Jeremy
Dronfield. The Boy who Followed his
Father into Auschwitz: A True Story.
Michael Joseph/Penguin Books, 2019. xvi + 416 pp.
Reviewed
by Norman Simms
This book by Jeremy Dronfield probably
should be categorized as a non-fictional novel: non-fiction because it is based
on meticulous research into family interviews and documents and the public
historical record, and a novel because of its vivid description of people,
places, things, feelings, thoughts and events, details generated by a
sympathetic imagination—those close, sensuous and intimate aspects of life that
are usually left out of academic historiography. Many important memoirs,
autobiographies and letters that constitute Holocaust Literature are either
written after the fact by professional writers looking back on their own
experiences or ordinary men and women struggling to find the words to express
their own lives under extraordinary circumstances, or attempt to present, with minimal
editing, accounts recorded during the time they spent in concentration camps or
in hiding from their persecutors.
Dronfield’s gift to the genre depends on
his sensitive eye and ear, his attention to the spoken and written voice, his
capacity to generalize from single instances and specific details to
well-realized scenes, and at the same time to filter out all the by-now
conventionalized and clichéd depiction of the Shoah and its victims. At a time
when survivors and the first generation of their children are disappearing, the
reality of the Shoah falls to those whose skills and sensitivities, whose
imagination and understanding of the substance of the event make them
authoritative bearers of the tradition. It is their task to keep the humanity
and Jewish spirit alive through novels, short stories, films, drama and other
artistic modes, and the task of intelligent and knowledgeable critics to be
ever vigilant for fraud, exploitation and sentimentality.
But does this proviso hold in Dronfield’s
family narrative?. For all its reliance on personal testimonies, written
documents and scholarly research, somehow the horror of the Holocaust does not
come through. That—the disorientating fear, the endless pain and humiliation,
the smells and tastes of ever-present death—remains on the margins, something
seen at a distance and thought about rather than felt. The main characters
scheme and negotiate with other prisoners, many non-Jews, German civilians
working in the camps and associated factories, even occasionally with soldiers
of the Wehrmacht and the SS. With difficulty to be sure, they maintain some
kind of communication with old friends and assimilated relatives in Vienna and
elsewhere in the Reich. They survive not by sheer luck or divine miracle, but
by will-power, manipulation of the system, and something else never
explained.Others die around them, are shot, pushed into the gas chambers,
starve, kill themselves—but not the father and son. They become ill, are
injured, sometimes tortured, exhaust themselves to the very limits of what the
body can endure, but they stay alive, and always have faith in the other, that
they will survive. Not a religious faith (Is it even a Jewish story?) or an
ideological (It rejects the Communists and the Fascists.) belief in the
self-correcting nature of history: but something like sheer grit.
On the other hand, there is between the
narrative voice and all the other more historical voices, documents and
information the author-editor-composer, that is, Jeremy Dronfield. For him, the
creating of this book is both a family duty—to preserve the memory of his
parents and grandparents and all the other members of the family murdered in
the Holocaust—and a historical project, to keep to the facts and guard the
integrity of his sources. While there are innumerable other studies, memoirs,
collections of documents and oral archives to ensure that as many of the
individual persons killed and families shattered, the burden is now ensure that
the Holocaust deniers and trivializers do not swamp these stories, reduce the
Shoah to one of an ever-increasing list of genocides and mass murders, dilute
it in a messy soup of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that fill up social media
and school textbooks, and cast doubt on the veracity of the carriers of the
truth.
That said, about 75 pages of The Boy who Followed his Father into Auschwitz
is made up of scholarly apparatus: Bibliography and Sources, Notes and Index.
In addition, from time to time in the narrative there are footnotes to explain
unfamiliar names or to give current names of places. There is also a two-page
Preface by Jeremy Dronfield, and a two-page Foreward by Kurt Kleinmann, and a
two-page Prologue by the author himself. These are authentic historical voices
testifying to the accuracy and importance of the narrative recounted in the
book, a story which is “true” but all wished hadn’t been. The narrative itself
provides a background to the Kleinmann family prior to the Holocaust and
afterwards, and a few pages about what happened to those members of the family
who managed to escape to England and the United States. The narrative is
divided into four main parts, designated by roman numerals and a brief title:
Part I, Vienna; Part II, Buchenwald; Part III, Auschwitz; and Part IV, Survival. Each part contains varying numbers of chapters,
from two to ten; and each chapter has smaller units set apart by Hebrew words
designating the main characters treated, אבא (aba),
father; אםא (ima)
mother, בן (ben) son, משפחה (mishpucha), family, and so forth. There
is also an Epilogue called Jewish Blood,
and it contains three subsections: “Vienna, June 1954”, משפחה
(mishpucha) and a Star of David.
No comments:
Post a Comment