Another Holocaust Review" FRANCI'S WAR

 

Franci Rabinek Epstein. Franci’s War: A True Story. n.p.: Michael Joseph/Penguin Random House, 2020. 258 pp.

Reviewed by Norman Simms

This is Franci Rabinek Epstein’s story of her survival during the Holocaust, a book, we are told, she had been writing for a long time, but died before it could be published. It draws on her own personal memories and the testimonies she recorded for Holocaust memorials. However, there are several other stories in and about the book that are equally important, and for readers who are mature and have read many tales of the Holocaust, true and fictional, these other parts of this book are perhaps more interesting or, at least, equally interesting. The fact of the matter is what is now published as Franci’s War had an earlier manuscript version called Roundtrip in the 1970s but it was rejected by many publishers, mostly for reasons which now seem unbelievable: one of the common excuses was that readers were sick and tired of books about the Holocaust; shockingly it was because this one was by a woman and about women in the concentration, slave labour and extermination camps. Worse, it dealt in raw (not pornographic) terms with sexual affairs in the camps, straight and gay, between Jewish prisoners, camp guards and even SS members: not for love or even out of loneliness, but for food, medicine and other favours, not least staying alive a little longer. Roundtrip was a tough book that pulled no punches and did not sentimentalize or become preachy about weak people, religious martyrs or good Germans or Czechs or whatever. As we shall see, the most important part of Franci’s War comes after the Liberation by the Russians and the British. This section deals with how the world’s ignorance and indifference continues to hurt the survivors and with Franci’s attitude towards stupid, selfish and superficial people, whole nations as well as individuals. This is not a book where you go to first learn about the Second World War or the Holocaust, but where you aim to go after much collateral reading, contextual research and mature thought.

The front cover of the published version proclaims that this is a true story. Usually we find such puff-notices stating that the book was inspired by or based on a true story. What, after all, is true in a true story? An accurate depiction of persons, places, things and events? A well-shaped reproduction of how humiliation, terror and pain were experienced by victims? An imagined description of the cruel and sadistic minds that conceived of and carried out the arrest, hunting down and disruption of lives, the tortures, the execution and the medical experiments, not just as an indifferent and unfeeling parody of scientific objectivity, but with a lurid delight in causing pain and watching others suffer? Where does such a true story begin and where does it end? How much do we need to know about ordinary people in ordinary circumstances before they were wrenched out of their private, professional and intimate lives? Perhaps we do need to watch, step by step, how these ordinary people were degraded, humiliated, subject to starvation and lack of medical attention, forced to work as slaves in the great Nazi war machine, physically injured and, for most, murdered by a modern state’s killing machines, with only a small percentage managing to survive. And with the survivors, how far forward do we need to follow them in their attempts to recover from the painful ordeal of the concentration camps?  Maybe there are no correct answers.

In this memoir of a young sophisticated woman from Prague, what stands out is the way the main narrator maintains her equilibrium and what she calls “sass” through very many trying circumstances. Though raised as a Catholic, at the age of twelve she chooses to identify herself officially as having no religion, and thereafter believes herself to be fully assimilated into modern, even fashionable European society. Her mother runs a salon and Franci works there, learning the trade and ingratiating herself with the customers and clients, Jewish and Gentile. These connections turn out to prove useful later in her story. As an adolescent and a budding young woman, she has little to do with the Jewish community of Prague or with Judaism. At first when the war begins, Franci doesn’t think it has much to do with her. She is young enough to feel herself invulnerable, to dream of possible sexual encounters, but even though she marries in haste under the pressure of circumstances, she finds it hard to think of herself as a married woman when she is separated from her husband. So long as she is not immediately threatened or harmed by the horrors around her, she looks forward to a future after the war that she believes will be little different to what she knew. Nevertheless, as events impinge more and more, and as she grows older, her character begins to change, not gradually, but in response to several sudden shocks.

The first part of this “true story” relates the narrator’s (she is “I”) life in Prague before the war, then it tells something of events under German occupation, and after that of the transport to Terezin. While most of the episodes, places and persons are more or less familiar to readers from other accounts by young people taken to the “show” camp, the key aspect to note is the personality and attitude of Franci. Sometimes she hides the name of women and men she met along the journey through her war, but sometimes she uses pseudonyms which have not been identified, and the editor (her daughter Helen Epstein) marks them with an asterisk, though we don’t find that out until the final section of the book compiled by the daughter. For readers who are familiar with the genre and the specific places and events in Franci’s “true story,” it might be best to read the final section before diving into her narrative.

Franci, of course, is aware of the Allies progress of the Second World War and she hears vague rumours of terrible things happening to the Jews, but mostly for her the worst events are off in the distance. Only when she sees and hears for herself horrible incidents in the places she is forced to live, work and sleep, does she begin to become anxious. Mostly, however, she remains calm and aloof, unbelievably so. As a matter of fact, until the actual arrest of her family and herself and their transport to the Nazi show-camp at Terezin, “I began to wish for something to happen—anything, just a change” (p. 33).

Then change does come, and sooner than she expected. It comes on the next page and the start of a new chapter (something that we are later told again is due to the editor, who divided the original manuscript into chapters, as well as filling out details of specific names and places). But in Terezin, she seems to show little sympathy for other prisoners’ weaknesses, sicknesses or emotional distress. She does not see the kapos, the Czech guards and the SS officers as unredeemable manifestations of evil; some, including the Czech guards,  are old friends, neighbours and customers, moderately friendly and helpful. She is young and she believes (not just hopes) there is a future.

Later we find out that while Franci knew several of the survivors who subsequently wrote their own Holocaust books after the War, she herself does not acknowledge reading them or offering comments. Partly this is because many were published after her death in 1989, and partly because she tended to be indifferent to what other people had to say. In regard to her own book, she seems to imagine an ignorant, if not hostile audience, except for her own children who are not much mentioned.

In the second part of her narrative, there comes a shift in tone and texture. When she is transported to Auschwitz and then to factory work-camps in and around Hamburg, she is shocked to see, smell and feel the substance of the Holocaust around her, including news about the murder of her father, mother and other family members, though the worst threats still remains mostly off centre for her. She is kept in a family compound, separated from the place where transports arrive and huge numbers of confused people are pushed into gas chambers. The first time she confronts evil in its most ugly, disgusting and horrible forms she awakens to changes in her self-concept. She finds herself vulnerable and therefore fearful of what will happen to her.

However, it is only after she is transported to Auschwitz for a second time and sees sick and emaciated bodies, putrefying corpses and frightened, confused and hopeless crowds forced into the killing rooms, does she stand back from her previous self and speak in the name of the number tattooed on her arm, A-4416.  The “I” has become a third person “she”.

Though now objectifying her own person from everyone and everything around her, bad things start to happen to the women around her. And in due course, they start to happen to her. Her condition becomes disgusting, both literally and metaphorically, with human excrement, blood, body parts. Her existential space fills up with smells and unrelieved pains. Still, somehow for her, as for few other survivors whose stories I have reported on, such as Dita Kraus, nothing she sees seems to touch her deeply; only what physically impinges on her sets her mind to different kinds of thought. Nevertheless, she is still certain, though that is now more hope than belief, that she will live to the end of the war and her life will more or less return to normal. Reading closely, we see some doubts begin to creep into her consciousness. A-4416 (Franci) meets people she recognizes as fellow prisoners from Terezin or even from her previous life in Prague, and she often makes contact with people on the other side of the barbed-wire, either by sending messages through friendly guards (even SS underlings and officers) or via signals passed to Italian, French, Russian prisoners of war and non-Jewish inmates. She learns that to “organize” matters is to steal whatever you can, and that furtive meetings and locked doors mean there is something ugly going on: hetero-sexual and homosexual favours, insidious rumours against people who otherwise seem innocuous, sometimes whisperings about herself. Her naiveté starts to fade and cynicism creeps in.

Old friends very often proved to be impossible to get along with in the suffocating new environment, while strangers became friends for life. A whole new standard of behavior evolved, much of it self-sacrificing and noble, but also frequently selfish and amoral. (p. 55)

There is a further shift in the tone of the narrative when she is sent to Bergen–Belsen.  There, for the first time, she actually witnesses thousands upon thousands of Jews being sent to the gas chambers, still more thousands cramped like animals in crowded, disease-ridden conditions, and thousands of her fellow Jews dying all around her. She herself becomes ill and is injured during bombing raids. But she also sees some earnest fellow prisoners, including Italians and Poles, who attempt to maintain their humanity and preserve a modicum of civilization, despite the terrible places where they work. The American bombers come on raids where Franci and her friends do manual labour. She hears about the invasion of Italy and the landing in Normandy. The War is ending but no one in the camps can be sure they will survive. She interrogates herself in the guise of her numbered alter-ego, yet the answers are less than satisfying, whether religious, social or historical. “A-4116 retreated into her own private world peoples with people from the past, and nurtured wild fantasies of escape” (p. 100). The closeness of the Allied bombing raids, with a building she shelters in struck, an event that removes even more of her sense of distance from the dangers all around.

A-4116 finally lost her aloofness and pleasure in air raids and was seized by abysmal terror every time the bombs started fall. Standing [with the other women] packed like sardines in the barn [where they fled], they were all trembling, crying, praying, or simply in a state of shock, unable to contain their bowels or bladders. (p. 163)

Eventually, the war does seem to be coming to its much longed-for end. Instead of immediate relief when the camps are liberated by the Russians and the British, however, there are three phases of further suffering. Then comes the real liberation of the death camps by British. The victors over Nazi Germany go into shock when they look through the barbed-wire. They begin to bury the dead, provide care for the barely living, and bring in food and medication. There is danger in that too. Before the liberators can start to examine the dying and living, or provide medical attention or distribute food, the prisoners break into the buildings where for years the Nazis hoarded food packages sent by relatives or the Red Cross:

With suicidal greed, every person still in an ambulatory state crowded into these storehouses, using doors and windows alike. In a state of mass hysteria, people literally drowned, their heads inside barrels of pickles, mustard, prune butter, and the like, while others tried to get in over them. (p. 168)

There is also a time before it is not clear whether the fleeing Nazis will return. Franci and others left alone are fearful of taking control over the care of their selves and lives. The few prisoners who venture out beyond the barbed-wire come back with terrible reports of killings and betrayals.

But even after the Allies finally do enter the camps, thousands still suffer and thousands lie dying. The typhoid epidemic rages, the long period of malnutrition and the breakdown of personalities remain. Liberation per se does not end the misery.

Placed in a hospital ward by her English liberators, Franci returns to using the first person about herself.  But for her friends and herself, there remain long periods of recuperation in hospital and only a very gradual healing. When she does regain enough strength to walk outside on her own, her spirit picks up a little, and she becomes interested in the young soldiers from Britain, America and elsewhere. But when the first contingent of men who saw the camps in their utter ugliness and smelled the stench of starving and rotting bodies departs, a new batch come in. Franci finds them appalling in their arrogance, stupidity and naiveté. One young man asks her why she has her telephone number tattooed on her arm. Others cannot see the difference between former prisoners and the Nazi guards and other officials, especially not between German women and Jewish survivors; they seem to think all women are fresh game to catch.

Franci misses her cosmopolitan and sophisticated pre-war life, and yet has the fearfulness and confusion of the young woman she still is in knowing most of her family, friends and neighbours were probably dead. She also mulls over in her mind the still-undiscovered secrets of the Holocaust—the obscene medical experiments of Dr Mengele, the pointless cruelty of the Nazis, the fragility of the human soul for so many previously assimilated Jews, the lack of remorse or guilt among the German civilians, the continuation of anti-Semitism in the Poles and Czechs…the utter destruction of towns and cities, including Prague which had been relatively untouched until, mere days before VE-Day, the German air force subjected it to a Blitzkrieg.

Months go by before Franci can bring herself to return to Prague. She watches newsreels of the liberation, but has difficulty recognizing herself and friends in the filmed images. She finds it difficult to know what is real, remembered, imagined, dreamed or completely false. Attempts by some of the former inmates to go home to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary often lead to frustration and disappointment. Not only were most families dead, but among the living relatives and old friends there were differences impossible to reconcile, not to mention hostile and violent neighbours. As we find out more clearly later, in the Afterward, where her daughter-editor inserts part of the original preface to Roundtrip, when it was still in manuscript form, Franci has no good feelings about her former torturers, little compassion for the minor sufferings of the defeated enemy who were bombed, starved and displaced by the victorious Allies. From brief excursions outside the military camp where she works as a translator and in occasional flings with officers and men, she cannot stand their obtuseness, their inability to imagine what she and her fellow Jews went through. She doesn’t even have to scratch below the surface to see that most of the Aryan Master Race and their supporters in Poland and Czechoslovakia have not changed an iota in their arrogance, bigotry and cruelty, except in their fawning before the conquering armies. Family and friends who had somehow survived in the countryside or hidden in the cities, even they cannot face asking questions or discussing what Franci went through. They cannot see that the rationing of food is not the same thing as deliberate starvation or the scarcity of luxury goods being the same as having nothing at all. She cannot stand their incomprehension, their denials, their superficial sympathy. These frank and harsh words give significance to the book that few other Holocaust memoirs attain:

The members of the German population I came into contact with were, in my judgment, just as repulsive in their new servility to their conquerors as they had been in their former righteous blind obedience to their Führer. (p.  189)

The main goal for most of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust was to migrate either the United States or Palestine (soon to be renamed Israel). For Franci and her best friend Kitty, as they recovered from their physical deprivations, try to imagine a better life in Prague. As she regains her strength and health, her mind focuses on the future and what she hopes will be a new life perhaps as a wife and mother and a resumed career in fashion. But it doesn’t take too long before reality snaps its fangs at her. Her cynicism doesn’t protect her either. She also feels that hatred for her torturers and the murderers of her family is a waste of time, and she just doesn’t care about them.

Why was destiny so capricious, always destroying the best among us? Tormented by these thoughts, I slipped into uncontrollable crying spells like the ones I had not been able to shake after my parents left Terezin. (p. 208)

She spends a short while in Czechoslovakia trying to track down the remnants of her family and old friends. Then she corresponds to a distant family member who helps her negotiate the bureaucratic mess to be allowed to enter the USA—something that should still shame American governments in their treatment of refugees and desperate immigrants. Franci does not tell that story. It is left for her daughter and sons to write that account.

We find out in the final sections of Franci’s War, that when she writes out her memoirs and it is everywhere rejected, this just proves the futility of it all. She suffers a nervous breakdown. She puts the manuscript away, never discusses the experiences she went through with her children, and dies before they are old enough to start to do research about her background; and also before the shift in temperament in the general public in its willingness to learn about the Holocaust. It then takes another quarter of a century for her daughter, who has meanwhile become a well-known writer, and her sons, along with a few distant relatives, to join together to edit the book you now hold in your hands. These helpful, loving and respectful editors do not have their name on the title page and you have to search for them in the last few pages.

The last section belongs to her daughter Helen Epstein as an Afterword, Editorial Note and Acknowledgement. These last fifty pages provide an account of how the book was compiled and edited, and a collection of photographs pertinent to the text. It helps focus on what is going on in Franci’s memoirs, since so much of it is understated, seen from an angle, and related with a strange indifference. Helen Epstein has written other books about the Holocaust, its impact on survivors and their families, and an extension of Franci’s life, and she attempts to make new generations understand the importance of what her mother went through.  Fifty years after it was written, Franci’s War has come out as a very important addition to all the other memoirs, fictionalizations and literarily powerful books about the Holocaust.