Antonio
Iturbe, The Librarian of Auschwitz,
trans. Lilit Żekulin Thwaites. New York: Godwin Books/Henry Holt & Co.,
2017. iii + 424 pp.
Original Spanish, La bibliotecaria de
Auschwitz, Planeta, 2012; 538 pp.
Dita Kraus. A Delayed Life. London: Penguin/Random
House, 2020. 474 pp.
Here
are two books on the same person, two different approaches to history and two
views of the horrors of the
Holocaust. First came Antonio
Iturbe’s novel The Librarian of Auschwitz
in Spanish in 2012, and then eight years later Dita (née Edita Adlerova) Kraus’s memoirs, A Delayed Life. Even though they are not the same, at least,
formally, in that a novel is a work of fiction, even when it is based on (or
inspired by) a real person and a historical life; and a memoir is true to the personal
recollections of the person who writes it, becoming thus an historical
testimony to real events and taken as a document to be studied in the light of
facts and other archival data. Yet the relationship between these two books is
more complicated than that. Both are true in different ways about the Holocaust
and both are creative responses to the memories of a real person who lived
through the horror that was Auschwitz, as well as first Terezen and lastly
Bergen-Belsen. At this stage in the history of the Holocaust and of Holocaust
literature, they are both important by themselves and in relation to one
another. Only mad people and evil politicians deny the reality of the Shoah:
the basic facts are beyond doubt. What the Holocaust means may be argued about.
How it was experienced is not only as various as there were individuals who
died there, who survived, and who have tried to recall their responses at an
ever receding time, so that new generations not only know what happened and
what it felt like, but can remain connected with the people who survived and
could speak and write about their experiences.
What
are the facts that lie behind the people, places and events in these two books?
According to Bernice Lerner:
The British Second Army had liberated Bergen-Belsen
on April 15 [1945]. What they found in the then-largest concentration camp was
indescribable. Still the Belsen trials first
witness, Brig. H.L. Glyn Hughes, the military officer who had assumed responsibility
for medical relief at Belsen, tried to give a picture. In Camp One, five
compounds contained more than 41,000 emaciated inmates in severely overcrowded,
filthy huts. Seventy percent of them required immediate hospitalization. Of
these, Hughes estimated 14,000 would die before they could receive treatment.
Ten thousand unburied corpses lay in mounds on the ground, among the living in
some huts, and floating in concrete ponds of water. Epidemics of typhus,
tuberculosis and gastroenteritis raged. Camp Two contained another 15,000
starving prisoners.
Dita
and her family, friends and fellows Jews were in the second camp. The book of
memoirs has only passing mention of the horrors discovered in the death camp,
though there are brief descriptions of the distasteful, stinking and disgusting
experiences she went through. The novel offers supposedly objective
descriptions of the indescribable horrors spoken of in Brig. Hughe’s testimony.
However, they are placed in Chapter 30 near the end of book, where also the façade
of fiction falls apart and Iturbe speaks in his own voice about why and how he
prepared himself to write Dita’s life.
Thus
there are several deep historical, problematic psychological issues and Jewish rhetorical
difficulties to be encountered in a comparison between these two books, one
inspired by, the other written out of the memory of the same person. It is not
necessary for a scholar or a novelist to find something new and different to
say about the Holocaust. The various ways memories evoked and the figurative
scenes constructed can provide subtle emotional perspectives. These differences
strengthen the notion of millions of individuals and not merely impersonate
types of personalities. The variations also ensure that the significance of
what is recollected, described embodied ensure that nothing like the Shoah ever
happens again. And yet what is unique and unrepeatable does not necessarily
touch on the essentials of human nature or species evolution and spiritual
development of the Jewish people was tested in the hellish cauldron of all the
horrors which constituted the attempt at total genocide and cultural
destruction. As Amelia B. Edwards puts it in her ghost story, “The Phantom
Coach” (1864):
The words that I was about to utter died upon my
lips, and a strange horror—dreadful horror—came upon me.
Rather
than specific images and detailed descriptions, the fictional voice in made-up stories
such as this one repeat the word horror
and its variations (horrible, horrid,
horrifying) or synonyms (terror, terrible, ghostly, ghastly or hideous).
Where a grotesque manifestation of evil and malevolence appears, there is a culminating
role for the key word, as in Jeffrey Parnol’s short story “Black Coffee” (1929):
And what he saw was an oval face framed in black
hair a face full and unshrunken, yet of a hideous ashen-grey, a high, thin,
aquiline nose with delicate proud-curving nostrils, and below, a mouth,
blue-lips, yet in whose full, cruel lines lurked a ghastly mockery that carried
with it a nameless horror.
As
for psychological investigations into the minds that created and those which
responded to the Holocaust, already in his 1865 short story “To Be Taken With A
Grain Of Salt” Charles Dickens opens with this quasi-fictional warning:
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even
among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own
psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort. Almost all
men are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel
or response in a listener’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed
at.
Putting
aside what specific type of fictional narrator introduces this horror story and
concentrating on what Dickens could have meant by “psychological experiences”—a
few lines later he speaks of them as “remarkable mental impressions”—we find
here one factor in the epistemological and rhetorical question of what is true (historically accurate words and images
vividly presented) about fiction; or
rather, what kind of truths (morally responsible, psychologically appropriate
and juridically convincing) can storytellers generate in their fictions. On the
surface, this persona merely claims,
in accord with the title and the ensuing horror tale, that ordinary people hesitate
to speak of their extraordinary moments when they encounter something that is
normally considered unreal, untrue and probably only imaginary. But it is not
just the commonplace motif of signalling that the appearance of ghosts, the
inexplicable coincidences that shake up normal certainties and the power of
words in a Gothic mystery to conjure up emotions that perhaps lie dormant in
otherwise civilized and modern minds may for a moment within the structures of
the tale seem to be true. There is also hint that the frisson of fear that the reader or listener feels—crawling under
his or her skin, making the hair stand up at the back of the neck or causing a
change in the rhythms of the heart—is real. All this is, of course, much too sentimental
and superficial to relate directly to the problem of how a witness or
imaginative artist attempts to put into words the unimaginable horror or
“inexplicable terror” of the Holocaust. Somethings are beyond ordinary language,
imagination and conception: “a hideous and undefinable terror.”
There
are many things about Dita’s memoirs that at first seem disconcerting, especially
in the change in tone, not only in the slide from the innocence of childhood
through the moodiness of adolescence, the sense of emotional confusion during
the horrors of the Holocaust, the disappointments and frustrations of married
life and motherhood, but also in the different degrees of despair, hope and
reconciliation to her fate.
But
these imbalances and awkward shifts are understandable when we take into
account that Dita spoke with Antonio Iturbe while he was writing his novel and she
read through La bibliotecaria de Auschwitz after it
was published and translated into English.
In several important ways, not all necessarily conscious on
her part, in her memoirs the real Dita Kraus responds, corrects and comments
upon the Spanish novel.
The differences indicate the variant strategies of
creating and shaping a fictional narrative and recalling one’s memories and
trying to understand what happened in one’s life. In ensuring accuracy, even in
a book composed by someone other than a survivor, in a fictional description of
one individual’s experience of the Shoah, the responsibility not to trivialize,
exaggerate or misconstrue the place of that individual in the larger picture of
what happened collectively to the six million victims is paramount. As time
passes and the generation of survivors and their progeny begins to disappear,
the public memory comes to depend on artists for emotional poignancy and vivid
depictions. In other words, to ensure that what happened does not fall away
into the past as just one more unpleasant event; but remains alive as both a
cautionary tale and a memorial to those who perished in such obscene
circumstances. Another kind of accuracy obtains, however, in regard to personal
testimonies. The experience from within the mind of the survivor places before
present and future readers, professional historians and the general public, the
confused, emotive and hesitant recollections. The subsequent life experiences,
the changing contexts of memory and the various purposes for speaking out and
writing down such memorials need to be taken into account as part of the long
history of the Holocaust.
Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman discuss the problems
of historiography and aesthetics in regard to the Holocaust:
[Theodor] Adorno declared that, in the wake of
the Holocaust, all culture fails before the reality of atrocious suffering,
rendering obscene all pleasure-giving forms of representation. Yet he also
admitted that suffering demands representation and that the aesthetic might be
its only voice.
In
her book, Dita Kraus writes out her whole life, from her earliest memories of being
weighed as an infant to her most recent recollections of life as an elderly
woman in Israel. What happened during the Holocaust becomes one part of her
long life and memories. So too are the years between liberation from the DP and
transit camps she was sent to, her
return to Prague, the attempt to live under the communist regime soon set up
there, and then the difficult journey to the newly-founded State of Israel. In
the Promised Land, she endured difficult times in immigration settlement camps
and then tried to fit into a kibbutz with her husband and son, and then moved
out to a small town and after to a big city.
Except for a few moments, it seems, she is never really comfortable or
happy anywhere. Bad luck dogs her every step. The years as a victim of the Holocaust were just a part of a much
longer series of more or less horrible ordeals to be endured, though clearly
the losses and trauma incurred continue to colour how she experienced
everything afterwards. Every move comes with its own kind of pains and the need
to struggle through awkward, uncomfortable and humiliating circumstances; yet
she perseveres—and lives to tell the tale. Awkwardly, perhaps more in the
translation than in the original Spanish text, Dita learns that “…sometimes you
have to grab luck by the throat” (The
Librarian of Auschwitz, p. 283).
In later years I read articles by psychologists
about the emotional damage the holocaust caused the survivors and began to
understand what had happened to me. I sensed this blunting of my emotions for
many years and I am not sure if I ever recovered completely (A Delayed Life, p. 246).
But
almost all the fragments of memory, even those she regards as turning points,
are not pure, unedited remarks caught within the moment. They are often introduced
from a later perspective—Dita tells us how she feels about them in the now of
her recollecting. Nor are all remembered moments the same. She claims most are
like drops of water absorbed into the river of time, indistinguishable from
each other. A rare few, however, have a special quality, though they are only a
few seconds in duration.
They were like drops separated from the
stream of life, permanently fixed outside time, unforgettable. (A Delayed Life, p. 82)
These
strange “indelible” memories also form a pattern, too, but in retrospect not as
they actually happened. It is as though everything occurred in its own time and
yet did not constitute an instant of all-consuming experience, they seem like tokens
or tantalizing signs of things to come; images that come into focus long after
the event. When she says that being transported with her family to the potomkin-type
city of Terezen “was the most significant delay of my life” (p. 115), we do come
to know at which stage of her life she came to this realization. It was
certainly a disruption, a turning point, and certainly a break from what she
experienced before. The statement comes at the end of chapter ten and the close
of the first section of her memoirs.
Pivotal and Momentous Moments
This
was a pivotal moment. A step that changed her received notions of family and
place.
Afterwards,
in the second part, come the horrors of ghetto, concentration camps and the
struggle to survive, when things and people no longer have the same appearance
and she is no longer the innocent and naïve girl she was. Everything looks
weird and crazy and she has trouble recognizing her father (p. 137). What she
sees no human being , let alone a child , should witness (not just brutality,
murder and degradation but an excremental vision of reality), so that what she
says is a terrible understatement: ”A very, very unpleasant memory—I wish I
could erase” (p. 140). Rarely does she confide in the reader that all her
subsequent life she is bothered by intrusive, painful dreams (p. 167).
A
more poignant disclosure comes when she catches herself in shifting away from
the matter at hand, without recognizing the way her Jewishness seizes on the
apparently trivial or irrelevant detail as the rabbinical entry into the
meaning of a portion of the sacred text.
As
always, I find myself digressing, turning away from the sights I don’t want to
remember, or rather something in me, some defence mechanism, diverts my
thoughts to other channels. Every time I start speaking of the Holocaust, I seem
to be drifting to those post-war experiences. (A Delayed Life, pp. 196-197 )
The
main metaphor here is time as a river she is flowing down, during which voyage
she must fight her way against the current. But she also imagines herself in a
struggle to avoid re-experiencing the traumatic shocks she endured and that
mark out the contours of her life. The rabbinical midrashic commentators worked
out a rhetoric in which precisely those points where the text of life seems to
struggle against itself and to expose the wounds of such a contest in syntactic
lapses, logical gaps or even orthographic anomalies are the portals through
which their interpretive debates force them to enter. At this point, Dita
speaks of the collective experience of the horrors that constitute the Shoah. Yet she cannot frame her remarks
either in midrashic terms or in the language of later psychologists who deal
with the long-term effects of post-traumatic stress.
Although they are directly connected to
our suffering, they are still peripheral, as if I could relate only to the edges
but not to the wound itself. The more bearable experiences, the humorous
incidents, scenes of friendship come to mind trying to eclipse those that I
cannot bear to face. (A Delayed Life,
p. 197)
The
wit that comes through in seemingly unimportant moments of calm, in jokes and
in sentimental moments of togetherness seem digressions, disguises or denials
of all the humiliations and pains; yet they are full of meaning as they embody
the age-old Jewish history of surviving. They are what makes it possible to
live with worst of what occurred, so that later she can speak the truth, keep
the reality from collapsing into maudlin clichés and unbelievable banalities,
which, as we shall see, happens in Iturbe’s novel.
But I feel I must come to grips with
them too. They are also true, those darkest pictures that exist in the hidden crevasses
of memory. I must plunge beyond the barrier and bring them into the light of
conscious reality. (A Delayed Life, p. 197)
Speaking
from a much later and more mature perspective, this passage is a riposte to
Iturbe and all those, consciously or not, try to exploit the Holocaust for
their own aims. These highly sophisticated last sentences stand out from the
rest of the memoirs as the purpose for writing out a single life experience
without trying to ram it into pre-conceived structures, to allow the
hesitations, the slides from moment to moment, from place to place, to let
normal language fall apart before the unspeakable and unimaginable horrors.
Fully half of the memoirs are those events following her liberation from the
death camps. In a sense, the specific scenes of the Holocaust recede into the
things that happen after she becomes an adult; only some of these later
recollections are keyed towards her adolescence as a prisoner of the Nazis. In
another sense, less stated than implied, everything that makes her who she is as a mother, kibbutznik and Israeli
are part of her personality and are expressed in what she thinks and feels. On
a few occasions, she is quite candid in saying that words are not her best
medium of expression and whatever she has written is inadequate:
Human language doesn’t contain terms to
describe Auschwitz the magnitude of those horrible experiences would require a
new vocabulary. The language I know has no words to describe what I feel (A Delayed Life, pp. 227-228).
She,
of course, means natural languages, such Czech, German, Yiddish, Hebrew and
English, cannot conceptualize or embody what she has experienced. This is why
the novelized version of her life, with all its literary flourishes and
historical embellishments, seems so thin compared to her own efforts at
recollection and expression.
However,
in regard to Dita Kraus’s theme of the delayed life, the sense of the fullness
of reality for herself comes late, she claims, only later while writing her own
book and after interviewing with Antonio Iturbe
and still later reading his fictional version of her time in Auschwitz and
other Nazi camps; only then does she recognize that everything was always
delayed. As the story of her life twists out of what seems like its normal and
inevitable course (childhood, adolescence, school, play, work), it spins away
from her conscious grasp of where it is going and what it means war, moves into
cramped apartments, transport to concentration camps, liberation, hospitals,
Displaced Persons camps); eventually, it starts to wind down and once more a
recognizable pattern emerges (arrival in newly independent Israel, work in a kibbutz,
married life in a small village, the birth of a son and two daughters, their
illnesses, loss of a husband and
children), she inserts chapters out of chronological order about her marriage
to Otto, her work-mates and her friends. Before the book of memoirs closes, she
also writes about her talks in Israel, Europe and Japan about her experiences during
the Holocaust in the various camps she stayed in. But the deferment of her life
ends and a sort of closure is reached only in her 89th year, the
date when she meets and reads Antonio Iturbe’s novel and tries to put together,
with editorial aid, the fragmented incidents in her life. Then she can reflect,
evaluate and understand what happened—and who she is. Despite all the losses,
sufferings and frustrations, she is contented
with her lot as a Jewish grandmother, having reconciled herself to being
both Czech and Israeli—a survivor recognized for her ability to tell her story
and that of all those people who did not survive. Yet the incidents she records
in her memoir do not flow coherently and progressively. They weave in and out
of different moments of memory and reflection. As we shall see, what is a
passing incident that barely takes a page (p. 144) to recount in her memoirs had
become a central organizing metaphor as indicated in the title of Iturbe’s
novel, that is, the very brief period when Dita put together less than a dozen
miscellaneous books and became the librarian of Auschwitz. In terms of truth
content, it might as well have been another passing moment when she became the
maker of doll’s clothing while a slave worker in Hamburg or an apprentice
cobbler on a kibbutz in Israel. The Spanish novelist can pick and choose
characters and events, reshape and focus on imagined circumstances and dramatic
conversations, feelings and interactions, even dreams and disembodied emotions.
There
are many clunky transitions from the present moment of the narrator’s reportage
of scenes and conversations into flashback memories what went on before the protagonist
arrived in Auschwitz from Terezin and sometimes further into her memories of
her life in Prague. When new characters enter into the story, they are finally
described and their backgrounds sketched out, the narrator is omniscient as to
their own thoughts and feelings. All these interruptions and digressions tend
to impede the flow of the narrative. Moreover, when people speak to each other
and silently to themselves, they make formal speeches; they explain explicitly
and at length what they feel they must say. Here the novelist’s voice turns clearly
into that of a history teacher who wants to ensure that readers know all that
happened during the Holocaust and why, as though audience were coming across it
all for the very first time, had never heard or read about it, and unfamiliar
of all the standard and often clichéd tropes developed in thc past
three-quarters of a century.
Though we cannot tell whether the problem lies with the original Spanish or the
translated English, there are too many anachronisms in what purports to be
idiomatic conversation; such jarring expressions
(“kids” instead of children, for instance, “lucked out” instead of was lucky)
bring with them our own contemporary attitudes and feelings, especially in
regard to the bodily functions, sexuality and pupil-teacher relations. These
expressions seem out of tune with Middle European minds—even those of young
children—brought up in the 1920s and 1930s.
When
an elderly and usually dignified gentleman successfully attempts to divert the
attention of a threatening SS officer and so keep the young Dita safe during an
inspection, no one catches his ploy and they consider him a doddering old fool.
Not even the narrator who normally explains everything never comments on the
cleverness of the trick and the risk Prof. Morgenstern takes in calling
attention to himself. None of them seem able to see him playing the role of the
shlemiel—fawning, asking stupid
questions and acting out what the Nazis assume is a Jewish character—nor
understanding how clever, sensitive, heroic and selfless he is. Not until the
last hundred pages of the novel, however, after having read The Good Soldier Schweik, does Dita come to understand how playing the fool (what
Socrates would call the eiron) can
help get her through stressful situations and take control of matters where a
young girl would not normally be listened to by other children or adults. The
characters and situations in the books she reads—and which the narrator
re-tells to the modern readers—help Dita begin to understand what is happening
to her and how to negotiate her way through the many difficulties that remain
to be encountered, even after liberation migrating to Israel and raising a
family. The realization, too, that the identity of a Jew has many faces and
many hiding places within itself comes slowly to, along with maturity and the
ability to reflect on the special role she has to play as a survivor.
When he [Morgenstern] reaches Dita, without stopping
or breaking step so as not to annoy those behind him, he suddenly becomes serious
and gives her a wink. Then he continues on his way and goes back to performing
his bowing routine, with that little crazy-old-man laugh of his. It was only a
matter of seconds, but as she was looking at him Dita saw the professor’s expression
change, and his face was different as if, just for a moment, he’d raised his
mask and allowed her to see his real self. It wasn’t the faraway look of a
crazy old man, but the composed expression of a completely serene person. (The Librarian of Auschwitz, p.231)
As
suggested above, Iturbe’s novel seems to have many stylistic flaws and
technical infelicities, yet on the whole it is a good introduction to the
events that occurred in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. However, what kind of
readership comes to the subject without at least some familiarity with the
accumulated knowledge provided in popular films and newspapers? Perhaps very
young people lack this basic modicum of shared awareness. Perhaps some non-Jews
in Spanish-speaking countries, but surely not those literate readers who choose
to purchase or borrow Iturbe’s book. Perhaps, then, those poorly informed and
naïve individuals in the USA and Great Britain who shockingly show up in the category of responders to surveys as
not recognizing the name Auschwitz or mistaking basic historical facts. Even
then I doubt it. Why? because much of the background text to Dita’s story is
made up of précis and resumé of books kept in her tiny library,
titles she recalls having read or been read to at home, from children’s stories
through H.G. Wells’ History of the World
to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and Jaroslav
Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk. Much space is given over to
retelling scenes from these last two novels in particular, with Dita imagining
herself as taking part in the fictional action, and learning to understand the
adult world through identification with the leading characters.
There is also an ethical question that arises from the way
Iturbo centres his novel on the real life history and personality of Dita
Kraus, who cooperated with the Spanish author through interviews and emails,
insofar as fiction reshapes the autobiography and the historical events. Many
secondary characters some who also share their names with actual victims and
victimizers who interact with Dita, but whose inner lives, memories and social
attutudes are created by the author as
though Iturbo was made privy to their minds, even those who are based on people
who were murdered by the Nazis. Nearly
half way through The Librarian of
Auschwitz, has a series of encounters—creepy, horrible, grotesque—with Dr.
Joseph Mengele, the “angel of death.”
But gradually each of these two historically-inspired personages is
shown to think about the other in ways which defy probability. Two
sensibilities flit past each other, one in search of victims the other seeking
to hide from torture. Not just Jew and Nazi, female and male adolescent and
adult, subordinate and weak, but also between the vague, frightening dangers
inherent in the situation and terrifying recognitions, attention-grabbing
furtive glances and the forbidden aura of sexual attraction and profoundly
disturbing dread.
And at that very moment, she senses
a presence behind her. When she turns around, the tall black figure of Dr.
Mengel is standing two paces away from her. He’s not whistling; he’s not making
any sound or movement. He’s just looking at her. Maybe he followed her here. (The Librarian of Auschwitz, p. 341)
The
menacing vagueness and the terrible ambiguity of her thoughts point towards the
nineteenth-century horror stories we discussed earlier, and to the repressed
sexuality they secretly or unconsciously signal. Though Iturbe spends over a
page rationalizing away Dita’s fears, reducing them to adolescent egotism,
nevertheless what the text reveals makes the power of the deep-seated horror in
the scene vivid, even palpable:
Dita
watches his tall, black, horrible figure move away. And then it comes to her: He doesn’t remember me at all. He has no
idea who I am. He was never pursuing me… (The Librarian of Auschwitz, p. 342)
Not only does it seem that someone is playing with the
readers’ sensibilities and sensitivities, and especially a reader familiar with
the generic markings of horror stories, but the deflation of expectations cuts
away the historical probabilities of the imaginary scene. The dramatic tension
built up to describe their relationship, the fifteen year-old Jewish girl and
the middle-aged Nazi sadist, goes beyond the limits of moral principles recognized
as appropriate to books about the Holocaust, whether formal scholarly studies
or historical novels. Too much is made explicit and overly articulated, so that
what is presented becomes bathetic. Instead of implication, innuendo, obliquity
and subtle allusion, a mode of providing the reader with hints, suggestions to
be meditated on and incomplete spoken sentences, silent thoughts and implied
reactions in the facial expressions and physical gestures of those crowds of
prisoners and guards who fill up the space of Auschwitz.
The implications of such gothic horror crawling through the
mists of Auschwitz—mud-soaked trysting places, ever-present spies in watch
towers, lurking prisoners eager to denounce and profit by the faults of
others—seem to come into focus on a secret love affair between a Jewish
prisoner and a young SS guard. All these “transgressive horrors” seems to happen in
darkness and gloom, the fear of being caught and the thrill of a forbidden
sexual attraction, with each of these strange young people having to deny who
they are to carry on such a relationship and not fully able to understand or
trust the other. As soon as they decide to make their escape, they do not find
the exhilaration of freedom just across the various boundaries they have to
cross; but they enter in effect a world which is already their graveyard. The death camp is piled into
a mass of twisted bodies dying or dead, condemned people kept in cellars in
cells too narrow to stand up in, would-be escapers hidden under piles of lumber
ready to crash down upon them, everywhere mangled and mashed corpses with every
kind of bodily fluid and excrement.
Lovecraft’s thingless names and
nameless things mark the limits of representation and imagination, including
geographical imagination. Lovecraft’s textual thresholds do not simply express
his racist fears, they produce the narratives that dramatize his fears of
contact and change.
There
is virtually no scene or recollection of this sort in Dita’s memoirs. As in a
classical tragedy, scenes of violence and horror usually happen off-stage,
while inner suffering and intimate states of agony are alluded to, sometimes
years later in retrospect. But these
grotesque and horrible actions do appear in The
Libarian of Auschwitz, along with developed episodes that occur out of
Dita’s sight and awareness.
In
the final pages, however, the horrors do mount up, both the words and the
imagery. The Nazis reduce the amount of food ladled out, allow the prisoners to
die in their own excreta from typhoid and other diseases, and hardly bother to
dispose of the disintegrating corpses.
In the midst of this charnel house, unknown to anyone of the main named
characters—as though in an obligatory nod of recognition—lies the dying Anne
Frank, whose story and later historical significance due to her published diary, Iturbe retells.
Iturbe
occasionally crosses over from his didactic presentation into these corners of
horror. His normal mode is explanatory and he proves more often than not
untrustworthy, or at least ethically questionable. He imagines a scene in which
the children in the family camp celebrate the Passover against all regulations
not to perform religious ceremonies. The
adults, adolescents and a few of the older children remember being with their
families and sitting around the seder
table. Using ad hoc substitutes for the symbolic items at the table and
listening to the recollected words of the Haggadah, the scene unfolds,
culminating with a child choir singing Ludwig van Beethoven’s An di freude (“Song of Joy”) from his Ninth
Symphony. The events are described in Iturbe’s omniscient narrative voice.
The trouble is he gets almost everything wrong, and tries to make the food, the
wine, the stories, the witty rabbinical explanations, and the messianic hope
into a foreshadowing of Christ’s Last Supper. The Jewish writers of the little booklet of
liturgical texts and directions for actions wrote it centuries after the
founding of Christianity and deleted all mention of Moses to ensure no one
would take the great prophet’s deeds as a foreshadowing of Jesus. Miracles are
performed, the commentary asserts again and again, not by a hero or angel but
by God Himself. And if anything, the
young people would have sung “Chad Gaddya”
(a kind of riddling poem about a kid [a baby goat] a father bought for two zuzzim), the traditional Aramaic
concluding song to the meal. The author probably never attended a Pesach meal.
The description of the seder goes on
for four pages, and is embarrassing to read, especially in the light of so much
praise by young people, their teachers and adults who wish to purchase the book
for their own children.
