Tolik Semerik (the author) is around 12 years old when Nazis enter his hometown. The Soviet Army has fThis is the story of Kyiv under Nazi occupation.
Tolik Semerik (the author) is around 12 years old when Nazis enter his hometown. The Soviet Army has fled in disarray. The Nazis where too strong to resist, the Soviets needed to regroup. Tolik is an only child. His mother is a teacher. He sees her rarely; she works long hours. He is mostly at home with his grandparents. His grandpa hates the Soviets. He feels he lived better under the tsar. There were no collective farms then. His grandma is more cautious of saying bad things about the former or the current occupiers. She is very religious.
Tolik is a typical adolescent. He ventures far and wide. He is curious. During the first days of the Nazi occupation, he sees it all. He witnesses the destruction of Khreshchatyk, where Nazi command was stationed (the NKVD planted and left explosives under the buildings), and he sees how Jews are moved to Babi Yar. He then meets a direct witness, someone who escaped the ravine, and tells her story in Babi Yar, with all the killing, the moving corpses and the dead.
In occupied Kyiv hardships soon began. There was little food. Tolik needed to get by and to help his family. There was no income for his grandparents and his mom, no longer a teacher, made little in the factory she worked at for a while. He starts buying and selling stuff on the black market. He was scavenging. At some point, he worked for a butcher who made horse-meat sausages in his home. Tolik was very enterprising. He managed to keep his family alive, with the exception of his grandma.
The years of occupation tell a sort of coming-of-age story. Tolik becomes more aware of his surroundings. He not only sees the darkness in his world but he comments on it. In the end he is transformed. He is no ordinary 14-year-old at the end of the occupation; he is an adult who has witnessed hunger, killing, crime, prostitution, collaboration, prisoners of war marching and dying, Jews marched to their death, Nazi soldiers, Soviet soldiers, resistance, the city, the villages, the bombings—everything.
This is not just a story of Babi Yar. In fact, the Holocaust, the killing in the ravine, makes up a small part of the book. The rest is comprised of stories in occupied Kyiv.
I realized that my grandfather, that great admirer of the Germans, was a fool. That there is in this world neither brains, nor goodness, nor good sense, but only brute force. Bloodshed. Starvation. Death. That I was alive and sitting there with my brushes beneath the stall, but no one knew why. That there was not the slightest hope, not even a glimmer of hope, of justice being done. It would never happen. No one would ever do it. The world was just one big Babi Yar. And there two great forces had come up against each other and were striking against each other like hammer and anvil, and the wretched people were in between, with no way out; each individual wanted only to live and not to be maltreated, to have something to eat, and yet they howled and screamed and in their fear they were grabbing at each other’s throats, while I, a little blob of watery jelly, was sitting in the midst of this dark world. Why? What for? Who had done it all? There was nothing, after all, to hope for! Winter. Night.
‘You stupid woman, you don’t understand a thing!’ Gramp shouted. ‘To hell with their lousy promises. But don’t you go comparing Hitler with Lenin or Stalin. He is at least a clever German, and they were just our own good-for-nothings.’ ‘They’re all as bad as one another,’ Lena said. ‘It’s the same story over and over again: whoever happens to be the latest scoundrel to get into power always declares right away that till he came along everything was wrong, that the struggle for a better future was only just beginning, and that therefore people would have to make sacrifices. Right from the outset—sacrifices! Sacrifices! The scoundrels!’
The most frightening thing on earth was death. It was such a terrible thing when a person died, even a very old person, even if it was the result of illness or just naturally, from old age. Was it not enough to have such a frightful prospect ahead of us in any case, without people continually inventing new artificial ways of bringing death about, arranging more and more of those cursed famines, executions and Babi Yars?
It is an interesting read from another point of the view: when it was first written and sent to the local Soviet publisher, the book was heavily censored. Kuznetsov seemed to have been unaware of how damning to the regime his book could be. He says that he writes things truthfully, as they happened, but in a dictatorship this doesn’t work. In the English version, after Kuznetsov emigrated, he did something remarkable: he included and highlighted all the censored words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages, as well as all the new additions. When you read it, you get the sense of how censorship actually works, of how a simple omission can change completely the meaning and the feeling of a story. How, with just a stroke of the pencil, a villain can become a hero. You also see what was sensitive to the regime, what was acceptable, and what was not (not always what you would expect).
I studied his hands. They were the big hands of a farm worker, with thick, calloused fingers and broken nails. He was obviously a very skilful operator who stole and sold grain belonging to the government, took a whole pile of money from Degtyaryov for it, smiled and went on his way. I never saw him again and never shall see him, but he engraved himself on my memory, perhaps because he put his arm round me like a father. At all events, because of him the whole frightful situation became even more confused for me. Those men who operated the machine-guns in the Yar had probably been the same sort of people, who knew how to handle horses, had unattractive wives and big-eared little boys. They would boil up their coffee on a bonfire, grasp the handle of a machine-gun as if it were the handle of a plough and shoot, and then go back and boil some more coffee and tell each other jokes…
How many there were of them we shall never find out. All the officially published figures are only estimates, changed to suit the occasion. All the same I believe that no major crime against society can remain undetected. Some old Masha who saw everything will always turn up, or else a few people—a dozen, two or even just one—will manage to escape and live to tell the tale. However much you burn and disperse and cover over and trample down, human memory still remains. History cannot be deceived, and it is impossible to conceal something from it for ever.
Avem aici mărturiile a opt români supraviețuitori ai Holocaustului, culese și publicate inițial în 2009. De fapt, nu sunt mărturii, sunt portrete – unAvem aici mărturiile a opt români supraviețuitori ai Holocaustului, culese și publicate inițial în 2009. De fapt, nu sunt mărturii, sunt portrete – un gen ziaristic din ce în ce mai rar. Portretele sunt scrise foarte bine. Sunt emoționante și tulburătoare. Lovesc exact cum trebuie și (sper) unde trebuie. Deși e un volum micuț, ar putea fi citit lejer într-o jumătate de oră, totuși nu ai cum să nu faci pauze în care să te reculegi și să te liniștești.
Acum, în 2024, din cei opt mai sunt în viață doar doi. Șase dintre ei (dar și alții) au fost intervievați la sfârșitul anilor ’90 de Shoah Foundation/Visual History Archive, organizație înființată de Steven Spielberg după ce a făcut Schindler’s List. Unele mărturii video sunt disponibile dacă îți faci cont, la altele poți ajunge doar printr-o instituție (bibliotecă) cu acces instituțional. Despre Leonard Zăicescu a apărut un articol recent în Europa Liberă. Trei din supraviețuitorii din acest volum au publicat cărți/memorii despre Holocaust....more
I must admit, I don’t spend much time researching the books I am buying/picking up. Most of the time, a trusted recommendation, the name of the authorI must admit, I don’t spend much time researching the books I am buying/picking up. Most of the time, a trusted recommendation, the name of the author, a well-written review or a feeling about what the book is about is enough. In this case, I was under the impression that I would get Vasily Grossman’s texts published in Krasnaya Zvezda throughout the Second World War, which would have been good enough. Instead, I got his unpublished and uncensored notes from the war, with very detailed context by the editor, something even better. However, now I need his texts, in the form they were published, for comparison.
Grossman was not fit to fight, but he spent almost three years (out of four) on different fronts with the Red Army. He lived amongst the soldiers, and he gained their trust. His reporting became very popular both on the frontline and back home. Krasnaya Zvezda, the Red Army’s official newspaper, became more popular and read than other, more widespread newspapers. This was all thanks to Grossman and his style of reporting. He was not interested in official propaganda, in big battles and big victories; he was focused on the individual. He picks characters and follows them: soldiers, commanders, infantry, tanks corps, aviation, snipers, people under occupation and people freshly liberated, collaborators, women – auxiliary staff, nurses, campaign wives, rape victims, children. He had some time off in 1942 and he wrote a very well-received war novel. He was appreciated and published even though he was not following any directives. With time, however, his articles were modified and censored. He became very frustrated with this.
He was with the Red Army when it retreated from Ukraine – a very sad time for him. He knew that his mother didn’t get out and he would probably never see her again. He was at Stalingrad for most of the battle. He was with the counter-offensive: at Kursk, liberating Ukraine, in Poland – in Warsaw and Lodz, but also at Majdanek and Treblinka, and all the way to Berlin. Sometime during 1943 he was becoming aware of Soviet antisemitism, at the time when he was discovering the scale of the Nazi atrocities. He was also a Jew. The official Soviet propaganda did not recognize the Nazi antisemitism and Holocaust as a distinct crime, and every time Grossman reported on this, he was censored. He worked, together with other writers, on The Black Book (of Soviet Jewry). It was not allowed to be published in the Soviet Union.
One reason I became interested in Grossman is because I knew he was with the Red Army when it got to Treblinka. When he got there, there was nothing left of Treblinka but fields and roads covered in ashes, a few personal effects sticking out from them and a handful of survivors hidden in the forest. However, Grossman was able to write a beautiful, albeit sad, tragic and heart-piercing essay. (It was not published in Krasnaya Zvezda, but in Znamya, a few months later). Thankfully, this essay is quoted in full. It is an impressive long piece of reconstructive journalism, where Grossman pieces together everything he learns there, all the small details, all the survivors’ and witnesses’ testimonies, to tell the story of Treblinka and its factory of death, from the moment people arrived there to the last days of the camp. He gets almost everything right (apart from the number of victims, which was estimated better later, on different methodology).
‘It was a luxury to get a bullet’, said Kozensky, a doctor who escaped from the camp. People said to me that it was many times more terrible to live in Treblinka than to die there.
It is a miracle that Grossman’s notes survived. Some of them would have been reason enough for a death sentence in the era of Stalinism. On the counter-offensive, Grossman notices more and more than the Red Army is not what he had idealized. After crossing into Poland and then into Germany, he saw how Soviet soldiers became beasts, interested only in raping and looting. It was very sad for him, even though he remained loyal to the Army. He could not forget the sacrifice and the resilience at Stalingrad.
He used his notes in his later novels: For a Just Cause and Life and Fate. The first one was censored, published and then, a few years later, removed from the libraries. The second one, his masterpiece, where his family is the inspiration, where there is a tribute to his mother, where he puts on the same plate Nazism and Stalinism, was never published during his lifetime (it is a miracle a copy survived and found later)....more
I have to say from the start, Primo Levi is one of the best writers about the Holocaust.
This series of essays follows his two memoirs about the experI have to say from the start, Primo Levi is one of the best writers about the Holocaust.
This series of essays follows his two memoirs about the experience at Auschwitz. I am always surprised to see how serene Primo Levi is in his writing. He is not enraged; he does not hate. He also does not forgive. He is still looking for answers, 40 years later after Auschwitz. Here he dwells on different aspects of the experience in an extermination camp but also on the life and character of the survivor. He speaks of the hope in the Lager, of the grey zone in which the survivors lived – because, as he sees is, only the privileged, corrupted ones survived, because, otherwise, without moral compromises, they would have also died –, of the shame to have survived when so many perished, of the useless violence they had to endure, violence that served no purpose, that was an end in itself. He also tries to answer a few questions he was constantly asked: Why did you not escape? Why did you not rebel? Why did you not avoid capture?
I have no energy to write more.
I had to pour me some hard alcohol to be able to transcribe the paragraphs below:
“Until September 1944 there were no children in Auschwitz, they were all killed by gas on arrival. After this date, there began to arrive entire families of Poles arrested at random during the Warsaw insurrection: all of them were tattooed, including the new-born babies. The operation was not very painful and lasted no more than a minute, but it was traumatic. Its symbolic meaning was clear to everyone: this is an indelible mark, you will never leave here; this is the mark with which slaves are branded and cattle sent to the slaughter, and that is what you have become. You no longer have a name; this is your new name. The violence of the tattoo was gratuitous, an end in itself, pure offence. Were the three canvas numbers sewed to pants, jackets and winter coat not enough? No, they were not enough: something more was needed, a non-verbal message, so that the innocent would feel his sentence written on his flesh. It was also a return to barbarism, all the more perturbing for orthodox Jews: in fact, precisely in order to distinguish Hews from the barbarians, the tattoo is forbidden by Mosaic Law.”
“For an orthodox Nazi it must have been obvious, definitive, clear that all Jews must be killed: that was a dogma, a postulate. The children also, of course and especially pregnant women, so that no future enemies should be born. But why, during the furious round-ups in all the cities and villages of their boundless empire, violate the houses of the dying? Why go to the trouble of dragging them on to their trains, take them to die far away, after a senseless journey, die in Poland on the threshold of the gas chambers? In my convoy there were two dying ninety-year-old women, taken out of the Fossoli infirmary: one of the dies en route, nursed in vain by her daughters. Would it not have been simpler, more ‘economical’, to let them die, or perhaps kill them in their beds, instead of adding their agony to the collective agony of the transport? One is truly led to think that, in the Third Reich, the best choice, the choice imposed from above, was the one that entailed the greatest amount of affliction, the greatest amount of waste, of physical and moral suffering. The ‘enemy’ must not only die, but must die in torment.”
“The human ashes coming from the crematoria, tons daily, were easily recognised as such, because they often contained teeth and vertebrae. Nevertheless, they were employed for several purposes: as fill for swamp lands, as thermal insulation and especially notable, they were used instead of gravel to cover the paths of the SS village located near the camp. I couldn’t say whether out of pure callousness or because, due its origins, it was regarded as material to be trampled on.”
“[T]here were insurrections; they were prepared with intelligence and incredible courage by resolute, still physically able minorities. They cost a fearful price in terms of human lives and the collective sufferings inflicted in reprisal, but served and still serve to prove that it is false to say that the prisoners of the German Lagers never tried to rebel. In the intentions of the insurgents, they were to supposed to achieve another, more concrete result: bring the terrifying secret of the massacred to the attention of the free world. And indeed those few whose enterprise was successful, and who after many more depleting vicissitudes had access to the organs of information, did speak: but, as I mentioned in my introduction, they were almost never listened to or believed. Uncomfortable truths travel with difficulty.” (emphasis mine)
Primo Levi committed suicide in 1987, a year after completing this book. Elie Wiesel said, at the time, “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later.”...more
Glad to have come across these two in one volume, for The Truce is the logical continuation of If This is a Man. If one is the descent of man into theGlad to have come across these two in one volume, for The Truce is the logical continuation of If This is a Man. If one is the descent of man into the abyss, the other is his rise from the dead, from where humanity dies, back to humanity itself.
"There were twelve goods wagons for six hundred and fifty men; in mine we were only forty-five, but it was a small wagon. Here then, before our very eyes, under our very feet, was one of those notorious transport trains, those which never return, and of which, shuddering and always a little incredulous, we had so often heard speak. Exactly like this, detail for detail: goods wagons closed from the outside, with men, women and children pressed together without pity, like cheap merchandise, for a journey towards nothingness, a journey down there, towards the bottom. This time it is us who are inside."
In If This is a Man, Primo Levi is a witness. We never forget that he is actually there, in the Auschwitz camp system, at Buna-Monowitz concentration/labour camp, but he does. He is an objective bystander, reporting to us what he sees, day in and day out. Levi was there for almost a year, from February 1944, until the Soviets liberated the camp. Out of 650 Italians in his transport, only 3 returned home. Once there, Levi introduces us into the camp dynamics, who is who and how the hierarchy looks. He tells us about the ever-present hunger, about the best place in line to get the most consistent soup, about the latrines, emptying the buckets in the middle of the night, about the overcrowded barracks, the cold, the selections and the work kommandos. He does not speak of things that he did not witness, but those he did see are enough to make us question human nature and the limits of human endurance.
"But this was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die."
In his writing, Levi is methodical. He is lucid and objective. He does not embellish and he does not exaggerate. The horrors happening there speak for themselves. He does not forgive, but he also does not hate, so his story is without revolt. This does not mean that he is cold, quite the contrary: his text is warm, he obviously cares about the people he writes about, even if most of them are fleeting occurrences in his camp life. Even there he preserved his humanity, memory being the only place where he could write.
"We do not believe in the most obvious and facile deduction: that man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic and stupid in his conduct once every civilized institution is taken away, and that the Haftling is consequently nothing but a man without inhibitions. We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence. But another fact seems to us worthy of attention: there comes to light the existence of two particularly well differentiated categories among men the saved and the drowned."
Towards the end of his stay there, in the winter, when most prisoners die, he had the “luck” (if one can talk about luck in such circumstances) of being assigned to a chemical work commando, meaning little hard manual work in the winter cold. He was also “lucky” to be ill when the Soviets were approaching and the Nazis left the camp with all the prisoners (most died). But I think what saved him is his memory and his refusal to give in and give up. In a place where all hope dies, where there is no more humanity, he still saw glimpses of hope, of humans behaving like humans.
"However little sense there may be in trying to specify why I, rather than thousands of others, managed to survive the test, I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving."
"Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen. Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas-chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again. If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer."
"Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never, seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm – even his – bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine."
The Truce is his journey back home, lasting almost as long as his imprisonment. He spent a lot of time in different displaced persons camps, in Katowice and then in Starye Dorogi. He travelled east, north, south, before going west, through Romania and Hungary, to Austria, Germany, and at last Italy. These are months of regaining strength and his human form, of vagabondage, of getting by or of abundance. He made friends and he describes them vividly. There are a lot of adventures and the book is more light hearted in tone, the will to live/to feel was more powerful, even in the direst situations, than the memories of Auschwitz.
"We had hoped for a short and safe journey, towards a camp equipped to receive us, towards an acceptable substitute for our homes; and this hope formed part of a far greater hope, that of an upright and just world, miraculously re-established on its natural foundations after an eternity of upheavals, of errors and massacres, after our long patient wait. It was a naive hope, like all those that rest on too sharp a division between good and evil, between past and future, but it was on this that we were living. That first crack, and the other inevitable ones, small and large, that followed it, were for us a cause of grief, the more hardly felt because they were unforeseen; for one does not dream for years, for decades, of a better world, without representing it as perfect."
The first book is sad and tragic. Primo Levi does not hate, but I do. He does not point fingers, but I do. He doesn’t need to revolt, because the reader does. It is hard to read, to comprehend, to process and to let go. The second book is comforting, for we all want for happy ends, even if we have to rethink the definition of happiness.
"We felt we had something to say, enormous things to say, to every single German, and we felt that every German should have something to say to us; we felt an urgent need to settle our accounts, to ask, explain and comment, like chess players at the end of a game. Did ‘they* know about Auschwitz, about the silent daily massacre, a step away from their doors? If they did, how could they walk about, return home and look at their children, cross the threshold of a church? If they did not, they ought, as a sacred duty, to listen, to learn everything, immediately, from us, from me; I felt the tattooed number on my arm burning like a sore."
Any well-written, well-researched history book is welcome. We forget how much we forget, and we need constant reminder of the atrocities that our granAny well-written, well-researched history book is welcome. We forget how much we forget, and we need constant reminder of the atrocities that our grandparents lived through or died in. However, any history book should also be read with caution. When one author is attempting too much, he may stumble on things that he does not completely understand or can not easily explain. He may find himself filling in the blanks with assumptions and with opinions that should be put under scrutiny.
Bloodlands is a good history book, but just that. It is not spectacular. It is at the same time a book about WWII and not a book about the WWII. It is a book about the victims of WWII, but not all the victims. It is a history of Eastern Europe in WWII, but not all of Eastern Europe. Perhaps these are the major shortcomings.
Snyder introduces the bloodlands. These bloodlands are along the Ribbentrop-Molotov line, the border zone between the Soviets and the Nazis, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, including Baltic States, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia. It does not include Romania, Bessarabia/Soviet Moldova, Hungary and others. Why? It is not completely clear. It is the space that serves better Snyder’s arguments though.
The history in this book starts in 1933 and ends, more or less, in 1945. Why? Because this is when both Hitler and Stalin were in power. Snyder correlates the crimes of both these criminals to come up with the figure of 14 million victims. He argues that Hitler and Stalin drove each other to greater and greater crimes and they would not have killed so many if they weren’t contemporaries. It is an argument hard to accept. All the crimes they have committed were crimes of opportunity, of need to keep power, of stupidity, cruelty, racism, disregard to the rules of war, madness and disregard to human life altogether. Certainly, some of the events which ended in hundreds of thousands of dead don’t have much to do with the relation between Stalin and Hitler. In 1933, Holodomor, or the Great Famine, in Soviet Ukraine can’t be connected to Hitler. The 1937-1938 purges in Soviet Union as well. The Final Solution was Hitler’s wish and need, not Stalin’s fault. Snyder argues that when Hitler was starting to see that his war against USSR is not going according to the plan, he started implementing his final solution against Jews. However, is it again Snyder who exemplifies that the mass killing of the Jewish people started at the same time as the Barbarossa campaign. The Final Solution is not a consequence of Soviet-Nazi interaction. The fact that the German army starved millions of prisoners of war in overcrowded camps was Hitler’s choice, not because of Stalin, but because Hitler wasn’t advancing in his eastern campaign. You can’t blame one for the choices of other one.
These two criminals had a lot in common. They may very well be the cruellest tyrants in history. They were sick to the bone. I would like to think they were not even human, for a person can’t possibly be so indifferent to the sufferings of millions of fellow humans. But, even if some events in the war were murkier, where people were changing sides, where everyone killed and many were guilty, and it is hard to make sense of it all, to place blame and to be objective, still, there are crimes that Hitler committed and then there are the ones Stalin did. With different motives and different execution.
The 14 million dead is of course a great number. But it does not tell the full story. Snyder only takes the dead from his bloodlands. If people died in the Great Famine provoked by Stalin, he only counts the dead in Soviet Ukraine. If Hitler killed millions of Jews, Snyder only counts those killed in the bloodlands, and so on. His 14 million are the victims of repressive and criminal policies implemented only in the bloodlands, and only between 1933 and 1945, without the military casualties.
The book follows a simple logic without strong arguments. It is easy to blame these two and especially to blame the choices one made on the other. But I think there is much more to each story. This was still a useful read, but the praise the book gets is not entirely justified. Of course, the events described in this book are not leaving me unmoved. It was hard to read and to think about. As is always the case when you read about millions of innocent victims, about families destroyed, lives lost, suffering and despair, and about the savagery of their executioners.
“Each of them died a different death, since each one of them had lived a different life.”
“One day in 1933 a staff writer for the party newspaper Pravda, which denied the famine, received a letter from his Jewish father: ‘This is to let you know’, wrote the father, ‘that your mother is dead. She died of starvation after months of pain.’”
“Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was ‘not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you’. The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or the prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did. Ukraine in 1933 was full of orphans, and sometimes people took them in. Yet without food there was little that even the kindest of strangers could do for such children. The boys and girls lay about on sheets and blankets eating their own excrement, waiting for death.”
4/5
The very small font in my paperback was gruesome....more
Un text interesant, dar care nu m-a răscolit prea mult. Subiectul Holocaustului mi se pare mult prea facil și avantajos pentru un scriitor pentru că mUn text interesant, dar care nu m-a răscolit prea mult. Subiectul Holocaustului mi se pare mult prea facil și avantajos pentru un scriitor pentru că mizează mai mult pe emoție decât pe conținut. Poate doar mi se pare pentru că am citit multe despre acest subiect. Evident că orice text care ne pune în față cu ororile trecutului sunt binevenite, judecata mea este doar din perspectiva unui cititor foarte activ.
Povestea este simplă. Fiica găsește o fotografie și un caiet/jurnal cu însemnările părinților. Tatăl, ucrainean, a fost gardian la Treblinka. Mama – căsătorită cu el chiar dacă știa asta. După câteva gânduri ale fiicei-naratoare, ne sunt oferite însemnările din jurnal, cu mici întreruperi. Conflictul interior al fiicei (cum s-a putut? cum a putut? cum o să pot?) nu mai este dezvoltat ulterior. Chiar dacă tatăl gardian nu a participat activ la crime, având puternice mustrări de conștiință, nimerit acolo din întâmplare, romanul parcă încearcă să ne întrebe: poate cineva care a fost martorul unor mii de crime odioase să fie nevinovat? Sau totuși este un călău prin faptul că nu a făcut nimic?
Mă deranjează faptul că fotografia de pe copertă e de la Auschwitz, nu de la Treblinka.
I am not a stranger to Holocaust literature but somehow this has eluded my radar for a long time, and then it was stuck in my reading list for some moI am not a stranger to Holocaust literature but somehow this has eluded my radar for a long time, and then it was stuck in my reading list for some more. It is partly because I could never read two Holocaust books in a row. I need a long pause between to recover.
Night is one of the best. Short, succinct, to the point. I guess it draws power from it being short. Manages to convey very well the sentiment of dread and despair. Reading, I was recalling my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau and I was heart-broken once again....more
Am fost surprins să găsesc în această carte un narator detaşat, care acceptă aproape cu seninătate ce se întâmplă în jurul lui. Bănuiesc că la momentuAm fost surprins să găsesc în această carte un narator detaşat, care acceptă aproape cu seninătate ce se întâmplă în jurul lui. Bănuiesc că la momentul scrierii a fost un element de autoapărare, un coping mechanism, pentru că altfel evenimentele relatate nu ai putea să le accepţi, să dai impresia că le înţelegi – ele merg dincolo de orice logică. Autorul descoperă că nu există pădure fără uscături, caractere şi categorii umane incoruptibile, şi că în tot întunericul, când te aştepţi cel mai puţin, se strecoară o rază de lumină din locurile cele mai neaşteptate. Un gest omenesc poţi găsi şi într-o mare de mizerie.
Aş fi vrut să citesc mai mult, dar înţeleg nevoia autorului de a nu intra în detalii. Sunt şi lucruri care nu se spun, dar pe care toată lumea le înţelege.
„– Este o ruşine pentru noi toţi! aproape că strigă el. Ne lăsăm duşi la moarte ca vitele la abator! Dacă i-am fi atacat pe nemţi – noi, o jumătate de milion – ne-am fi putut elibera din ghetou sau măcar am fi murit onorabili, nu ca o pată pe obrazul istoriei. Tata asculta. Mai degrabă încurcat, dar cu un zâmbet blând, ridică uşor din umeri şi întrebă: – Cum poţi fi atât de sigur că ne trimit la moarte? Dentistul îşi încleştă mâinile. – Ei, fireşte că nu ştiu cu certitudine. Cum aş putea? Doar n-au de gând să ne spună. Dar nouăzeci la sută poţi fi convins că planul lor e să ne lichideze. Tata zâmbi iar, de parcă ar fi fost şi mai sigur de el după această replică. – Uite, spuse el arătând spre mulţimea adunată în Umschlagplatz. Nu suntem eroi! Suntem nişte oameni cât se poate de obişnuiţi, şi de asta riscăm să ne punem speranţa în acele zece la sută şanse de supravieţuire.”
Loading...
