*****
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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