peteryoung | Entries tagged with holocaust

The Polish composer Henryk Górecki, whose 'holy minimalist' Symphony No. 3 is, for my money, one of the highlights of 20th century classical music, has died age 76.

Though it dates back to the mid-1970s, like many Brits I first heard this astounding symphony via Classic FM in 1992. But I'm surprised to learn now that both the symphony and Górecki were rather misrepresented on both the radio and the specially made TV documentary that I still recall seeing that same year: Symphony No. 3 was actually not written as a response to Auschwitz (situated just down the road from where Górecki lived) as just about everyone at the time was led to believe. From Wikipedia:

While Górecki has stated that for many years he sought to produce a work specifically in response to Auschwitz, he has resisted that interpretation of the symphony, which he prefers to be viewed in a wider context. Other critics have attempted to interpret the symphony in spiritual terms, an approach which Górecki has also dismissed.

Górecki has said of the work, "Many of my family died in concentration camps. I had a grandfather who was in Dachau, an aunt in Auschwitz. You know how it is between Poles and Germans. But Bach was a German too—and Schubert, and Strauss. Everyone has his place on this little earth. That's all behind me. So the Third Symphony is not about war; it's not a Dies Irae; it's a normal Symphony of Sorrowful Songs."

For me at least, the continuing potency of this piece of music will make it very hard to separate from thoughts about the holocaust after nearly two decades of thinking about it in precisely that way.

69) Soazig Aaron, Refusal, 2002
Sometimes it seems that any new fiction centred on Auschwitz is required to offer up new horrors previously untouched upon and Soazig Aaron has certainly attempted to go down that route too, somewhat in the tracks of William Styron's Sophie's Choice (which I haven't read). In this case I'm not sure it was necessary, but as the point of Refusal is to focus on some of the after-effects of the horror, perhaps you can't really do that without the inclusion of a few graphic scenes as flashbacks. In Refusal much of the evil of Auschwitz happened to Klara Schwarz-Roth, a German-born Parisian Jew, separated from her daughter and sent there where she was forced to learn many of the darker aspects of survival, which also prevent her from properly rejoining the world upon her release. Klara is a fascinating and eloquent character, if also deeply scarred and deeply scary. Even though the story is told through the eyes of her pre-war friend Angélika, Klara takes centre stage throughout. This is one of those books that won't let go and is, even with Klara's self-imposed and self-limiting options for her future, defiantly difficult to argue with.

Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl, 1989
The two linked stories included in The Shawl were not combined into a unitary edition until 1989, having both first appeared in The New Yorker earlier in the 1980s. The first story is 'The Shawl' which, in a mere two thousand highly succinct words, is calculated to deliver a short, sharp shock of the first order, describing the plight of Rosa Lublin, a Polish teenage mother and concentration camp inmate who witnesses the murder of her daughter Magda by a Nazi camp guard.

It might have been a self-contained if very bleak tale, had not Cynthia Ozick, a recognised American 'lady of letters', capped it with a more sympathetic but no less saddening portrait of Rosa in the second story, 'Rosa'. Now living in Miami, Florida, it is immediately clear Rosa lost more than her child that day fifty years before, there are aspects of herself that she has sadly also not been able to recover. With an internal life that is far richer than the actual life she lives out, Rosa writes letters to her late daughter, convincing herself that Magda has grown into a wise and worldly woman, while herself hiding this secret life from others by simply stating, more realistically, that thieves took her life. Like the shawl that once held Magda, memories of Magda herself seem to have become the shawl that Rosa uses to protect her permanently damaged psyche from the reality of a daughter and life stolen from her. There are tormented psychological depths here sketched out but to my mind not fully explored, instead going for a more distilled portrait of personal pain and inner despair, making it a book probably best approached with some trepidation.

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Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1959 (Penguin Classics, 2004)
Had Borowski not commited suicide at the age of twenty nine it is thought he would have gone on to become one of Poland's truly great writers. The defining two years of his life were spent in Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1943 and 1945, a period which undoubtedly coloured his perception of humanity for his remaining six years and which found an outlet in the short amount of Holocaust fiction which he produced, gathered here in this short, valuable collection. These are tales based on true happenings in Auschwitz but told with a storytelling licence that makes no bid for literary greatness or emotive overkill, yet it is just this act of 'telling it like it is' that gives This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen its impact.

The distinguishing thing about concentration camp life, as Borowski tells it, is that there is no clearly defined line between victims and perpetrators. Camp inmates act with frequent self-interested cruelty to each other, something that Borowski resigned himself to accepting is a trait of anyone whose back is against the wall and whose life is under threat; the Nazis, however, do reserve both the more gratuitous and 'professional' acts of inhumanity for themselves and appear to relish in them, there being little that is identifiably human about them, as we encounter them here. This short book seems to offer an 'entomologist's microcosm' of one extreme of human experience that does benefit from some occasional optimistic colouring and black humour, though amongst the almost everyday telling there are some particularly memorable and shocking sequences, delivered deadpan and with surprisingly little anger or cynicism. This collection deserves its 'classic' status.

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