The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz, Denis Avey

I can’t say enough about this book. I don’t even know where to begin or how to find the works to properly convey the magnitude of what is written here and how it is expressed.

I will simply say that this is one of the most important books that I have ever encountered and been privileged enough to read. I have fortunately read widely about the Holocaust and the tragedies of WWII both from an historical and a personal perspective, but, I have never read anything like Avey’s account.

I have visited Yad Vashem and the Washington Holocaust Museum and the Jewish Museum in Sydney and each has been profound and moving and austere. I have read Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and countless others. And I have been stilled by the enormity of what they endured and how they managed to convey the intensity of the horror that they experienced and over which they triumphed. I have done courses about the Holocaust, read poems about the Holocaust, seen photographs depicting the trauma and the chaos and the inhumanity.

I find myself pondering what it is that Avey has done which so distinguishes this book?

I think that the only way to explain how moved I was by this text is to use Avey’s own words, taken from the point of the book where he is explaining how he swapped clothes with a Jewish prisoner and took his place in Auschwitz, giving up the security that his Prisoner of War status afforded him:

“I lay and listened to the wheezing and groaning of the others in the dark. Someone was rambling to himself, endlessly repeating the same locked-in phrases. He was not alone. There were the screams of people reliving by night the terrors of the day, a beating, a hanging, a selection. For others it would be the loss of a wife, a mother, a child on arrival. When they awoke, the nightmares continued around them. For them there was no escape.

When you give up, you don’t even feel pain any more. Every emotion or feeling is cut away. That’s how they were. That’s how it was.

I struggled to breathe again. It was stiflingly hot and there was the putrid smell of ripening bodies. Auschwitz III was like nothing else on earth; it was hell on earth. This is what I had to come to witness but it was a ghastly, terrifying experience.”

“It was days before I was able to reflect on those hours in Auschwitz III and appreciate the utter desperation of the place. It was the worst thing you could do to a man, I realised. Take everything away from him – his possessions, his pride, his self-esteem – and then kill him. Kill him, slowly. Man’s inhumanity to man doesn’t begin to describe it. It was far worse than the horror I faced in the desert war. Then I had an enemy before me and I did my duty. I was good at it and so I survived.”

I think that Avey’s text is so powerful because the impact that the bestiality that he witnessed had on him is so clear in the way he describes things:

“People talk about man’s inhumanity to man, but that wasn’t human or inhuman – it was bestial. Love and hate meant nothing there. It was indifference. I felt degraded by each mindless murder I witnessed and could do nothing about. I was living obscenity.”

This obscenity haunted Avey for over 60 years, tormenting him with nightmares, leaving him bereft of a language which could broach the horrors he had witnessed.

I loved this book. I think that Avey’s message will stay with me for ever: bad things only happen when righteous people do nothing.

Denis Avey, you are a great man and clearly deserving of a place in heaven.

The Book of Lies, Mary Horlock

Textpublishing provides the following outline of this book:

Guernsey, 1985. Fifteen-year-old Catherine Rozier has a secret she can no longer keep to herself. It’s about the night her best friend fell from the cliffs.

Twenty years earlier, Charlie Rozier stands at the edge of the same cliffs, looking for a confession of a different kind. He thinks he was betrayed by his friend during the Occupation, and now he wants the truth to come out.

This stunning debut from Mary Horlock is about the conflicts and trials of growing up, the secrets of families, and the repressed histories that we all harbour. Captivating and moving, it is a journey with two characters whose unique voices the reader will not easily forget.

It sounds captivating. It wasn’t.

I really and truly struggled with this book. I so desperately wanted to like the characters, to be drawn into the plot and to be carried away into another time and place. But, none of this happened. I found the first part of the book terribly boring, slow moving and at times confusing. I felt as though there was something there waiting to be discovered but it was never really revealed. My position as reader in this relationship was frustrating to say the least and I read on to the final page only because of this feeling that buried here was something great.

Despite the challenges that I faced in actually completing this book (read: it took me a REALLY REALLY REALLY LLLLLOOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGG time!), what I found most interesting was the context of Guernsey during WWII. In fact, I was so taken by this background that at times I found myself researching some of the events and descriptions which Horlock provided in outlining the backdrop for part of the story.

When I go back and reread the book’s opening, it doesn’t seem so bad. It actually captures some of the elements which so attracted me to the book in the first place. For a moment I have to consider that perhaps I have missed the book’s essence … but no, I don’t think this is the case. I wasn’t convinced on too many levels – even the title didn’t seem to fit with the angst that this book described. Poor Cat, fat and lumpy she seemed to me, totally out of place, exactly as I imagine Guernsey to be, funnily enough (not that I have anything but assumptions to base that on!). But, rather than empathise with Cat, I found her irritating. She grated on me as I imagine she grated on her peers. And, to top it all off, I found Nicolette’s actions totally over-exaggerated and unrealistic, especially toward the end as Cat tries to recall the events of the night on the cliff. Whether Nic’s behaviour is described in this way as a means to convey Cat’s version of events (a type of justification), I cannot be sure. Nonetheless, there are too many moments in this text where Nic seems excessive in terms of characterisation.

Feel free to read some other reviews here, here and here.

What has stayed with me most from this read is how relieved I am that I finally reached the last page!

(As an aside, I have read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and I found that a far more endearing read.)

The Messenger, Yannick Haenel

I got this book courtesy of the good people at textpublishing. I heard great things about Haenel’s work so I decided to put it aside until such time that I was ready to devote my total concentration to it.

I have studied quite a bit about the Holocaust, doing a course at the Sydney Jewish Museum, visiting Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Holocaust museum in Washington and reading various fictional and non-fictional accounts. I have met Elie Wiesel and revelled in his softly spoken brilliance. For a time I was overloaded with Holocaustisms and couldn’t stomach reading any more or thinking further about the unfathomable events which transpired in Europe during World War II.

So, it was with a bit of angst and trepidation that I opened The Messenger last week and started to read. Having completed the book I am unsure how to describe it. It is clearly faction – a fictional account of factual events. It is  part documentary and part narrative, a story about Jan Karski, a non Jewish Pole who lands up involved with the Polish underground, trying to publicise the fate of the Jews of Poland to the rest of the world. Karski’s mission is doomed but makes for fascinating reading. He visits concentration camps, meets with dignitaries like Churchill and Roosevelt and tries desperately not to lose himself beneath all the hardship that he witnesses.

Haenel’s book is an attempt to explore some of the complex issues involved in bearing witness. Karski as a protagonist is a perfect example of the challenges that anyone has to endure in order to survive witnessing horror. He is torn apart by his desire to bear witness to what he has seen in a public fashion. He speaks about his experiences until he can, quite literally, no longer speak any more and is rendered silent. He realises the futility of his need to give voice to the horrors:

“In the end, what touched them was not the fact that the Jews of Europe were being exterminated, it was that I felt so miserable. I was the one who touched them, not the fate of the Jews, and even less that of Poland. Of course, they found it all terrible; of course, they wanted the Nazis to stop inflicting such horrors.”

Through his text, Haenel gives voice to some of the deeper issues surrounding the Holocaust – why did the Allies not intervene earlier? Why did they feign ignorance? Why did they not bomb the camps? Haenel has no answer, but the very fact that he raises these questions in the manner in which he does so, was intriguing.

“I have lived through the end of what was called ‘humanity’. You must be careful about that word, I used to tell my students, it may even no longer be possible to use it correctly, because it has served as an alibi for the worst atrocities, it has been used as a cover-up for the most abject causes, both in the West and in the Communist countries. The word ‘humanity’ has become so compromised during the twentieth century that, each time it is used, it is as if we start to lie. It is not even possible to talk about ‘crimes against humanity’, as people did in the sixties … speaking about ‘crimes against humanity’ implies that a part of humanity has been preserved from barbarity, but the barbarity affects the entire world, as was shown by the extermination of the Jews of Europe, in which not only the Nazis were involved, but also the Allies.”

What Karski comes to terms with is that he cannot escape his responsibility to keep telling the story: “A witness’s life is no longer his, it belongs only to his testimony, and this cannot be stopped. It is impossible for a witness to bear witness just once; when you start bearing witness, you have to continue doing so ceaselessly, your words can never stop, and everyone should be able to benefit from them.”

I was torn, with Karski, by this book; torn by Haenel’s massive task to explore these issues and torn by revisiting the history of the horrors of the Shoah. This is one of those remarkable must read books. It is the duty of every person to grapple with the complexities of these gross atrocities against people and to try, on some level, to ensure that such a nightmare is never repeated.

Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson

I revisited this book recently for a student, just to refresh myself. I had forgotten about its austerity and I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying it, despite the fact that I knew what was unfolding. I think that at the time of my first reading I must have been less intune to the subtle racial under-currents which litter this book – although I’m not sure how this was possible. I don’t recall being so struck by the situation of the Japanese in America during the Second World War. Perhaps I was more taken by Guterson’s beautiful prose. In any event, I was enthralled by the way that Guterson managed to so clearly convey the complexity of this dynamic and the depth of emotion which built up, over time, in both the Japanese and the white American communities.

I was thrilled to be able to relate my reading with the photographs taken by Dorothea Lange depicting some of the traumatic events which became a part of life for Japanese people during this time.

I think that perhaps it was Lange’s haunting imagery which accompanied me through this second reading and made this book come alive for me.

One of the striking elements of this book is how Guterson manages to utilise a crime scene and trial to actually deal with these issues which are so central to American identity and history. Guterson’s characters are vividly dispersed and unfolded throughout their encounters with the victim and the protagonist, Kabuo. It is through their testimony at Kabuo’s trial that we come to know them each intimately. Whereas most crime fiction novels place the plot at the centre of their structure, for Guterson, it sits contentedly in the background, allowing him to flesh out the more subtle issues which are clearly so central to his understanding of America’s small town history.

I am intrigued to read more of Guterson’s work. Any suggestions?