Who Shall Live:
The Wilhelm Bachner Story
By Samuel Oliner & Kathleen Lee
Academy Chicago, 277 pages, $25
In Search of Sugihara:
The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who Risked His Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews From the Holocaust
By Hillel Levine
Free Press, 323 pages, $25
Lucien’s Story
By Aleksandra Kroh, translated by Austryn Wainhouse
The Marlboro Press/Northwestern, 80 pages, $39.95; paper: 67 pages, $11.95
The Nazi Holocaust is the benchmark of human terror. More than 50 years after the liberation of concentration camps throughout Europe, the Holocaust has brought forth an outpouring of analysis and philosophy, memoirs and testimony, evidence and documentation in various media. These works inform history and compel us to remember an episode of evil that may never be fully understood.
And because it is, above all, history, the literature of the Holocaust cannot truly be divided by genre or measured by aesthetics. Therefore, every shred of information, regardless of how it is packaged, has some intrinsic value in tracing what the critic Irving Howe has called the “slope of destruction.” But it is possible to make distinctions, and to take a critical approach to appraise the merit and relative value of particular works for their contribution to piercing the darkness of the Nazi horror.
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg’s daring heroics to save Jews during World War II were well known, but mostly to Jews and historians. Australian author Thomas Keneally’s “Schindler’s List” (1982) was a significant departure in writing about the Holocaust. His deft combination of episodic narrative with solid journalistic reporting explained the spontaneous–though hardly pure–valor in one man, Oskar Schindler, a fledgling industrialist and bon vivant. Keneally tells skillfully how Schindler, overcome by circumstance, simply reacted like a savvy businessman to prevent the murder of his workforce of Jews that produced his considerable income from the German war machine. Still, Schindler evinced that some heroism existed. This opened the way to find courage anywhere within the Holocaust–in the ghettos, the camps, anywhere there was evidence of humanity against desolation.
Because Schindler’s story reached mass audiences through Steven Spielberg’s film, righteous acts during the Holocaust are now measured alongside his story. In these three books we have the stories of a “Jewish Schindler” from Poland who saved dozens and a “Japanese Schindler” who may have rescued 10,000, as well as a memoir of a person who saved only himself–but never wanted to talk about it.
“Who Shall Live” is the story of Wilhelm Bachner, an assimilated Polish Jew who was schooled in Germany to become a prominent engineer, and who used his training and his impeccable German to keep 50 people working and out of the concentration camps. Samuel Oliner and Kathleen Lee have woven together interviews with Bachner’s friends and family to detail an elaborate paper trail of forged work and travel permits that circumvented raids and sadism by Nazi guards.
Through extraordinary chutzpah, Bachner got himself hired by a German architectural film and used his manager’s status to bring Jews and non-Jews into the company as it expanded to build and repair railroad facilities in Russia and Ukraine. He shuttled workers back and forth from the ghetto in Warsaw and funneled money back to his family through a delicate system so they could survive with dignity in the increasingly dismal ghetto.
Bachner later transported his family out of the ghetto and into Ukraine by sheer gumption. He faced up to Nazi SS guards when they questioned his paperwork, and he kept his employer–who was traveling throughout the Reich expanding business–at bay by performing all assigned work with alacrity. He even earned the trust of the Germans who watched his every move.
“Who Shall Live” demonstrates extraordinary courage in a man who did not know he possessed it. But it is written in a way that exploits his emotions. Oliner and Lee ascribe far more than the interviews would seem to reveal, and the narrative often becomes cliched: “Weariness had seeped into the marrow of his bones, leaving him aching for the life envisioned by that confident young man who had come to Warsaw two years ago. His future had glowed in his mind then, a blueprint for a precisely engineered future.” Bachner’s story surely adds to the growing understanding and knowledge that many Jews did act courageously against the German onslaught. But “Who Shall Live” need only give witness to his courage; Oliner and Lee diffuse Bachner’s act by rendering it in novelistic fashion. The importance of literature on the Holocaust is not to attempt to explain it, because it is ultimately beyond explanation. Just the facts, well told, are enough.
Hillel Levine, however, did not stop with just the facts in his ambitious, intriguing exposition of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania, in 1940, who produced thousands of foreign transit visas for Jews trying to escape the Nazis. In ways that some statisticians might find questionable, Levine estimates that Sugihara might have rescued as many as 10,000 Jews. Though records indicate the number that can be tracked is actually 2,100, Levine has doggedly pursued other records, visas and entry papers that may have contained forgeries of the Japanese seal that could have been passed to thousands more who escaped. Therefore, he says, “10,000 . . . is a reasonable estimate.” But there is no way to be sure.
“In Search of Sugihara” is a meditation on the nature of heroism, a response to Hannah Arendt’s famous description of the lesson of the Holocaust as being the “banality of evil.” Levine presents Sugihara’s actions as a psychology of righteousness, something that he implies is absent from Keneally’s “Schindler’s List.”
Drawing on sparse facts gleaned from official documents and interviews with some survivors freed by Sugihara, Levine, a sociologist, traverses Europe and Japan, looking for more clues to explain the unassuming consul’s uncommon altruism. But there is little to find. Sugihara, who died in 1986, left only an autobiographical fragment, written in 1967, to explain his actions in 1940: “I acted according to my sense of human justice, out of love for mankind.”
Still, Levine is not deterred. He interviews members of Sugihara’s family, none of whom can offer any real insight into the diplomat. In trying to draw a portrait of Sugihara’s childhood, Levine strains to find any evidence of his acts as a rescuer–either by education, temperament or even hobbies. He places Sugihara’s life in the context of contemporary Japanese events and historical trends, but even these cogent analyses provide little in the way of an inward look at the man. Perhaps heroism cannot be explained, just as brutality cannot be explained.
What can be explained, however, is the experience of terror of the Holocaust. And not since the remarkable writing of the late Primo Levi has it been presented as convincingly as in “Lucien’s Story,” by Aleksandra Kroh. Where “Who Shall Live” and “In Search of Sugihara” are often overheated, “Lucien’s Story” is simply chilling, painfully descriptive and powerfully dispassionate.
It is a story that emerged by accident. Kroh, a Polish immigrant and scientist living in Paris, met Lucien Duckstein, a native Parisian and well-regarded scientist living in Arizona, at a conference in Ft. Worth. They became friends and stayed in touch. Years later, while they were walking together in Duckstein’s childhood neighborhood in Paris, the past “came flowing back” for Duckstein. He stunned his friend by telling her that in November 1943, the police took him, then 11, and his family into custody. They were soon sent to a resettlement camp in Drancy, France, and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. At Kroh’s home several days after their walk, Duckstein talks to her in a manner and at a length he has never done before; Kroh is smart enough to get it on tape.
“Lucien’s Story” is rendered as a first-person memoir that snaps back and lunges forward to show how the mind sees life through horror, how what Duckstein remembers can be distilled into his future behavior–if he can just survive.
What results is a small but powerful witnessing, a transformation of body and soul and spirituality.
“(A)t Drancy,” he remembers, “we are still altogether human. We continue to try to hold on to certain things, to keep our heads up. There are people who continue to think that it is natural to give children an education.” Duckstein is among a dozen children taught algebra by professor Loeve, a great French mathematician specializing in probability who is also in the camp. “All my life,” Duckstein says, “I shall take refuge in algebra as an antidote to bleak thoughts, I shall calm myself by summoning to mind a problem to solve; all my life mathematics will have for me the power to dispel anxiety and sorrow.”
When Duckstein reaches Bergen-Belsen, he realizes that “here there is no room for moods.” Because of scant food rations, he dreams of rutabagas. “Hunger is an obsession. Ten, twenty, forty years afterward I shall not be able to bear feeling hungry; even mild hunger will throw me into a panic, will make me completely lose my head, will make me aggressive and irritable. . . . I shall not be able to put up with the feeling of hunger.”
And, he says, “I tell myself that (God) does not exist. And if he exists, if he allows what is being done to us in Bergen-Belsen, then I don’t want to have anything to do with him, I don’t want to hear any mention of his name. Never, during the whole of my life, shall I give two hoots about religion. I shall not even be against it; I shall simply not care about it.”
At the end of his story, Duckstein confesses that he regrets not having told this story to his wife and children, “other than piecemeal, in snatches.
“So here is the tale of what my eyes have seen, of what my memory has retained.”
It is an essential, important document.
