***** 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some withdrawn from the dance by selection or cunning manipulation of the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).
[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.
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