a new series of essays in the Holocaust

Some Jewish Responses to Reflections on the Holocaust

After reviewing dozens of books on the Holocaust, it seems time to sum up my impressions, starting with a discussion of how Jews respond to such a world-shattering crime. This is not a research paper, although I have done a great deal of scholarly research, and especially tried to read historical, fictional, journalistic and especially contemporary thoughtful writings by people who lived within or on the edges of the Shoah. At times, I have ventured to read books, interviews and autobiographies of the perpetrators, their children and the apologists for the Holocaust. Wherever possible, though, I have avoided those who merely theorize, write by formula only filling the gaps with specific names of people, places, things and events, and the authors who seek to exploit the sufferings of others and show know understanding or compassion for the people they write about.

1.  Religion and Culture

On the one hand, there is, of course, no single Jewish response to the Holocaust. There might be six million, one for each of the victims, but then you would have to factor in all those Jews who escaped before the Shoah began those who were already relatively safe in different parts of the world, and all the Jews who were born since the end of World War Two.  Not only do you have three or four opinions for each person, considering that as they become adults, parents, grandchildren, and move around in the world, their views change; but there has never been a single set of beliefs or pattern of practice common to all the people who consider themselves Jews or are so designated by others. And yet, on the other hand—because that is the way Jews argue with and among themselves, there is always an “on the other hand”—the arguments and debates are the very essence of Jewish tradition.

So what is the Jewish response to the Holocaust? One thing is certain, there is no single religious approach to the question. For some people who went into that hell on earth and never came out, well, we won’t ever know for sure, even when they left a few scraps of comment and confession, or when those near them who survived listened to what they said and later tried to record those opinions. We know that sometimes a victim’s religious beliefs were tried and tested and in some way or other came out the stronger for their ordeal, and at other times the horrors they experienced ripped away their faith in a God and in the efficacy of the Law they had studied all their lives previously. For those who had lived in a more or less assimilated and secular way before they were incarcerated and tortured by the Nazis, their experience showed that there was no point to believing in a religion that could not answer the question of why evil existed in the world, no more so than such terrible times could validate the morals, ethics, cultural values and aesthetic ideals of German or even European civilization.

Thus many who survived and could think their way through what had happened became cynical and bitter and wished to have nothing more to do with Jews, Judaism and Europe itself. Others, seeing that virtually no one else in the world, let alone the next world, came to their aid, thought the only way to protect what remained of their families or the children of the next generation, was to build a different kind of Jewish community, sometimes in Israel, sometimes in America, sometimes behind closed doors and windows, one which shared the memory of the Holocaust and all the implications it held for any future at all. This could be called the religion of “Never Again” or a different kind of Zionism than had existed before the Shoah, one that would be aggressive and strong.

A major motif in many personal and group accounts of how ordinary Jewish people experienced the Holocaust is that of the shock of realizing that they were Jewish, if not in a religious way, then in a racial version of group identity. It is not that these men and women did not know they were Jewish, but that being so had never really mattered in their lives.

If they were intellectuals, scholars or literary writers, their identity was with the European values they had learned in school, as well as with the moral and ethical principles they imbibed at home, but never as an exclusionary heritage; rather, they felt that they could understand and participate in European culture fully—perhaps more fully than others—because they were not bogged down in Christian theological debates, had no romantic notions of belonging to the soil or the folk amongst whom they lived, and could roam, as it were, amongst German, French or Russian conceptual worlds.  If they felt alienated from the artistic milieu in cafes, bars and atmospheric bohemian neighbourhoods, they could become critics, editors, patrons, dealers, museum directors and lecturers in university disciplines they had invented for themselves, such as Art History and Anthropology.

If they were not intellectuals but merchants, professionals or civil servants, they knew about legal restrictions to where they could live, occupations they could enter into and levels of advancement they could not break through, yet nevertheless found that they were able to live parallel lives, with most of their circle of friends and colleagues Jews like themselves, and participated in the contextual society on terms that were comfortable and acceptable to themselves. They no longer wore distinctive garments, did not keep strictly kosher at home and ate in goyish restaurants, they still gave much to charity but not only to Jewish organizations. If they were excluded from some clubs and brotherhoods, they invented their own, like B’nei B’rith. They avoided the big hotels and spas where they were not welcome because they could go to other which were tolerant and so felt separate but equal. They sometimes married out and no longer felt compelled to convert in order to feel at ease in the outside world.

It was a shock when Hitler and his regime began to treat them as a different race, a different class of citizen, or not even as citizens any longer. They believed for a while that they could get along in this limited way, and that they could depend on their neighbours, their friends and colleagues.  However, eventually, aside from a few who began to realize what was going on and were able to see the writing on the wall, whether they wanted it or not, they were thrown back on the Jewish community, had to depend on Jewish charities, and looked for help from Jewish communities overseas.

In the old joke that tells of a marooned Jewish man who is found on a desert island and shows to his rescuers what he had done over the many years he has been all alone, the ship captain asks why there are two synagogues for one person.  The answer is that that there is one shul he goes to and one he wouldn’t be caught dead in. By the late 1930s in Germany and then in Austria and the once imperial countries of Kaiser and Emperor, there was no synagogue which most modern assimilated Jews could belong to—and only one shul in which he would be caught and killed in.

Very quickly, in just a few years, the scales fell from their eyes. Innocence, naiveté and wilful ignorance were stripped away. There was nowhere left to turn to, and no one they could trust. Yet if there were a God and a Law, how could such a deity let all this happen to his Chosen People, and how could a Law function that had no state, no police, no army, no teeth to protect them? No one was playing a game of theodicy to see how to justify the ways of God to man. No voice came out of the whirlwind to caution and then to instruct Job. No powerful divine arm broke through the clouds of heaven to stay Abraham’s hand and substitute a ram for Isaac. The blood stained lintel in Egypt did not signal that the plague of death would pass over the homes of the Israelites, but the blood-soaked swastika marked them out for persecution and annihilation.

Three more Poems for May

Fallow Fields Unseeded

The legend goes, the elderly Inuit

Floated out to sea on ice floes, calm and still,

As royal loyal wives in India, slowly lay

Down on pyres; but is there wisdom in your wit?

The praetorian guards far to the north, each slew

The other, and his steeds, to keep his warrior’s oath;

And thousands of porcelain soldiers, faces new

And distinct even today, defy the growth

Of empires and invaders, underground; so that we

In massive machine-dug graves in jungles, absolve

The guilt in rest-homes, where forgotten, fees

Unpaid and corpses left to pass away dissolved,

Vague determinations of what is just and needed,

Economy or eternity, fallow fields, unseeded.

Illegible Ossuaries

As the seasons refused to yield their rains,

The shallows of the Amazon displayed

Forgotten cities, vast canals, empty drains,

Clogged ossuaries where colourful spirits once had played.

Great inland oceans now withdrawn, their shores

Reveal amongst the rusty ships, ancient

Mortuaries crumbled into shells, and spores

Unwilling to yield their hopes—and those whose patient

Cores wafted away to distant continents

Our imagery and tones. Under archaic seas

Were monuments to life before our own discernments,

Scratched on icy walls, silent, the lees

And dregs of illegible gods and their liturgies.

Did you Lose your Consciousness?

Not as I skittered along, smash-bang into

Furniture, a chest of drawers—because you often ask--

Did I ever lose my consciousness; my dignity,

Yes, my modesty, too, scraping both knees;

Like a little kid of eight; and me at eighty

Slowly aware of a crack, and where it was,

That old bum shoulder, deltoid-ness for yonks.

Above all, the consciousness of pain, not blood

Or the noise coming out of my mouth, until you woke

From your soundless sleep, while I slowly hoisted

My decrepit self, and said, “I tripped and fell.”

You looked on in disbelief, and then agreed,

Time to press the emergency button beed-yonk beed-

Yonk “Nasty little wound there, young man,” she said.

So down from the ambulance, into emergency for triage.

Not even a bandage, with no one waiting. Details:

Name, address, date of birth; and

“Do you know where you are?” I looked and wanted

To sing, “It must be heaven, if you are here.”

Instead I whispered,  “A great big ER.”

And the nurse of seventeen crooned,

“And yer ‘ad a bit of a nasty fall there, sir.”

“Indeed, I did.” Then more and more, the angels

Flocked, prodding and probing, making me flutter

After them to the icy x-ray room,

Then chased me back to my little cubicle,

More tubes and wires and questions.

“Did you lose consciousness?”—“Why, is there one missing?”

“Do you know where you are?” “A paradise of nurses

And technicians and doctors who are neither surly

Nor sulky.” Then they said. “Yo’se ‘ad a narsty fall

An’ an inj’ry.” That done, I was allowed to fall

Asleep and have some lovely pills, and to dream.

Wrestling in Verse with an absurd murderer

Dreams of Little Old Poems

They sang, back then, of a blue catarrh and guitars

Of little balloon men and wheelbarrows brimming with verse;

There were stumble-bums and roustabouts to rhyme

With scallywags and pickaninnies or worse.

Sleds that slid into icy ponds and barrel girls

And boys when floods got out of control,

Stanzas full of flying monkeys, rapunzels,

Socks striped in red and white, the woollen sky

Ablaze with witches and tornados, like an albatross

Seeking habitats on sullen shores, tame gazelles.

In days of yore, back then, when time began, a toss

And a hank of yarn, all things were possible, a smidge

Of this, a snort of that, then all across the ridge

The hoofers hoofed and the jongleurs began their cry .

Where Does Word-Pay Ever Get You?

Calumnies and calamities, clam-bake ditties

Off Martha’s curlicue coast, then bisque

For the Basques near Charlemagne’s cities,

Like two towns called Tripoli where they whisk

You away from the high seas, like La Scala’s

Divas at the top of the scale in weight and tone.

All is operatic piracy, pie à la

Mode, arias with ice cream in MilAn,

A thousand years ago, said Millicent Anne,

Or eleventy hundred. She was a militant,

My lovely Tanta Millie, with her High-C.

Her symbol was a simple cymbal’s crash.

A sample of which was Mr Whippee’s screech,

Eskimo pie, the friendly humour man,

And finally a frutti-titti in a cup size c,

As though that were all along the plan.

The Tangled Bank

He tumbled down the bank into a ditch,

Tangled roots and branches intermingled,

Then where there were species he saw a switch,

But why he could not tell, until there tingled

Inside his brain, where vessels of all kinds

Sang out: Come and grasp or escape and flee!

Something like this made fighting couples bind

And lovers in the darkness turn two to three.

What intergalactic force makes choices choose

Unknowingly the invisible threads, the seeds,

The never-ending conjugations? What ruse

Arouses the flowers ecstasy and speeds

Eternity out of silent years? What sterile joy

Is capable of such a crime as to destroy

The universe inside an infant’s toy

Four New Poems at Level 2 of the Covid-19 Emergency

Seasons of Tectonic Despair

There was a time when sylphs were summer’s ornament,

Nereids, water-babies and all that ilk,

And the universe’s government ran milk

And honey over dunes and dells, and all that meant

Something surely, as satins did and silk

When lovely demoiselles thought money spent

Well if luxuries and luminescence bent

Across the moon and brought forth sighs, but not

If leather bats and cardboard goblins were sent

On futile junkets into empty worlds;

As though their fragrant breath was daubed with snot

And eye-beams fluttered until they were uncurled

And fell into the swamps of inflammation:

So winter’s flu destroyed the flaccid nation.

Dream of Someone Very Special

I had lived among the werewolves long enough,

And watched berserkers break away in battle,

And thought that wodwoses were wily, tough

And mean, until I saw stampeding cattle

Chased over cliffs by puny little hunters,

Creatures without claws or antlers, whose calls

Were wild and inarticulate—only prattle

Round their fire pits, who scratch the walls

Of twisted caverns in the dark. Then I knew

The game was up for unicorns, for churls,

For every sort of satyr, and so I flew

Into the safest haven outside of heaven: girls’

And boys’ imagination, pink and blue,

Namby-pamby blankets, in rose and lilac halls.

The Noble Tui

The tui, with his white bow tie, loves to bathe

In our garden. He stands on the rim, turns left,

Then right, then takes his dip, flutters, bereft

Of dignity for just a moment—a wraith

In the silver light of dawn. A moment later

The sparrows gather, flouncing about, to peck

At crumbs of mouldy bread, that I, their waiter,

Scatter with disgust and duty. Those who wreck

The drying grass must be fed, though they lack

Respect and self-esteem. The noble tui

Will not deign to eat such fare, yet for who he

Is, atop the tree, does strip a snack

Of bark ostentatiously; and then at night,

When no one spies, he gathers morsels bite

By bite while flying low, in my spite.

The Shaman’s Flight

Shamans fly among the trees, not like bats

By radar; they glide up into the sky, then dart

Down underground to tussle with spirits, that’s

Their special task.  Another healer’s art

Is to creep, crawl, insinuate herself

Inside the consciousness of pain—and shout

A library of curses, until the elf

Recedes and runs away. And all about

The luminescent body tremble sons

And daughters, who dance and chant, until

The medicine takes hold. There are suns

And moons inside the soul, and stars that spill

Out energy of primal bangs, great storms

Of light and dark upon our fragile forms.

Holocaust Book Review Macadam No. 4

***** Part Four *****

Review of Heather Dunne Macadam. The Nine Hundred: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Transport to Auschwitz. 

In the last third of the book, there is another shift in generic presentation. This section of the book deals with the final year of the war, and in particular with the efforts by the Nazis to begin destroying the evidence of their most outrageous crimes and to force march the inmates of the various death camps into the territory of Germany proper. These hundred odd pages, first of all, show that the underlying reason why the fighting continued for so long. When it was obvious that the military game was essentially over and any “normal” country would be negotiating terms for a peace treaty, the Wehrmacht, the SS and other military branches of the Nazi regime fought on. The reason was not to win the war or gain some strategic advantage—such as to keep the Soviet Army in check long enough to surrender to the Western Allies--during inevitable negotiations for a peace treaty; but to carry out the extermination of the Jews for as long as possible. The destruction of the gas chambers and associated buildings was done in such a way, too, as to kill as many of the Jews as possible, and so it was with the cruel nature of the journey back into the Old Reich. 

The author’s strategy in this last third of the book therefore seems to be to widen the perspective so as to place the narrative of the remaining girls from the first transport in a context of the German retreat from both Eastern and Western fronts. The steadfast advance of Stalin’s armies frightened the Germans, to be sure. Yet it did not seem that the increasing ferocity of Allied bombing raids troubled them as much. Though American and British planes often flew directly over the camps, they seemed deliberately to avoid hitting the rail links  and the clearly discernible (by their tall smoke stacks) gas chambers.

 
Though Macadam occasionally turns her focus on the panicked SS guards and other Nazi officials in Auschwitz and in the other smaller camps where the prisoners were taken on their way towards Ravensbrűk, the infamous women’s concentration camp, her emphasis is on the experiences of the Slovakian and Polish women from that first transport. Their stories are increasingly interspersed with lengthy citations from post-war trials and interviews; so that the immediacy of her description belongs less to imaginary reconstructions of events inside the camps and more on the actuality of them as mature and increasingly elderly women looking back at their lives. Increasingly, too, Macadam’s presence in the text is much more active as a seeker after knowledge and an empathetic listener to their memories.

Chapter Thirty-nine opens with what seems to be an explanation of a shift in literary tone and generic scope and a programmatic introduction to the last fifty pages of the book:

A novel would end here. It would wrap up with everyone safe and happy and traveling home to be reunited with loved ones. Fiction can do that. Nonfiction cannot. And that is not how wars end. (p. 340)

But no one would think that what has been narrated so far is anything but an attempt at history, albeit with some rhetorical moments of vividness and emotional immediacy normally disallowed in formal academic writing. While disavowing any attempt to continue this kind of fictionalization into the story of what happened after the women were liberated and made their way either back to their villages in Slovakia or to new homes in America and Israel, Macadam ramps up her private involvement in the story. She describes events not only as though she were there with the remnant of the original nine hundred as the final episodes run their course, but she puts herself right with them at their interviews, testimonies and recollecting of lost details as they look back at the end of their lives to what happened to them as adolescents. Very often, when she cites one of the survivors or their children, the elderly informant is speaking directly to Heather Dunne Macadam—and offering her cups of tea and pieces of fresh home-baked cake.

The son of Edith and Ladislaw Grosman George Grosman, the novelist whose fictional versions of his mother’s life, such as The Bride, have taught Macadam much of the background to the experiences before and during the events in Auschwitz, says: “I guess we are all secondhand survivors” (p. 357).

Insofar as the living survivors’ voices are all but gone now, except in written transcriptions and sound and visual recordings, the main conduit to the historical realities as a lived existential horror comes through in the experiences of the children and grandchildren of those women—and men, of course—and of those writers who undertake projects like those of Macadam, as well as novelists, short story writers, dramatists and film makers. But whereas the primary sources are the documents of all kinds created in the moment or recollected thereafter by those who lived through it all (or part of it), and such evidence is at one with their cries of pain, silences and awkward statements, the secondary documents—the edited and selected compilations, the reconstructions, tendentious, fictional, scholarly and educational—have a special obligation to guard  the integrity of the stories, to respect the dignity of the victims and their families, and to ensure that what they do cannot be misinterpreted by malicious and hostile audiences.

However, as Henry James says in his Art of Fiction,[1] there is no set of guidelines for how to go about doing this—this being the representation of reality in historical time and place, but good taste, honesty and skills necessary to express one’s thoughts clearly and responsibly; in other words, not to be mawkish or sentimental, to avoid crass distortions of how the human world works and not to exploit the pains, humiliations and grief of one’s subjects.

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[1] Published in his Partial Portraits, see Note 14 above.

Holocaust Novel Part Three

 ***** Part Three *****

Review of Heather Dunne Macadam. The Nine Hundred: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Transport to Auschwitz. 

None of the scores of women survivors whose testimonies were recorded and conversations analysed by the author could give a complete, in-depth portrait of their experiences in Auschwitz. It remains problematical to assess the validity, integrity, vividness or historical truth-value of what Macadam has synthesized and shown through the filter of her own imagination. Generically the book stands between (1) a genuine anthology of separate witnesses, (2) a historical reconstruction and (3) a novelistic invention of the people, places, events and feelings which constitute one small incident in the Holocaust.

What made the ordinary women who survived Auschwitz extraordinary? Such horrible traumatic shocks were neither expected by the young victims nor carried out according to a specific plan of the victimizers. To be in the midst of them was to be tested beyond any normal sense of ordinary life or even historical significance. Some of the young women could not stand to live a moment longer, went mad, committed suicide or caved in to become Musselmänner, that is, virtual walking corpses, golem or zombies.[i] Others lost their sense of morality and dignity and became selfish and cruel, doing anything to survive for just a week, a day or a moment longer. Still others tried to help one another, performed small acts of charity and selflessness. But mostly they just tried to hold themselves together for the duration. A very few seemed to rise above their own expectations and conditions to stand out as saints, martyrs and righteous individuals. What happened to them all was not just the physical injuries and psychological jolts to individuals; but all of them were shoved without warning or understanding into a dance, a dance of death, a dans macabre; “a series of steps” in which each motion linked into another, un-choreographed, unexpected, unplanned, but nevertheless creating a ritualized and bizarre dependency and impulsion into the next.[ii] The dance created figures that were not  “lively” (alive, healthy, aesthetically inspiring) but grotesque figures that emerged from the darkness of shame and agony as one group of girls replaced another, some withdrawn from the dance by selection or cunning manipulation of the system, some by disease or madness or too many by death.[iii]  “At some point,” says the narrator, “the mind shuts down to the horror” (p. 234).

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[i] The collective confusion and unexpectedness of each day—or hour—“drove everyone to the edge of sanity” (p. 111): such statements about insanity, madness, craziness and similar vague, general expressions do not address the real problem of determining the nature of the  shared disorientation among the inmates of the concentration camps; any more than does it serve to tell us what kind of mental or spiritual disorder was shared by the perpetrators of such sustained inability to feel or recognize normal human feelings. The victims felt eventually that their brains “weren’t working.”

[ii] “Wrenched from the unordered routine of civilian life, the girls were quickly becoming regimented manne-quins” (p. 116).

[iii]  Norman Simms, “Thomas Hardy’s Textual Choreography: Tangles, Knots, Braids, Textures and String Games” Literature & Aesthetics 29:2 (2019) 67-98.

Part 2 of Review of Macadam Holocaust Book

***** Part Two *****

Review  of Heather Dunne Macadam. The Nine Hundred: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Transport to Auschwitz. 

There are times when the author herself seems to be overwhelmed by the story she is telling and, if she fails to make sense of what makes no sense at all, who can blame her? What had at first only been a speculation and a metaphor becomes in a moment of intense crisis a reality beyond all understanding. There is, for example, is a moment late in the narrative worth slow and full parsing.  Helena’s older sister, Ruzinka, arrives in Auschwitz as a prisoner and is recognized in the line-up of people on their way to the gas chamber. Though she doesn’t know who is talking to her at first, she learns it is her younger sister, and is talked into leaving her young children in the anteroom where victims undress before entering the gas chamber. Ruzinka did not understand what was going on. She promised her children she would return shortly. Helena and her friends do what they can to save one person’s life. They already have been hardened by their experiences to not worrying about the children or anyone else. There is no time for debating the morality of what has been done. In Auschwitz, one does what one can.

A few days later, we are told, Ruzinka starts to realize partly what has happened, what she has lost, what she cannot do. She still thinks her children are waiting for her on the other side of the fence.

Dressed in new prison garb, bloody from her new tattoo, Ruzinka was frantic with worry and exhaustion. (p. 296, emphasis added)

But what we read are not the mother’s feelings and thoughts, but the author’s words about what is happening in that moment of desperation, The archaic and literary term garb jars with the description of the woman’s extreme emotional discomfort and disorientation, her inability to find her children.

The minutes she had promised she would be gone had turned into hours and then into days. She had told the children she would be right back. How could she have lied to them? (p. 296)

In a state of denial, unable to comprehend what is going on, and trying to conceptualize the loss in terms of a normal time and place, Ruzinka blames herself for something that is not only completely out of her control, out of moral responsibility, and already in the past. We do not know for sure that this is what happened and what Ruzinka felt within herself. It was Macadam has extrapolated from interviews and documents, and what she intuits. What do we really know? We know that Ruzinka’s younger sister Helena, an experienced inmate of the camp and thus in possession of the kind of existential knowledge that cannot be morally explained to the newcomer, had  enticed the mother from the children just as they were preparing to take off their clothes and be ordered to enter the place of death. The arguments Helena used were false, her intention was to save at least one life out of the hundreds in the anteroom to hell; and the result of this deception creates a bitter moral dilemma. But for whom? Ruzinksa has no doubt that she ought to have stayed with her children and is torn apart with guilt. For Helena and all the other survivors that participated in the deceit, the memory will last throughout their lives. This may not be guilt, however; they did what they could in a time and place where there was no hope and no time to mull over morality. For Macadam as she writes this book, where and when there is a space for thinking through the moral dilemma, there is no simple answer. For us, the readers with an increasing g distance between the time and place of the deception, the moment when evil had to be met with an act that would preserve at least a single life, there is a greater problem to be worked through. We cannot blame the victims. We cannot know what we would have done because we have never been tested in this way.

Now look again closely at what Macadam writes about Ruzinka. Suppressing what she has done, at first, in allowing herself to be manipulated, passing through several days—neither she nor we can know how many—in a state of confusion, there was no occasion to bring to mind the fate of her children. How could this be? How can a mother forget about her children?  How can she avoid seeing and understanding what is going on all around her? When Ruzinka finally allows—with what kind of will or what kind of lack of power to keep repressing the truth?—her consciousness to be drawn back into the reality of the moment; she realizes what she has done, at least in regard to the relatively superficial point of not returning as promised to be with the children, there is a painful intuition of the loss, without supposedly the actual certainty that they have been already murdered.  How does Macadam explain this awareness without actual knowledge?

Instead of properly examining the psychology of the traumatized mind, a hysterical state of consciousness, the author returns to her strange theory of genetic intuition:

Like the parent bamboo dropping its flowers in mid-bloom, she must have felt it in her very being. Their DNA no longer answered hers. The connection between them had gone silent. (p. 296, emphasis added.)

The hysterical mother is not a bamboo plant in flower nor does DNA communicate coded messages of the sort the author imagines. But at least, Macadam does not end there in this fatuous explanation.  The scene continues to reveal in somewhat more probable terms what has happened. Yet the stumbling block of ambiguous and profoundly disturbing silence remains.

But not knowing the truth of Auschwitz, how could she trust her instinct? (p. 296)

Knowing the truth and feeling by instinct collide and undermine each other. This is therefore an emotional, moral and epistemological point of convergence for different kinds of silence.

Ruzinka asks about her two children: “Where is Aviva? Where’s the baby?” The narrator informs us:  “Her sister [Helena] could not bear to tell her the truth” (p. 296, emphasis added). Instead, the younger sister persists in “promising her that her children were alive,” that is, she lies. She speaks words which are empty of truth-value to reassure her Ruzinka and thus to keep her from further falling apart emotionally. Throughout the intervening time between the luring of the older sister away from her small children and the time of Ruzinka’s insistent asking where they are, Helena fills the social space between them with reassuring words, promising the distraught mother that the children were safe and would be returned to Ruzinka’s care. Helena makes noise, deceptive and comforting, but devoid of the truth. Noise and silence are the same phenomenon. But are they?

Her sister could not bear to tell her the truth. (p. 296, emphasis added.)

There it is again, the little verb to bear: to carry a physical burden, to give birth to, to take up the responsibility for and to be able to endure the emotional load; and, here especially, to sustain the emotional charge of speaking truth in a time of emotional and epistemological crisis. In response to this, the need and desire to speak the truth is overwhelmed by the shock of keeping silence:

The other women in the block gawked at Helena. Waited for her to say something, anything. (p. 296, emphasis added.)

Here is another odd word, gawked, another odd archaic word drawing on Old Norse and Old English roots meaning to stare stupidly or awkwardly, a term associated with the now obsolete awk with its connotations of the sinister and the untoward. The silence of Helena, composed of the noise of her persistent lying promises, stands out among the other women prisoners who see such a refusal now as a cruel ruse. The way Macadam describes this is far from objective, however; it is crafted with literary tricks.

Someone yelled, You have to tell her! (p. 296, emphasis added.)

The “someone” is everyone there except Helena. Why? because everyone’s knowledge now includes the moral obligation to speak the truth, yet an obligation which is swallowed up in its own silence:

No woman could bear to tell the truth. (p. 296, emphasis added.)

However, among all the women then in “Canada”, the name for the room for sorting out the clothing, gold teeth and other possessions of all those who were murdered in the gas chambers,

Most…had never been married, never had children, but they felt the horror of Helena’s choice. The horror of Helena’s choice. (p. 297, emphasis added.)

Helena’s choice, though, is not the same as Sophie’s choice in William Styron’s novel of that name (1979) and the subsequent movie (1982), wherein a young Jewish mother is forced to choose which of her two children will be saved from immediate death in the gas chamber and which one she may take with her into the labour section of the camp. The other inmates in Canada are not mothers, have not born children, but nevertheless “felt the horror” of Helena’s choice, whether to tell Ruzinka the truth about her children having been murdered or to maintain a silence that is itself a terrible and unbearable lack of knowledge, a horror. There is in ancient Aristotelian science a horror vacui, a fear of emptiness—of nothingness and of silence. Here, as in an artist’s horror vacui, the fear of blank spaces on a canvas leads to the filling up of the picture with disembodied faces, floating ashes of the dead and images of ghosts.

Glassy-eyed with shock, Ruzinka stared at the bare beams of the ceiling above her head. Saw her daughter’s face in the darkness. Breathed her ashes in the air. Aviva’s ghost was everywhere. (p. 297.)