It’s a Washington winter afternoon, and my college sophomore daughter and I take the Metro downtown to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. We’ve been there before, when she was a few years younger, still a child, almost. After a semester course in the literature of the Holocaust, she wants to visit the museum again.
“I was so ignorant the first time,” she says, as we approach the entrance to the dour gray building, a monument to one of history’s worst nightmares. “I want to see it now that I’ve done all that reading about it.”
This will be my third or fourth trip since the museum opened. People come to town, relatives, close friends, and you take them to visit. It’s certainly not a place you can take in with only one viewing, anyway. It also helps to prepare. I’d been doing that with my reading over the decades, though not so many histories and first-person accounts as my daughter encountered in her college course. Raoul Hilberg’s “The Destruction of the European Jews,” Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz,” Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” Ida Fink’s “A Scrap in Time”–these were some of the books she read for her course.
My own reading on the subject began when I was in high school and discovered “Spark of Life,” Erich Maria Remarque’s novel about a German political prisoner in a concentration camp. The book gave a fictionalized but intense version of the concentration camps before the period of the extermination of European Jewry came to be known as the Holocaust. It wasn’t until the English language translation of Wiesel’s autobiographical novel “Night” that so-called Holocaust literature began to find an American readership.
“Night” is extraordinarily powerful, and the scene in which the young boy is separated from his parents by a Nazi roundup of Jews stays with you long years after you first read it. So does the narrator’s loss of faith in the face of monumental human ruthlessness in a world that, he fears, God seems to have forgotten.
Wiesel became a one-man industry. Book after book came from his wrenching experience as a child of the Nazi occupation. The only work of fiction with equal force on the same motif was Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird.” The story of a young boy alone and on the run in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe became an overnight success (it wasn’t until years later that questions about Kosinski’s sole authorship of the novel cast a shadow over the book).
Other Eastern European fiction began to catch the attention of an American readership, fiction such as Tadeuz Borowski’s “This Was for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman” and, several decades later, the powerful novels and stories of Aharon Appelfeld and Ida Fink. My list here–more a recollection of my reading on the subject than anything approaching a bibliography–served as my own little college course. It gave me a powerful sense of what life was like under the Nazis, augmented, of course, by a few (mostly foreign-made) movies–culminating with “Schindler’s List.”
Now we have the Holocaust museum performing an educative function, with millions of people each year visiting the premises just south of the Mall. The museum certainly pays back the inquisitive visitor, no matter how many times he or she returns to it. So many artifacts of this pathetic time, so many particular lenses through which to view this historical misery. In that regard, it is something like a good work of literature–a work of art that you can return to time and time again, and each time come away with something new.
And yet a museum is only an adjunct to history, not truly a work of art generated out of a historical period. And as fascinating, yet again, as I found this latest visit, I can’t help but be amazed at–for all of its powerful effect–how much less an effect the museum has than reading some new novels based on the same material.
Even the most conventional of them, such as “Red Gold,” Alan Furst’s new work of historical fiction set in Nazi-occupied France, creates more of an atmosphere than any of the exhibits in the museum. As the book opens, a French movie director named Jean Casson, a Jew, has escaped from the Paris headquarters of the SS. As Casson skulks his way through the dangerous streets of Paris hoping to join forces with the Resistance, the prose creates a palpable sense of fear and apprehension. Time after time, Casson remains only an artful dodge and feint away from the roundups for the camps.
In another new novel, “Clifford’s Blues,” by John A. Williams, the reader enters Dachau, but sees it from an intriguing new perspective. The protagonist is Clifford Pepperidge, a black, homosexual, American jazz piano player who is interned in the camp on an indefinite sentence in summer 1933 and survives there to the end of the war. The narrative consists of Clifford’s journal entries. These are episodic, and particular to his special plight (indentured as a servant in the quarters of a storm trooper officer and his wife, and made to perform his music for the Nazi camp elite), but they offer a powerful, if oblique, new view of camp life–and death.
“Village of a Million Spirits,” the new work of fiction from Ian MacMillan, is anything but oblique. In his previous novels “Proud Monster” and “Orbit of Darkness,” MacMillan took as his subject the atrocities and horrors of the eastern front during World War II. In the new book he focuses directly on the horrors of forced labor, torture and extermination.
The setting is Treblinka, the concentration camp where, before it closed its gates after the prisoner uprising in summer 1943, a million people, mostly Jews, had perished. In this relatively short novel MacMillan performs the miraculous task of speaking effectively–because precisely and dramatically–about the unspeakable. Try, if you can, this sentence, in which Schneck, a former medical student turned Nazi officer, commits one of his numerous atrocities, a sentence that drives home the truth of Isaac Babel’s statement, “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place”:
“Schneck took a woman’s baby and threw it into the fire and then invited her to jump in after.”
Such sadistic murders and tortures of the inmates by their Nazi jailers–and the systematic extermination mechanism of the gas chambers and the burning pits and the ovens–unroll in these pages from multiple points of view. Prisoners, victims, guards, officers alike serve as the lenses through which MacMillan tells the story of Treblinka, and a number of these people, some Jews, some Nazis, become instantly real to a reader brave enough to stay with this incredibly powerful historical fiction.
This effect is itself voyeuristic, but of a transcendent variety, as when in one of the opening sequences, as a Jewish artist named Berilman struggles to keep breathing in the extermination chamber, he slides along the tiled walls until he comes to a window and discovers that “there on the other side is a man looking in, his face crossed with an expression of wonder and awe.”
That man is a German officer named Voss, who has just had his first glimpse of the inside of the gas chambers. We readers who look at Voss looking–and at everything else that goes on in this piece of hell called Treblinka–are also witnesses, but of a special sort. We see things, as does the German officer, with wonder and awe, yes, but also guided by a higher point of view. This becomes clear when Anatoly, a Ukrainian guard, notices Voss spying at the window on the gas chamber and ponders the fact that some guards and staff are still overwhelmed by the horror, while others fully participate in it. For the latter, he thinks to himself, “God has no eyes.”
The museum off the Mall stands as a marker to the Holocaust. But it doesn’t help us to see–or feel–anywhere near as effectively as these fine new novels. As long as we keep reading such books, God still has eyes.
