Tag: poland

Author, Book review, Books in translation, Fiction, Germany, Haus Publishing, holocaust, literary fiction, Monika Held, Poland, Publisher, Setting

‘This Place Holds No Fear’ by Monika Held

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This-place-holds-no-fear

Fiction – hardcover; Haus Publishing; 277 pages; 2015. Translated from the German by Anne Posten. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Monika Held’s This Place Holds No Fear is an extraordinarily beautiful novel — about survival, the power of love and the strength of one exceptional marriage.

It’s also about the Holocaust (fittingly, it was published on Holocaust Memorial Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz just six weeks ago), but it’s quite unlike any Holocaust novel that I have read. That’s because it’s not so much about what happens to those who are sent to the death camps while they are there but explores what happens to the survivors afterwards — how do they get on with their lives after such unfathomable horror and trauma?

A love story

The novel is essentially a love story between Heiner, a Viennese man, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 as a Communist, and Lena, a translator from Germany, who is 10 years his junior.

They meet by accident when Heiner is called to give evidence as a witness at the Auschwitz trials, held in Frankfurt in 1964, in which former SS officials and guards were tried for war crimes.

Lena is working in the court, translating evidence from Polish into German. On the 52nd day of the hearings, Heiner collapses in the hallway of the courthouse, where Lena rescues him — she wipes his brow, helps him to a chair and gets him a glass of water — forging the beginning of a love affair that endures for the next 30-plus years.

The Auschwitz legacy

As the couple’s story unfolds we learn that Heiner’s experiences at Auschwitz will forever mark him.  As prisoner 63,387,  he worked as a typist in the prisoner’s infirmary typing death records for those internees who had died.

Several times a day the SS man brings us a list with names and numbers of the dead. We don’t know how these people died. We can choose from thirty different illnesses. According to my typewriter people die of heart failure, phlegmons, pneumonia, spotted fever and typhus, embolisms, influenza, circulatory collapse, stroke, cirrhosis of the liver, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and kidney failure. Under no circumstances is anyone tortured, beaten to death or shot at Auschwitz. No one starves, dies of thirst; no one is hanged, no one is gassed.

On a daily basis, Heiner witnessed great brutality and unspeakable acts of cruelty and inhumanity by the SS officers and guards, but he knew that he had to survive in order to be a witness. But life was cheap and at any point he could be the next to die:

That was the first lesson he’d learned: You can die. For looking too curious, too horrified, too bold, too submissive or not submissive enough. For walking. Too fast, too slow, too casually. You can die for saying your number wrong. Too softly, too loudly, too hesitantly, too slowly, or too fast. You can be killed for not knowing the words to a song. If a person wants to kill, any reason will do.

But after liberation there were new challenges to overcome— “He’d survived — but what was the point? The perpetrators were convicted and would serve their sentences without remorse, without understanding, without any shock over what they’d done” — and no one understood what he had gone through:

 At home people had looked at him mistrustfully: How come you’re still alive? We thought there was only one way to freedom at Auschwitz: through the chimney. Their eyes asked: What did you do? Were you a Nazi stooge? At whose cost did you survive? If only they had asked him directly. He found their secretive looks repugnant.

His first marriage, which is mentioned only in passing, falls apart when his wife and young child are unable to cope with Heiner’s ongoing suffering and his inability to escape from the shadow of Auschwitz that continues to loom over him.

By the time Lena meets him — almost 20 years after liberation — Heiner is still in the grip of that shadow. Their marriage works, not because Lena helps Heiner to overcome his pain — he can never overcome it — but because she accepts that it is part of his character, part of his being. As she tells Heiner’s friend, Tadek, who is also a Holocaust survivor, “it’s like living with a singer who can’t stop singing the song of his life”:

He sings it in the morning, he sings it at noon and in the afternoon, evening and night. It has many verses. You have to like the song or you’ll go crazy.

Marriage governed by trauma

This Place Holds No Fear offers a poignant, often moving but never sentimental, glimpse into a marriage that is governed by trauma. It’s never maudlin, however, but it distills in clear, eloquent prose (beautifully translated by Anne Posten), an unconditional love that knows no bounds.

It particularly comes into its own in the second half of the novel when the couple travel to Poland, now under Communist rule, to deliver relief supplies to other Holocaust survivors. Here, Lena listens into conversations that deeply move her, because in meeting Heiner’s comrades she comes to understand that they all share a deep need to tell their (disturbing) stories. Yes, they are psychologically damaged men, but they have managed to stay sane not by forgetting what happened to them but by remembering their unnatural pasts.

The novel is based on a true story — the author interviewed and spent time with Auschwitz survivors — so it feels incredibly authentic. It’s certainly powerful and compelling. And when I finished it, the first word that sprang to mind was not “depressing” or “traumatic” but quite simply this: “beautiful”.

Author, Book review, Books in translation, Faber and Faber, Fiction, holocaust, literary fiction, Poland, Publisher, Setting, Steve Sem-Sandberg

‘The Emperor of Lies’ by Steve Sem-Sandberg

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Emperor-of-lies

Fiction – paperback; Faber and Faber; 664 pages; 2012. Translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death.

Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Emperor of Lies won the August Prize — the Swedish equivalent of the Booker Prize — in 2009 and was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012.

It is a dense behemoth of a book, with nary a chink of light in its dark fictionalised account of the Holocaust, but I read it at a time when I was looking for something substantial to get my teeth into. At more than 650 tiny print-filled pages, it certainly fit the bill. It is by no means a light or easy read, but it is one that rewards the patient reader.

Based on a true story

The book is based on the factual story of Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, a 63-year-old Jewish businessman, who was the leader of the Jewish ghetto in Łódź. The ghetto — the second largest in Poland — was established by the Nazis in February 1940. Its 200,000 inhabitants were forced to work gruelling hours  — and in impoverished conditions marked by constant hunger, cold and fear — to provide supplies for the German military.

Chaim, who was also known as “Eldest of the Jews” after the Nazis appointed him to the role, was a mysterious figure with murky morals: was he, as many believed, a Nazi pawn, content to do as the Germans wanted in order to save his own skin and fulfil his quest for power? Or was he acting in the misguided belief that if he turned the ghetto into a well-oiled machine for military production he would not only save the lives of those Jews who worked for him but convince the Third Reich that Jews were not the vermin they were thought to be. In other words, was he a sinner or a saint?

The book, which explores this question in exacting, sometimes overwhelming, always meticulous, detail, fictionalises Chaim’s life and the lives of those who lived among him, but it does not provide a definitive answer (although the title might hint at the author’s opinion). What it does is make the reader see the man in all his many facets — some of it good, much of it bad — and leaves you to come to your own conclusions.

Problematic but still powerful

The problem I have with a book of this nature is not knowing what is real and what is not. If it is based on fact and historical research — and the appendices suggest Sem-Sandberg has devoted considerable time in this pursuit — why not write a straight non-fiction book so it’s perfectly clear? Why fictionalise something and then write it in such a way — very dry, prosaic and “journalistic” — that it reads like authoritative non-fiction reportage?

The answer, I suspect, is that the author would find it difficult to bring in the view points of the vast array of characters at the heart of this novel, all of whom were based on real people. (The book is littered with eye witness accounts.) Indeed, there are so many characters that it’s hard to keep track of them (though the guide at the back is helpful), and because it is written from so many perspectives it’s difficult to identify with any one person. I often felt like I’d just got to “know” someone, and then the story switched to a different character and I would have to start afresh, as it were.

This might sound like I am being negative, but I have to admit that I found The Emperor of Lies a truly fascinating and absorbing read. It tends to plod along, but I appreciated the detail and the way in which Sem-Sandberg examines Chaim’s moral culpability. It’s crammed with information but is also very nuanced and moving, so that the weight of the emotion builds slowly and by the final page you feel absolutely shattered. When Chaim sacrifices the elderly and the children of the ghetto to save the working population, it comes as quite a shock. And when you know the fate of those that are disappearing — many were murdered in Auschwitz and Chelmo — when they do not, it is extremely distressing.

Although The Emperor of Lies is a problematic novel, it is also one of the most powerful I have ever read.

You can read more about the real life Chaim Rumkowski on wikipedia (though the articles seems almost as contentious as the person it’s about). And there’s a terrific review — or should I say hatchet job — on the Financial Times website. There’s a more positive take on it in The Independent.

Author, Book review, Children/YA, Fiction, holocaust, Morris Gleitzman, Penguin, Poland, Publisher, Setting

‘Once & Then’ by Morris Gleitzman

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Once&Then

Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 249 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Morris Gleitzman is an English-born Australian-based writer with more than 20 childrens’ books to his name. This book, packaged as an “adult edition” brings together his two Holocaust novels — Once, first published in 2005, and Then, first published in 2008 — for the first time. Fittingly, it’s released today (August 6) to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.

I’ll have to admit that when this one arrived on my doorstep a month or so back I was a little skeptical: surely it was just jumping on the Holocaust bandwagon already set in place by John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (both of which I loved)? What could yet another childrens’ novel tell us about the Jewish experience during the Second World War? Hadn’t it all been said before? And why wasn’t Penguin re-issuing Esther Hautzig’s true life story The Endless Steppe instead, a book I adored when I was a pre-teen and still remember with an aching fondness?

Casting my cynicism aside and holed up in my sick bed bed, I decided to give this one a go because it probably wouldn’t tax the brain matter too much. I figured I’d probably read the first 50 pages and then make a judgement call. I got so swept up in the story about a 10-year-old Jewish orphan, Felix, and his gutsy little non-Jewish friend, Zelda, that I read the book cover-to-cover in a matter of hours. And then wished I hadn’t ploughed through it so furiously because I wanted to spend more time in the company of these wonderful, inspiring characters.

A fresh perspective on the Holocaust

The beauty of Once & Then is its ability to present the Holocaust in a fresh way — that is, from the perspective of a young boy who fails to comprehend the violence and brutality around him. Of course, Boyne does this in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but Gleitzman tackles it from a slightly different angle: a Jewish boy who doesn’t even remotely understand that it is his very religion that puts him in danger.

Indeed, when the book opens Felix’s naivety is crystal clear: he truly believes he is only residing in a Catholic orphanage, not because his parents are dead, but because they are trying to sort out their problems as Jewish booksellers before coming back to rescue him.

There were two reasons Mum and Dad chose this orphanage, because it was the closest and because of Mother Minka’s goodness. When they were bringing me here, they told me how in all the years Mother Minka was a customer of their bookshop, back before things got difficult for Jewish booksellers, she never once criticised a single book.

His innocence is all the more apparent when you realise he’s being carrying this false hope with him for three years and eight months, and yet it remains undiminished. His only fear is that when his parents return they won’t recognise him because he’s changed so much in that time.

But the tables are turned when a group of Nazis arrive one day to burn all the Jewish books in the orphanage’s library. Felix suddenly realises that he needs to rescue his parents, not the other way around.

There’s a gang of thugs going round the country burning Jewish books. Mum and Dad, wherever in Europe they are, probably don’t even know their books are in danger.
I have to try and find Mum and Dad and tell them what’s going on.
But first I must get to the shop and hide the books.

This sets Felix off on an amazing voyage of discovery in which he escapes the orphanage and begins a new life on the run. Along the way, he collects a sidekick, a six-year-old girl, whom he rescues from a burning farm. Together Felix and Zelda form a formidable duo, a kind of brother-sister act that endures all kinds of highs and lows as they try to survive everything the Nazi regime has to throw at them.

A page-turning adventure

To supply any more detail would spoil the plot, because the enjoyment of reading Once & Then is letting the adventure unfurl page by page, and experiencing the adrenalin rushes, the shocks and the tears that this brings. There’s plenty of laughs in the book, too, a delightfully naive child-like humour that softens the blows of what would otherwise be a terribly dark and depressing story.

But the best part, especially for book lovers, is the infectious enthusiasm for storytelling that exists within Felix and his undying love for British writer Richmal Crompton and her humorous Just William stories.

I clamber over the beds and squeeze onto the floor and take a book from the shelf. Just William by Richmal Crompton. It’s still one of my favourite books in the whole world. As I open it I try not to remember Mum and Dad reading it to me.
Instead, I read a bit to myself. About William’s dog. He’s called Jumble and he’s a mixture of about a hundred different dogs and William loves him even when he pees in William’s new boots.
Mum and Dad said I can have a dog like Jumble one day.
Stop it.
Stop thinking about them.
William is training Jumble to be a pirate. That’s what I love about William. He always stays hopeful, and no matter how bad things get, no matter how much the world turns upside down, his mum and dad never die.
Not ever.
I know I should be getting back, but I can’t get up at the moment. All I can do is stay here on the floor, with Just William and Zelda’s carrot, thinking about Mum and Dad and crying.

Once & Then is a powerful story about the strength and resilience of the human spirit. It’s about courage and hope, and surviving against the odds. And while it tackles one of the darkest times in 20th century history, Gleitzman does it sensitively without losing any of the important detail. There’s plenty of death here, and cruelty, but it’s not sensationalist or gratuitous. “This story is my imagination trying to grasp the unimaginable,” he writes in his afterward. I think he’s achieved it.

Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, London, Publisher, Rose Tremain, Setting, Vintage

‘The Road Home’ by Rose Tremain

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RoadHome

Fiction – paperback; Vintage; 365 pages; 2008.

Rose Tremain is one of those British authors who has been on the periphery of my reading existence for about 10 years. She’s been hard at work crafting novels — 11 at last count — and the odd short story collection, but I have only ever read Music and Silence, which won best novel in the 1999 Whitbread Awards. In fact, I adored that book so much, it may partially explain why I’ve shied away from reading anything else by Tremain: I’ve been scared that nothing else could live up to the beauty of my first experience reading her work.

I have had her 1992 novel Sacred Country in my reading queue for a year or so, but then she won this year’s Orange Prize with The Road Home and I wondered whether it was time to give her another shot. A half-price promotion at Waterstone’s was the final push I needed, and so, that was how I found myself last weekend opening this book and falling in love with it.

The story is essentially about an immigrant from an unspecified Eastern European country (I imagine it is Poland and wondered why Tremain had refused to just come out and say this), who arrives in London determined to make enough money to support his elderly mother and young daughter back home.

Lev is in his early 40s and still grieving over the death of his wife, 36-year-old Marina, from leukemia, so there’s a sense of melancholia about him. But he is also prepared to work hard and knows to get anywhere in life he must put aside his personal troubles and just get on with it.

Naively believing that it is possible to survive in London for £20 a week, he initially struggles to get settled, sleeping rough and making a measly fiver here and there by delivering leaflets for a kebab shop. But his luck turns when he scores a job washing dishes at a restaurant run by a famous chef (the fictional GK Ashe who has a  touch of the Gordon Ramsay’s about him).

With a little help from Lydia, a fellow compatriot whom he befriended on the long bus journey to London, he finds himself a room to rent in a house owned by the genial Christy Slane, a recently separated Irish plumber. Together Lev and Christy strike up a wonderful friendship, based partly on shared grief and the fact they both have young daughters of around the same age.

When Lev finds himself falling in love with Sophie, a colleague, it seems as if his new English life is finally complete, but it’s really just the beginning of a complex, often bumpy, occasionally funny and constantly challenging journey…

Initially, I was gripped by this very human story. Lev is a remarkably likable and sympathetic character. I loved reading the descriptions of London through an immigrant’s eyes, having been one of those myself a decade ago. But while Tremain makes his struggles quite tough, they don’t always ring true. That Lev would find himself such a compassionate, helpful and friendly landlord, for a start, seemed unlikely. That he would land such a great job with so little English also seemed problematic. And his lack of friendship with other immigrants from his country — aside from the slightly highly-strung Lydia — seemed unrealistic. If you have ever been an immigrant you will know that you seek out others from your country, often without realising it, and congregate together, if only because the sound of a familiar accent (or language) is a comfort.

I had other problems with this book the further I got into it. There are inconsistencies in Lev’s character (that he could be so violent towards a female in one particular disturbing scene and then be unable to fight off two 12-year-old muggers in another, for example) and there’s a tendency to resort to immigrant stereotypes (the drunk Irishman, the fat curry-cooking Indian, the aloof and mysterious Chinaman). While it is clear that for much of the story Lev is living on the poverty-line, or surviving just beneath it, he still owns a mobile phone and thinks nothing of phoning his friend Rudi, back home: phone debt never seems to enter the equation.

But the thing that annoyed me most was the story’s slide, somewhere after the half-way point, into a kind of rose-coloured upbeat fairy tale that had me guessing the ending 100 pages before it arrived. It was like Maeve Binchy suddenly took over the narrative and injected a bit of heart-warming sentimentality. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it effectively ruined what had been an extraordinarily realistic tale up to that point. Suddenly it changed tack and became a vastly different book to the one it had promised to be.

Perhaps I am being overly critical. Perhaps Tremain wanted to show that it is entirely possible to achieve your dreams if you get all the horrible stuff — like struggling to survive on a minimum wage — out of the way first. But the promise of the first 180 or so pages did not play out and by the time I reached the final page I was more disappointed than satisfied.

Still, despite these flaws, I enjoyed The Road Home and found myself underlining sentences that struck me with their beauty, such as: “Planes kept passing overhead, embroidering the sky with garlands of vapour.” And this: “On the policeman’s hip, his radio made sudden, violent sounds, like the coughing of a dying man.”