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Flight

Life could continue in captivity and under occupation. The treatment of the human being changed. The vocabulary of freedom, of home, security, and warmth, disappeared, many comforting illusions were abandoned. Conditions changed but life still went on. What was that life, how could a person describe it? The challenge was to find words for it.

Often it was a life of numbing physical labor. Many people found they were required to do the work of a domestic animal. One writer arrived at a forced labor camp and, on the first day, found a heavy wooden yoke placed around his neck. He had to heave, like an ox, against the yoke with all his strength.

Sometimes a person had the illusion that he was changed temporarily into an animal, perhaps a domestic animal, or an animal from a familiar species. But more often his situation could be best defined by a string of negatives: he was not this, he was not that . . . For better or worse he remained a person, he could not remove his skin, or transform himself into something else.

Most surprising were his own reactions. They were unmistakably his own. But in what category were they, were they “human” or something else quite different? How could he describe them to others, with words? How could he—or she—communicate them?

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In a short story by a Czech writer, the protagonist is in hurried flight. It is a chase.

The whisper of stones disappears in white silence. Feet sink, fall behind, give way. But paws, brown, velvety paws, glide over snow, agile and light. They come with jaws, though . . . He had been on the run for several days and the border was still far. He skulked around lonely houses and farmsteads, slept in barns and haylofts, no, no one must see him, and he ate what he could steal: raw turnips, a handful of oats, and a few frost-bitten potatoes. He could not—dared not—ask anyone for hot food or a place to spend the night, no matter how he longed for hot food and a fire. He shook with cold and hunger, but he had to go forward. His was the hare’s path, seeking always to confuse his pursuers. He had to be at once a hare and a fox, to glide through the silence and disappear into the snow. His hungry body cried out for sleep but his throbbing temples urged him onward. Onward, to where there is peace and quiet, bread and a hot bowl of soup; onward to where there is sleep in a bed, to the border. If only he could grow fur, white or brown or even russet; if only his heavy feet could turn into paws or perhaps hooves—it would have been good to be an animal. But in the thick of the hunt he was a man in a tattered greatcoat and cracked boots; he had to walk where he would have done better to leap, fly, or burrow.1

As he flees from unnamed pursuers, the man thinks of his actions more in terms of animals than of men. He thinks of himself as “I,” and the images that pass through his mind are spontaneous, natural, and compelling. He focuses on flight in its most active form, as it unfolds in the present. He thinks of his own movements, his needs, and his hunger, with animal imagery. The reader is led to accept that the narrator is almost—though never completely—an animal. This was the form adopted by the Czech short story writer Jiri Weil to express an experience described in many writings from the wartime period: flight.

As with the writings that describe people treated as insentient objects, this was the experience of an ordinary civilian, one event in the lives of the countless people caught behind the fronts and changed frontiers, living in the world of occupation. It was always unpredictable, often deadly. The purpose of most of these comparisons with animals is to explore the “human” side of the comparison: the stress is on the reactions of the human person, caught up in “occupation” or captivity. As with the use of objects, it was often a language of protest against the treatment of human beings.

In the description of flight from unnamed pursuers, the greatest emphasis probably is at the end: “in the thick of the hunt he was a man in a tattered greatcoat and cracked boots.” Despite his many thoughts about an animal world, he remained—for better or worse—a human person. There are many negatives in the passage: he is not this, he is not that, the narrator declares “he was a hunted animal, yet in this hunt he was not, could not be an animal.” On the other hand what gives the passage its special force is the refusal of the man in flight to believe he belongs any longer to the “normal” human world. He has left safety, security, peace, all former comforts. His world is stripped bare. He is no longer human but something else, and the whole work strains toward what that something else is. Images suggest parts of animals, feet, paws, wings. But almost always he is not that.

Another writer might have given different concrete details about an escape, for example where he escaped from, which town, which prison, who arrested him and why. Weil chose a different kind of narration, and gives no circumstantial information about the man or the reasons for his flight; he provides only the man’s vivid thoughts. For long passages he forgets he is a “man” at all. His needs and instincts are different from those of a human being in a normal world, but there is no one-to-one equivalence with a single animal. Rather he describes a range of behavior and instincts concentrated on the act of flight. In his thoughts he is a creature in the animal world. Later in the story the reader learns there is a bounty on his head, “for his blood.” A bounty for a human being? Or for an animal? The question remains open, it is unresolved.