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.)