The Holocaust left a legacy of fundamental questions that touch the core of human existence as it is reflected in Western, and primarily Christian, civilization, questions of God’s silence and of the indifference of those who professed to believe in a faith that affirmed the dignity of all human beings. Out of the ruins has emerged a bizarre tale, awesome in its irony—a tale worth telling and telling again. It is a story about the telling of a story, in fact about the telling of six million stories, or maybe six million tellings of one story of the implementation of a demonic design, the all-out effort of a technologically advanced civilization to first dehumanize and then exterminate an entire people. The story of the telling of the tale concerns tellers young and old, scholars and craftsmen, who, charged with a sacred sense of mission, sought to preserve the Jewish memory and to uphold the humanness of the victims in the face of an ingenious SS machine designed to strip them of their individuality and turn them into ciphers crammed into concentration-camp logbooks.
In the walled-in ghettos, behind the barbed wires of the concentration camps, on the bloody trails in the woods, and in stifling hideouts, the persecuted took time out from their bread reveries and snatched minutes from their nightmares to put down what their eyes had witnessed, what their hearts had felt, and what their minds had pondered. Gazing at these pages written in a babel of languages, one wonders what it was that motivated these obsessed witness bearers. Was it the instinctive response of an organism to the threat of extinction, or was it a manifestation of a collective consciousness rooted in a long tradition and guided by a historic imperative to remember and remind? A hint of an answer to these questions may be found in the following talmudic tale.1
In the year 70 A.D., as Jerusalem was under siege, surrounded by the Roman legions commanded by Vespasian, a passionate debate took place inside the walls as to whether they should come to terms with the enemy or keep on fighting. Rabban Yohanan Ben Zakkai, a recognized spiritual leader, counseled moderation. Since the Jews could not possibly defeat the mighty Roman legions, they should seek some accommodation. Subsequently, Yohanan managed to escape from the city. On reaching the Roman lines, the story goes, he encountered Vespasian, the Roman general, whom he hailed as follows: “Peace to you, O King, Peace to you, O Ring!” Rabban Yohanan’s greetings, we are told, turned out to be prophetic. For even as Vespasian was objecting to the bestowed title of king, a messenger arrived from Rome announcing: “The Emperor is dead, and the notables of Rome have chosen you Head of State.” As an expression of gratitude for his prophetic utterances, Vespasian granted Yohanan one request.
One might well expect that Yohanan would have asked for the release of his family, still under siege, or for the sacred religious relics and treasures lying in the temple. Instead, the request that Yohanan put to the newly appointed emperor was as laconic as it was portentous: “Give me Yavneh and its scholars.”
At this momentous juncture in Jewish history, Yohanan set his eyes on the future. It was phenomenal foresight. In deciding to save Yavneh, Yohanan saved the Jewish heritage from extinction. The words of the Torah that came from the school of Yavneh stimulated an impulse for the evolution of rituals and ceremonies exhorting the Jewish people to preserve the past in memory. As a consequence, it became possible, following the destruction of the Second Temple, to absorb the grief of the people and to convert it into a vehicle for spiritual renewal during the long period of exile.
Approximately 1900 years later in a continent far away from the land of Israel, the collective Jewish memory was again put to the test. In the shadow of the Nazi swastika, a contest was taking place between the perpetrator, who was determined to erase the memory of an entire people from the collective consciousness of mankind, and the persecuted, who were equally resolved to foil the oppressor, not necessarily by escaping personal extinction but by keeping and concealing historical records for the information of future generations, even when individual survival had clearly become impossible. Following in the footsteps of the biblical and talmudic tradition, the designated victims resorted to an unprecedented recording of their experiences. Ultimately, recording becomes synonymous with remembering and remembering with spiritual resistance. This three-stranded, braided cable of recording, remembering, and resisting is the quintessence of the following message delivered by Rabbi Nachum Yanchiker to his students at the Slabodka-Musar Yeshiva in the fateful year 1941:
My dear students, when the world returns again to stability and quiet, never become tired of teaching the glories, the wisdom, the Torah and the Musar of Lithuania, the beautiful life which Jews lived here. Do not become embittered by wailing and tears. Speak of these matters with calmness and serenity, as did our Holy Sages in the Midrash, “LAMENTIONS RABBATI.” And do as our Holy Sages have done—pour forth your words and cast them into letters. This will be the greatest retribution which you can wreak on the wicked ones. Despite the raging wrath of our foes, the holy souls of your brothers and sisters will then remain alive. These evil ones schemed to blot out their names from the face of the earth; but a man cannot destroy letters. For words have wings; they mount heavenly heights and they endure for eternity.2
As though she had been one of those students addressed by Rabbi Yanchiker, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk stored her Holocaust experiences in memory, and when the world returned to relative stability and quiet, she began to speak of these matters with calmness and serenity, and, for the most part, without bitterness and wailing. It is one of the still unresolved problems of that body of writings called Holocaust literature that the events seem to overwhelm all attempts to impose formal order, either of literary history or literary criticism. The problem of ordering, categorizing, and interpreting is further exacerbated by the perverse efforts of so-called revisionist historians who deny everything, deny that the Nazis exterminated millions of Jews and others, thereby placing an additional burden on those who wish to study the ways in which imagination modifies memory and fiction vitalizes history.
Among witnessing authors, Elie Wiesel is preeminent for his poetic and novelistic evocation of the death-camp experience. No one has labored more assiduously to reveal the multi-faceted reality of survivorship. Yet even Wiesel has recognized that sometimes it is only fiction that can make the truth credible, just as it is only imagination that can make memory tolerable. This vision is expressed in a dialogue between Wiesel and a rebbe, as reported in the introduction to Legends of Our Time:
“What are you writing?” the Rebbe asked. “Stories,” I said. He wanted to know what kind of stories. “True stories.” “About people you knew?” “Yes, about people I might have known.” “About things that happened?” “Yes, about things that happened or could have happened” “But they did not?” “No, not all of them did. In fact, some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end.” The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said with more sorrow than anger: “That means you are writing lies!” I did not answer immediately. The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defense. Yet, I had to justify myself: “Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred.”3
In reporting his conversation with the rebbe, Wiesel has pinpointed one of the major problems faced by witnessing authors in writing about the Holocaust. To tell the story as it “happened,” as unembellished, unadulterated “realism,” would strain the reader’s credulity, for the concentration-camp world was stripped of the basic premises constituting a normative society. The cause and effect link, for example, that defines our relationship to our surroundings was rendered inoperative in the concentrationcamp environment. The relative freedom that enabled a person to arrange his life within a causal context was brutally denied to the concentration-camp inmate. Consequently, the inmate was deprived of the psychological props indispensable to the individual in orienting himself to the world. Paradoxically, a swing to “pure” imagination would be equally inadequate, for to cast the camp reality into wholly metaphoric structures would undermine the historicity of the events. Since the relatedness of memory and imagination has only been touched upon with regard to Holocaust narratives, critics have not recognized that neither can be relied on as an absolute constant. Both are variables. The challenge to the witnessing author, therefore, is to use traditional mimetic forms to convert the repugnant, intolerable reality he witnessed into an intimation of reality that can be both accepted and tolerated by a sensitive, normatively oriented reader.
The credibility factor occupied the chronicler under siege as far back as 1941. Fearing that the depositions of victims in the Warsaw Ghetto would be received with skepticism after the war, Emmanuel Ringelblum instructed his chroniclers to adhere strictly to bare facts and to avoid emotional coloring in their reports. “Comprehensiveness was the chief principle guiding our work,” notes Ringelblum in his diary, “and objectivity was the second principle guiding our work. We aspired to tell the whole truth, however painful it may be.”4
About the same time, in the Lodz Ghetto, a high school boy by the name of S. Dratwa envisioned how producers would make a film of the Jewish tragedy after the war, predicting, at the same time, the kind of response the film would elicit from the audience. In his mind’s eye, he saw the audience watching the film:
Wrapt in emotion,
Quivering with pleasure,
Everyone will think:
“The film is fabulous,
But nothing is true.
They are only tales from a grotesque land.”5
Unwittingly the young Dratwa posited the crucial question of how to portray a grotesque world and yet make it seem historically true. What the besieged Dratwa foresaw, Elie Wiesel survived to see, and having seen it, he has tried to caution the world against converting a historical event of immeasurable human pain into a merely grotesque fiction divested of its historic dimension.
Like Wiesel, Sara survived to draw her disturbing vignettes, and in drawing them to make the grotesque reality believable. She is a natural storyteller who has the capacity to render the unbearable tolerable by suffusing her narrative with a radiance of imagination, treading a fine line between history and fiction, between document and novel. The present editors and others who have read her “stories” have been startled by her ability to convey the most depressing materials without depressing the reader. She does this, we believe, with the skill of the novelist, creating the illusion of vibrant life and the will to live even in the kingdom of death, making her characters live in the reader’s imagination. And she accomplishes this feat with utmost economy in her brief vignettes.
Sara’s interest in character, however, is not Dostoyevskyan in nature. Rather, her characters exist as constituents of the death-camp reality. Though the individuals whom Sara recalls are often fascinating in themselves, each one is, nevertheless, anchored to a camp happening; consequently, it is the aggregate of the individual vignettes that structures the incarnation of the actual camp experience.
As an example of Sara’s storytelling art we would like to examine briefly the vignette entitled “Old Words—New Meanings,” which can be perceived as being in some sense a microcosm of the book as a whole. On casual reading, the vignette appears to be a simple, plainly told story of the young girl Fela. In telling Fela’s story, Sara exposes some of the grimmest aspects of camp life: sick, starving prisoners who must cheat each other to stay alive—an economy in which every scrap of bread one eats is life-bread taken from someone else, and not only is this the case but everyone who has a crust of bread knows this is the case; kanada, the gruesomely conceived warehouse storing belongings of the dead and those consigned to death; and finally, “selection” and the gas, the insane process by which people are more or less randomly inscribed for life or death by Dr. Mengele and his cohorts.
It is our impression, confirmed by other readers, that the horrors are not immediately perceived as such by the reader because of Sara’s narrative technique. She begins her story with a more or less abstract concept: the collapse of normative reality in the camps, which results in a corresponding disfiguration of language and a change in alignment between sound images and the concepts to which they refer. Specifically the word “organize,” a signifier normally associated with social order and well-being, has come to denote the activities involved in procuring the basic elements necessary to sustain physical existence.
Sara writes in the tradition of the Yiddish folktale. Though her stories are simply told, they stimulate the reader to contemplate complex issues that belie the apparent simplicity of the surface structure. Hence, in the tale at hand, she quickly roots the abstract notion of a collapse of reality reflected in a collapse of normative linguistic usage in the story of Fela, a young girl who learns not only the new meaning of the word “organize” but also learns how to “organize,” i.e. who becomes a master of the new reality. It is, of course, the reader’s consequent fascination with the character of Fela that pushes the ghastly aspects of camp life into the background, where they register on the subliminal consciousness. Consider, for example, Sara’s brief description of Fela and her situation: “Eighteen years old ... she had been sent to Auschwitz when she was caught smuggling food into the ghetto for her family. She was a tall, slim girl with very light blond hair. She was not a beauty, but she had a quality that was impossible to describe. Something forced you to look at her. She was alone, without family or friends, but in spite of that, she did not give the impression of being helpless.”
Though the sketch is drawn in a few brief sentences, the reader has already learned much about Fela. From the fact that she was caught smuggling food into the ghetto for her family, we may infer that she was courageous, resourceful, devoted, and not simply looking out for herself. We also learn something about the abhorrent conditions of ghetto life, where people were left to starve unless they engaged in the activity of illegal barter and two-way smuggling (the smuggling of valuables out of the ghetto and food back in). Avoiding the possible pathos of labeling Fela as “a beauty,” Sara nevertheless conveys an image of Fela’s physical attractiveness. She further engages the reader’s sympathy by writing that Fela “was alone,” revealing that the family for whom she had risked her life by smuggling had been exterminated. In conveying this information indirectly, Sara does not permit us to dwell on the depressing horrors but forces us, rather, to focus on the intriguing figure of Fela herself, and she arouses the reader’s interest further with the statement “she did not give the impression of being helpless.” We now wait to see how Fela is going to help herself in this destructive environment, how she is going to “organize.” Against the drab and depressing facts of life under Nazi occupation, the colorful image of Fela emerges to pique the reader’s curiosity and to overpower the dominance of concentration-camp gray.
Having set up this image, the narrator re-introduces herself as a reflector rather than a character. She registers a traditional value system superseded by the quasi-Darwinian camp ethic of survival of the most ruthless. The young Fela, on the other hand, seems to have made the necessary adjustment to the new value system. In a social order that allows only two classes—victims and victimizers, and nothing between—she is determined not to be one of the victims, even though it means abandoning all scruples. When Fela concludes her cynical outburst by saying, “I have to organize something,” Sara comments that this is the first time she has heard the word “in the new Auschwitz sense.” Since the word itself was commonplace in the camp, one might suspect the precise accuracy of Sara’s memory here; nevertheless, one would not have it otherwise since dramatic truth here takes precedence over factual precision.
When Sara next meets Fela, the young woman is carrying a sack full of bread, certainly a most unusual occurrence in Auschwitz. Sara immediately suspects that Fela has stolen bread from the sick and accuses her, whereupon Fela, who is apparently not fully hardened, explains that she not only did not steal the bread but earned it by performing a service for the sick women, giving them her home-cooked potato soup in return for their hard, crusty bread, which they cannot chew anyway. In the course of recounting Fela’s explanation, Sara provides the reader with a vivid account of the economy of camp life. Bread is bartered for potatoes and onions, which are then cooked into potato soup that is traded for more bread, which in sufficient quantity can be traded for cigarettes. The cigarettes can then be used to buy all other commodities and can even improve one’s work assignment when used to bribe the officials.
In the face of Fela’s entrepreneurial genius, Sara perceives a moral and ethical dilemma. Compared to the general camp regimen, Fela’s bartering, though “ugly,” is relatively harmless and perhaps even beneficial: “I stood there facing her, not knowing what to say to her or how to act toward her. It was certainly an ugly way of ‘earning’ bread, taking it from unfortunate, very sick women, tearing the very last bite out of their mouths. But that is what they wanted. They preferred this cup of watery soup smelling of home to the portion of stale bread. To throw Fela out of the hospital would be to deprive the women of the soup for which they had been waiting all day. Nobody else would ‘Organize’ the soup.”
In an evil kingdom in which only successful predators are permitted to exist, Fela is at least a benign predator. By Auschwitz standards Fela has earned an A + in morality. But what is her grade when seen in a larger perspective? Dare one assign such a grade?
The next time Sara encounters Fela, the latter has achieved her goal. She has “organized” a job in kanada (presumably by parlaying her bread and cigarettes), where a prisoner can acquire some of the creature comforts that are left behind by the dying and the dead. One striking sentence stands out in the narrator’s description of the kanada komando: “They wore red kerchiefs on their heads and belts that were made especially to each girl’s measurements.” The color associated with Fela, a flash of bright red, leaps boldly out of the gray Auschwitz background, as does Fela’s pride, for she has no qualms about waving her red kerchief to attract Sara’s attention.
It turns out, however, that Fela’s “organizing” abilities are no match for the cruelties of Auschwitz. She leaves the kanada komando because she is shaken by the sight of the bodies of children who have died of asphyxiation as a result of having been packed in valises by parents who hoped to save them. Nor can she take any pleasure in the garments and baubles that once belonged to the dead. These fundamental details of the death-factory warehouse, including the valises that became coffins for dead children, have been told before but rarely with Sara’s ability to subordinate them to the dramatic existence of individual characters.
It is through this subordinating of the horrors to the individual characters that Sara moves from documentarian to novelist, and it is as a novelist that she heightens the reader’s awareness of the complexity of the moral and ethical problems posed by Auschwitz. Fela is a decent person. She has cared for her family, not only in the “normal” past but even in the murderous ghetto environment, which was not much better than that of the camps. Finding herself a lone survivor in Auschwitz, she resolves to survive at any price. Yet, even in her survivalist desperation, she finds a method of “organizing” that is morally ambiguous at worst. She takes bread from sick women but gives them something in return. Her “organizing” of a job in kanada is a further step toward degradation; she does not directly inflict physical injury but lives like a vulture off carrion. But apparently, she is too sensitive to remain in this environment and must plunge back into greater physical danger for the sake of psychological or spiritual survival.
At this point one might expect the story to end. But with the touch of the master storyteller, Sara adds a coda, using, with great effectiveness, a traditional folktale device that she uses elsewhere in the narrative, the tale within a tale. We seem to shift from Fela momentarily as Sara starts to describe an “interlude” in the killing. It is, of course, not really an interlude, since the guests at the little gathering in the infirmary belong to the leichenkomando, the detail assigned to dispose of the corpses. At this point, the SS driver of the leichenauto deposits a soot-covered bundle which turns out to be Fela, at the infirmary. Now Fela completes her story in her own words, a story of symbolic death and resurrection (the SS man who permits her to live apparently thinks she is “a creature not of this earth”). Once again Fela has saved herself; this time, however, not at anyone’s expense but by quick thinking, some risk-taking, and good luck. Having been selected by Dr. Mengele, she avoids the gas by leaping down the chimney of a car that could be powered by burning wood or petroleum. As she tells the story in her own words, the reader cannot help but sympathize with her plight and rejoice at her survival, at the same time being aware of the tragedy of those who were not so resourceful or fortunate.
From Sara’s dramatization one more intriguing question emerges: Why did the SS man who found Fela the next morning not finish her off? Why did he go to the trouble of delivering her to the infirmary, where she might (and did) find at least a temporary haven? Given the SS ideology and given the fact that the SS driver had just participated in mass murder the night before, how can one explain this human behavior on the part of a trained mass killer? Is it that once Fela had separated herself from the others the SS man had to deal with her as an individual? Or is it that once the death machine was temporarily closed down, there was no point in gratuitous killing until it was started up again? When the death machine was at rest, so was this one small cog.
It is fitting that the story of Fela should remain open-ended. As Sara tells it: “She left Auschwitz with the next transport. I do not know whether she ‘organized’ further. I never saw her again.”
Sara’s narrative is replete with such dramatizations. For example, a frequently described ghastly phenomenon was the SS ban on women’s giving birth in the camp and the subsequent decision by Jewish camp medical personnel to kill the new-born infants in the hope of saving the lives of the mothers. (For a first-hand factual account see Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys).6 Sara, once again, presents the horrifying fact “novelistically” in her touching portrait of the naive Esther, who has no way of comprehending the sadism of the pathologically murderous Mengele.
Sara’s ability to walk the fine line between memory and imagination, document and fiction, opens up new perspectives on Holocaust literature. There are several thoughtful studies of this literature, but they are incomplete and to a large extent uncertain of the direction they wish to take. The authors seem to be confused as to whether they should be concerned with “high art” or with factual accuracy, whether to deal with the historical event or with the representations of the event. Lawrence L. Langer, for example, chooses to pursue the elitist course in his first book, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, searching out instances of literary excellence and analyzing them only in terms of the high standards of the New Criticism. But in his recent Versions of Survival he moves into an almost exclusive concern with Holocaust literature as document, focusing on accuracy, and sitting in moral judgment. Alvin Rosenfeld, in A Double Dying, stresses the fact that old forms and traditional tropes are no longer available to Holocaust writers but concentrates, nevertheless, on works that use the old forms and the traditional tropes. Terrence Des Pres, on the other hand, provides a fine taxonomy of documentary narratives, condensing descriptions of both the strategies for survival and the conditions under which the prisoners lived, but he shows little interest in narrative and poetic method.7 Sara’s narrative forces us to develop a dual focus that embraces both the actualities of camp life and the artistry with which those actualities are represented. In forcing this dual focus upon us, Sara’s narrative may also point us toward a much-needed morphology of camp narratives. Although Des Pres comes close to providing such a morphology, he falls short because he is more interested in the psychology of surviving than in the strategies survivors employed to convey behavior too cruel and bizarre, suffering too prolonged and intense to be believed by an audience that knows only the conventional cruelty common to normative social systems.
In the space available here we shall attempt only the barest outlines of such a morphology. One must begin with certain patterns of social organization that were so commonplace to camp life, yet so unusual in civilized society, that they are described in every documentary account and in many of the impressionistic accounts. So brutal and inhuman were these patterns that many of them have become common knowledge, even among those who do not take a special interest in Nazi atrocities. For example, the transport of innocent men, women, and children in crowded cattle cars, without food, water, or even air is fairly generally known. Other commonplace features of camp life that often turn up in Auschwitz narratives are: arrival on the gravel-strewn ramp, roll call, dysentery, selections, lice, “organizing,” “kanada? the watery camp “soup.” As indicated, Sara dramatizes these phenomena instead of merely describing them.
In contrast to these constant, day-in-day-out tortures of hunger, thirst, filth, lice, dysentery, beatings, and other afflictions, there were certain occurrences in the concentration camps that were strikingly dramatic and were recorded both for their inherent dramatic quality and for their divergence from the gray, dreary diurnal existence of the camp routine. These occurrences were sometimes individual acts of defiance, and sometimes they were mass acts. Perhaps the best known of the former variety is the frequently discussed incident in which a naked woman on her way to the gas disarms an SS man, shoots him down with his own gun, and then is shot in turn, thus avoiding the degradation of mass execution. Bruno Bettelheim made this story famous by adapting Eugen Rogon’s telling of it. In Rogon’s version, told in three brief sentences, an Italian dancer is ordered by the SS rapportführer Schillinger to dance naked in front of him before going to the gas. She manages to get close enough to him to grab his pistol and shoot him. Rogon ends the account with: “In the ensuing struggle, the woman herself was shot, thus at least avoiding death by gassing.”8
Bettelheim speculated that the act of dancing, of practicing her “vocation,” may have “made her once again a person. Transformed, however momentarily, she responded like her old self, destroying the enemy bent on her destruction, even if she had to die in the process.”9 Bettelheim’s use of this incident as a possible paradigm of prisoner behavior and as a cudgel to use on other prisoners who did not do what the “Italian dancer” did has resulted in extensive controversy that we cannot enter into here.10 Suffice it to say that Rogon does not cite the source of his information, and since the incident took place in the crematorium, it could have been witnessed only by the SS, the sonderkomando, and those who died in the gas chambers.
Tadeusz Borowski tells the story somewhat differently—at greater length and more “artfully.” He creates narrative distance by presenting the incident as a story told to him by a friend who was foreman of the sonderkomando and who was a witness to the event. In Borowski’s story within a story, the woman who shot SS man Schillinger in the “cremo” was not an Italian dancer but an “ordinary” Polish Jewess. As the witnessing foreman had put it to the Borowski narrator, “Our Polish Jews knew what was up.” The foreman then describes how, when Schillinger grabbed the woman’s arm, “the naked woman bent down suddenly, scooped a handful of gravel and threw it in his face, and when Schillinger cried out in pain and dropped his revolver, the woman snatched it up and fired several shots into his abdomen.”11 In Borowski’s account it is toughness, savvy, and desperation that count. Moreover, Borowski’s use of irony, a common feature of Polish works of fiction, gives his story an appearance of fiction even though he was in a better position than Rogon to get the facts straight. The irony lies in Borowski’s report of the brutal Schillinger’s whining complaint after being shot: “O God, my God, what have I done to deserve such suffering?” As Borowski tells the story there is no basis for Bettelheim’s speculations, and he ends his story with an anticlimactic and dampening description of a well-known historical incident, the revolt of the sonderkomando in the crematorium.
Wieslaw Kielar, in his powerful Auschwitz narrative, Anus Mundi, tells the story in a way that is close to, but not identical with, Borowski’s telling. Kielar does not specify the woman’s nationality or occupation, but he describes her as “beautiful.” According to the Kielar version, as Schillinger tried to pull down the woman’s brassiere, she grabbed his gun and shot him in the struggle. Like Borowski, Kielar follows this account with some mention of the revolt of the sonderkomando, but he draws much different conclusions from the woman’s act. “The incident,” he says, “passed on from mouth to mouth and embellished in various ways grew into a legend. Without doubt this heroic deed by a weak woman, in the face of certain death, gave moral support to every prisoner.”12
Sara tells a similar story with a slightly different setting and with a different cast of characters. Like Borowski, she represents herself as retelling a tale that has been told to her. In her version, the woman is a French dancer, but the incident takes place on the unloading platform instead of in the crematorium. In Sara’s narrative, the woman is the only one in this transport who refuses to undress. When an unidentified SS man approaches her to get her to remove the bathing suit she has been wearing on the trip, she grabs the pistol out of his holster and shoots him.13 It may be, of course, that Sara’s story is of another incident that is similar to the three just mentioned. But Sara’s variant presents a fully coherent dramatic action, setting the moral implications into sharp focus. Here, the woman’s behavior is an unambiguous act of defiance and a conscious assertion of her human dignity. By saving the last bullet for herself, she cheats the dehumanizing death apparatus. The narrator wisely draws no moral at this point, simply leaving the reader to ponder Magda’s comment, “That’s how you’re supposed to die.” Once again, it should be noted, we have an instance of inexplicable behavior by the oppressor, an act of kindness by a German soldier which saves the young French girl, thus permitting her to relate the incident to Sara, who then tells it to us.
Of the inherently dramatic “public events” that are often told, none has been more widely disseminated than the romance of Mala and Edek (Tadeusz in Sara’s version). This romance, a Romeo and Juliet story, as Sara correctly points out, exists in at least five versions. Those who are interested in comparing them point by point should, of course, read all five. We shall point out only a few of the differences among the various versions.14 Seweryna Szmaglewska gives the girl’s name as Zimmerman, while Kielar gives it as Zimetbaum. Fania Fenelon writes that the girl was an interpreter, the others that she was a läuferin or lauferka (messenger or runner). Sara and Fania agree that she was Belgian; Lengyel thinks she was a Jewish Pole and Kielar that she was a Slovak Jewess, though this is less apparent in the English translation. The descriptions of the executions are similar, yet they differ in minor details. All agree that Mala slapped someone and that she remained defiant to the end, refusing to die the death that the SS had planned for her.
Of greater significance is the portrayal of Mala and Edek as individuals. The accounts of Szmaglewska and Lengyel are insignificant in this respect, simply recounting the bare events. Fania and Sara, however, knew Mala and portray her as an extraordinary heroine—brilliant, courageous, and strong. Kielar, who was supposed to escape with Edek and Mala, and who describes himself as a close friend of Edek’s, portrays Mala a little less gloriously, although he portrays Edek as being, in sharp contrast to himself, noble and heroic. Mala, in Kielar’s portrait, emerges as a vulnerable woman who achieves her heroism at the gallows. Perhaps the most important fact is that all accounts agree that the love between Mala and Edek was remarkable, a deep and unselfish affection that could flourish even in the cauldron of hate that was Auschwitz-Birkenau.15 With her unerring dramatic sense, Sara weaves this tale and its moral into a powerful, compact vignette that brings the dying lovers together as a symbol of the triumph of love over tyranny and death.
A quite different kind of public event that has also been widely described and that has shocked even those inured to the death machinery of Auschwitz was the extermination of the gypsy camp. Unlike the incident of the dancer or of Mala and Edek, this was a mass event of cataclysmic proportions. The gypsies had been lulled into a false sense of security by being set up in a family camp. All of the prisoners, including the gypsies themselves, took this as a sign that the SS planned to use them mainly as forced labor. On a single night in either August or October, 1944 (accounts differ), the entire remnants of the gypsy family camp were liquidated. It has been estimated that from the first shipment of gypsies on 26 February 1943, a total of almost 22,000 gypsies were sent to Auschwitz and that by 1 August 1944, 15,000 had been murdered. Estimates vary on the number killed the night the gypsy camp was liquidated. Sara’s estimate of 25,000 is high, and what she appears to have in mind is the total number of gypsies killed in Auschwitz over a period of twenty months. Miklos Nyiszli puts the number killed that one night at 4,500, and Danuta Czech puts it at 2,897.16 For some reason, all of those who tell of this catastrophic night seem to remember the sound of the engines. As is her wont, Sara’s narrative genius instinctively leads her to connect the incomprehensible mass slaughter to the devastating tale of the gypsy boy who was, as the sonderkomando later tells her, pushed into the gas chamber by Mengele himself (note the parallels between this story and the incident of “Mandel and the Child” told by Fania Fenelon). Perhaps we should not try to add anything to Sara’s chilling narrative of the gypsy boy. We wish simply to reinforce Sara’s genius for getting at the deeper truth of these terrible concentration-camp events by recording here a song that Aleksander Rulisiewicz tells us was written by a Cracow student, Roman Friedlein, for a little gypsy girl dancing behind the wires of the gypsy camp. By performing the dance, Rulisiewicz tells us, the girl was begging for bread. The author himself was dying of tuberculosis in the “hospital” at Birkenau and witnessed the gassing of the gypsies shortly before he died:
I don’t have anybody.
I spit blood in my filthy bunk.
Your beautiful feet are dancing a czardas.
Tell me, my God, why am I croaking here?
I curse you, vile Birkenau.
Death is lulling me to sleep.
You will go into the fire with me, Maryka.17
Eli Pfefferkorn
David H. Hirsch
1 Gittin 56 A and B, The Babylonian Talmud (London: The Soncino Press, 1960).
2 Rabbi Nachum Yanchiker, Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship, ed. The Assembly of Rabbis of the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 256-57.
3 Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), p. viii.
4 Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. and trans. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken Books, 1958).
5 S. Dratwa, “A Jewish Grave,” trans. Eli Pfefferkorn and Mark Goldman, Midstream, Vol. XXX, No. 4, p. 39. From the Ratznelson Museum Archive.
6 Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys (Chicago and New York: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1947), pp. 99-103.
7 Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975) and Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1982); Alvin Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).
8 Eugen Rogon, Der SS-Staat (Stockholm, Sweden: Bermann-Fischer Verlag AB, 1947), p. 180.
9 Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1960), pp. 264-65.
10 See Eli Pfefferkorn, “Bettelheim, Wertmuller, and the Morality of Survival,” PostScript, 1 (Winter, 1982): 15-26; “The Case of Bruno Bettelheim and Una Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties” The Nazi Concentration Camps (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984), pp. 663-81. Basically, the controversy centers around Bettelheim’s contention that those who had the best chance of surviving in the camps were prisoners who were able to set up sophisticated psychological defenses and to find strategies for retaining old human values in the new hostile environment.
11 Tadeusz Borowski, “The Death of Schillinger,” in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. Barbara Vedder (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 143-46. First published in Poland in 1959 and in the United States by Viking in 1967.
12 Wieslaw Kielar, Anus Mundi, translated from the German by Susanne Flatauer (New York: Times Books, 1980), pp. 177-79.
13 “Revenge of a Dancer.”
14 The tellings alluded to here occur in: Fania Fenelon, Playing for Time (New York: Athenaeum, 1977), pp. 157-68; Kielar, Anus Mundi, pp. 215-55 and passim; Lengyel, Five Chimneys, pp. 124-25; Seweryna Szmaglewska, Smoke Over Birkenau, trans. Jadwiga Rynas (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947), p. 296.
15 There is an unfortunate mistranslation of a sentence in the original Polish that underscores Edek’s devotion and loyalty to Mala. In the English version of Kielar’s account, p. 227, Edek tells the narrator: “You must understand me. I have no obligation to Mala.” The Polish clearly states the reverse. Edek says, “You must understand me. I have an obligation to Mala.”
16 Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz, trans. Tibere Rremer & Richard Seaver (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1960), p. 99; From the History of KL Auschwitz (New York: Howard Fertig, 1982), p. 210.
17 This song is translated from Polish by Roslyn and David H. Hirsch on the basis of a recording made by the late Aleksander Rulisiewicz, in Poland in 1981: Piesne Obozowe (Songs of the Camps), Polskie Nagrania: MUZA (SX 1715). Kulisiewicz, who was a prisoner in Sachsenhausen from 1959 to 1945 and an extraordinary figure in his own right, was the foremost collector of camp songs. His archive is now being administered by his son, Rrzystof, a student in the faculty of English Linguistics at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. From what we have seen and heard of these still largely untranslated materials, they are an essential resource for those who wish to understand the survival of the human spirit in the concentration camps.