus on the group as a collective. Personally, I found it liberating to think that we can resist without setting out to be resisters, especially if we can find some likeminded people to surround ourselves with. Too often, Holocaust education, especially for children, argues that people need to be “upstanders,” not bystanders. But we don’t have to—can’t—do it all alone. Surprisingly, given its subject matter, Lives Reclaimed is one of the most optimistic books I’ve read in a long time.