This is a feature originally published in the Jewish Chronicle or The JC.com on 25/9/2015
“All
I can do for my family who were lost is to say I am with you in spirit. I take
on myself, as much as I can bear, the terrible despair and suffering and heartbreak
and pain that was visited on you. Although it is only a feeble gesture, I stand
with you at the moment of death, and create a living link with you. That’s all
I can do.” Mark Forstater
Mark Forstater’s book, I Survived a Secret
Nazi Extermination Camp, is a slim volume in three parts published by
Psychology News. The first section is a brief introduction to the Holocaust,
referencing the unique journalist and biographer Gitta Sereny. The second is a
testimony for the Jewish Historical Commission by Rudolph Reder, one of two
known Jewish survivors of the Belzec extermination camp in Poland: the other
being Chaim Hirszman, who joined a communist
militia in postwar Poland and was shot in 1946 before he could testify to his
wartime experiences. The camp was “secret” in the sense that by the end of the
war it had been covered over with flowers and trees, no visible trace remaining
and those responsible for “vanishing” it had themselves been murdered at
Sobibor.
Reder, above, had the role of “oven specialist”
at the facility where an estimated 600,000 Jews were murdered, a skill that
made him valuable to his SS captors for four months in 1942 until he was able
to effect an escape so prosaic that “you couldn’t make it up” does it a
disservice: he was taken into the nearest town as slave labour to pick up some
supplies, whereupon his captors got drunk and fell asleep, allowing him simply
to walk away. He spent the rest of the Nazi occupation of Poland hiding at the
house of a woman who had worked for his family and whom he eventually married.
The third part, which is beautifully
written – in contrast to the deeply troubling, matter-of-fact staccato of the
second – describes Forstater’s rationale for taking on the project and the
process that formed it. As a Jew from Philadelphia born in 1943, a baby-boomer
who has recently been in the UK news for winning a court case against the Monty
Python team, he says the Holocaust affected him hardly at all until he was 13
or 14 years old. “It all seemed to have happened very far away, to a people who
lived in a black and white world, in grimy ancient ghettos. Here in peaceful
and plentiful Philadelphia … it seemed an incredible – even an impossible thing
to happen. It was no wonder everyone thought of Hitler as a mad man.”
He says it was not until the advent of
the internet – and specifically Forstater’s discovery of www.Jewishgen.org – that the thing became deeply personal for him and he was
able to trace a web of ancestors whose existence he had barely considered but
nearly all of whom had perished at Madjanek, a concentration camp where Jews
from Lublin were sent, and Belzec, its closest extermination camp. The chance
discovery of Reder’s testimony in a museum gift shop “with the title Belzec
printed in rough red letters on a glossy black cover” led to this project:
Forstater realised when reading it that Reder had probably dug the graves and
carried the bodies of his relatives. So, then, a retelling of his own stateside
family history, done with an eye for the telling detail, has become a meditation
for the extended family he never knew: the domesticity of 1950s and 60s
Philadelphia a small compensation for the abrupt silencing of the massed ranks
of European Jewry.
It is an extraordinary book. To say
that the section containing Reder’s testimony – surely one of the pre-emininent
documents of the Holocaust - is a “primary source” would be strange because the
effect when reading it is of being crowded and jostled by the fictionalised
versions of these events that have become standard fare – Schindler’s List, The
Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. And yet there is something else.
Every so often the various lenses – the
writerly eye or systems analyst – that we must use to view the horror of the
events at Belzec, described here in almost unbearable detail, slip and the
realisation that they happened to the person actually telling them to you is like a punch in the face, in the
sense of a weirdly altered personal reality. To make the story make any kind of
sense I had to focus on details.
And so I found myself dwelling on the bizarre
idea that music was an integral part of the camp’s routine: that an orchestra
of inmates playing instruments belonging to the dead accompanied the removal of
bodies from the gas chamber. That the SS decreed songs should be sung on
certain occasions and that one particular SS guard forced the orchestra to play
a tune called Highlander Aren’t You Sad? over and over again.
I found myself wondering whether, as
Forstater says he was told, it is really possible for a person’s hair to go
white in a matter of minutes (internet says no) and what it would do to one’s
psychosexual development for one’s first sight of a naked woman to be in a
picture of Belzec inmates running to their deaths, an experience Forstater
describes having had while reading The Scourge of the Swastika by Lord Russell
of Liverpool. I found myself wondering also, given Reder’s detailed descriptions
of the behavior of some of the SS guards, whether psychopathy was a job
requirement and how exactly the candidates for the SS were selected? How is it
possible – though apparently it was – that Reder was an “oven specialist” and
yet did not know about Zyklon B?
It is the issue of empathy that has
stayed with me more than anything, though. Unavoidably the nature of Reder’s
testimony is matter of fact: its value as a historical document being in direct
proportion to its credibility. And yet in order to remember the events that he
lived through without killing himself as many others did – Reder died in
Toronto in 1968 - a deadening of the mind must have taken place. Would this be a human strength or a weakness? Forstater’s
warm rememberings of Philadelphia suggest that empathy is a joy and yet in the
context of Belzec empathy would kill you. Moreover, what are the ramifications
of this for modern Jewish identity?
Forstater has made something of
enduring value here: he and Reder both survived Belzec in a sense. I urge you
not to look away.
*
I Survived a Secret
Nazi Extermination Camp is available from Psychology News (http://www.psychologynews.org.uk/catalog/i4.html) There is an audio version read by David Suchet available on
iTunes.
* If you appreciated this article you may also be interested in this, called Sound of Heimat. Or why the Germans hate their own folk music