the holocaust

September 9, 2021

Book 301: Man’s Search For Meaning

“Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.”

Dates read: March 9-12, 2019

Rating: 7/10

One of the interesting/terrifying things about the world as we know it is the amount of information we have access to at any given time. We can learn about virtually anything we want, whenever we want. We can see the world’s greatest art works on demand. And we can see the worst things that people are doing to each other all over the globe. If you start looking, the tragedy in your hometown alone could break your heart.

In the face of profound despair, it can be easy to wonder what the point even is. The Holocaust, of course, is one of the worst events the world has ever seen. Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist living in Austria when Hitler came to power, and like most European Jews, he ended up in a concentration camp. He survived Auschwitz, though, and wrote about how he did so in Man’s Search for Meaning. The book is divided roughly in half: in the first, he tells his own story, and in the second, he expounds upon the therapeutic technique he used to make it through, which he calls logotherapy. Essentially, logotherapy consists of finding meaning in one’s life, no matter how meaningless it might seem.

Like most Holocaust memoirs, this is difficult to read. Frankl’s pre-existing training in psychology is obvious, as he breaks down the ways in which people were psychologically broken upon entering the camps. The procedures used by the Nazis to strip their prisoners of their humanity, their sense of personal dignity and purpose, were brutal and effective. And then, of course, there were the actual physical dangers of the camps: starvation and overwork, which took away strength and energy. For those that did manage to survive, their liberation was not the end of their story. They had to go on to live in the world, and Frankl also talks about the difficulties of re-adjusting to life on the outside.

While not “enjoyable” per se, the portion of the book concerned with Frankl’s own experiences is the most compelling and powerful. The actual detailing of logotherpy in the back half of the book feels almost superfluous, because it’s both described and demonstrated in how he used it to survive. The more it’s described, honestly, the less impact it has…it boils down essentially to the power of positive thinking, to refusing to succumb to the darkness. While it clearly was tremendously important to Frankl, and has surely been helpful to others in their own struggles, it’s not all that interesting or novel to read about. If you’re looking for a Holocaust memoir with unique psychological insight, this is something you’ll really get a lot out of. Just…skip the part at the end with all the psychobabble.

One year ago, I was reading: The Good Soldier

Two years ago, I was reading: Seeing

Three years ago, I was reading: Juliet, Naked

Four years ago, I was reading: Valley of the Dolls

Five years ago, I was reading: The Other Side of the River

June 13, 2019

Book 185: The Book Thief

“Although something inside her told her that this was a crime—after all, her three books were the most precious items she owned—she was compelled to see the thing lit. She couldn’t help it. I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.”

Dates read: October 25-30, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Over the past several months (writing from the end of 2017), there’s been no small amount of debate over what it means to be complicit. Ivanka Trump asserted that she’s not complicit in her father’s presidency, which she wouldn’t necessarily be as a daughter, but she pretty clearly is as a senior advisor in his administration. There’s a growing awareness that to be privileged in a system that’s beneficial to you, whether or not you are an active architect or proponent of it, without taking action for marginalized people also flirts with the line of complicity. No one likes to feel complicit, so we try to find ways to weasel out of it, to find people more actively involved with whatever it is, point the finger at them.

One of the biggest open questions of complicity in the last century is that of the German population under the Third Reich. I suspect, like most things, it fell in some sort of bell curve…some citizens were opposed, some were supporters, and most fell somewhere in between, trying to survive by keeping their heads down. Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief takes us to a small village in Germany during World War II and lets us see that spectrum play out. A young girl named Liesel and her brother are brought by their mother to foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, because their mother can no longer afford to keep them with her. On the way, though, her brother dies, and this is what brings Liesel to the attention of Death.

Death is our narrator, and when the illiterate Liesel snatches a book off the ground as her brother is buried, he (it?) dubs her “the book thief”. Liesel doesn’t actually steal very many books during the course of the story, but it fits well enough. For a while, as Liesel grows to know and love her rough-edged, foul-mouthed foster mother and gentle, patient foster father who teaches her to read, and makes friends with her neighbor Rudy, their little town is isolated from larger events. But the real world can’t be avoided forever, and World War II sweeps over the Hubermann household, bringing a Jewish man into their basement to hide and constant danger lurking everywhere.

The villagers’ attitudes toward Nazism range from passionate true believers to the Hubermanns, who resist joining the Party and hide a Jew for months. Many of their neighbors go along as far as they need to to keep out of trouble. I don’t think this is a perspective we see very often, looking at the ordinary people who exist in these regimes, and so I found it interesting to read. Zusak’s characterizations of everyone who populates the village are a highlight…Liesel herself is probably the least well-developed character, but Hans, Rosa, Rudy, and several of Liesel’s other classmates make vivid impressions and linger in the memory even after the book is closed.

But even though this book tends to get rapturous praise, there were some places where it fell flat, too. I think the Death-as-narrator trick worked less well than it could have…it just struck me as more gimmicky than meaningful and never really developed. I think the constant interjections into the text as “explainers” by Death were overused, and I think Zusak’s writing is sometimes overly focused on going for “wow” instead of letting itself flow. As a whole, though, these are minor quibbles. The book is very good, with vivid and developed characters living in a well-drawn community, and the ending has a big (and earned!) emotional impact. It’s well-worth reading and I’d recommend it widely, to everyone.

One year ago, I was reading: Love Medicine

Two years ago, I was reading: The Man Without A Face

Three years ago, I was reading: Zodiac

September 21, 2017

Book 95: Sophie’s Choice

“I was unable to make the anthropomorphic leap and thus failed to comprehend the resemblance between a swan and any specific human being, but Sophie swore that they were dead look-alikes, began to call him Tadeusz and murmured to him in little glottal clucks and clicks of Polish as she heaved at him the debris from her bag. I rarely ever saw Sophie lose her temper, but the conduct of the other swans, bossy and preemptive, so fatly greedy, infuriated her and she yelled Polish swear words at the big bastards and favored Tadeusz by making sure that he got more than his share of the garbage. Her vehemence startled me. I did not—because I could not at the time—connect this energetic protectorship of the underdog (the underswan?) with anything that had happened in her past, but her campaign for Tadeusz was funny and immensely appealing.”

Dates read: September 30-October 8, 2016

Rating: 6/10

Lists/Awards: National Book Award

Growing up, we all read books and stories about the Holocaust in school. We all learn about Auschwitz and the ovens. But for me, personally, there were three movies that took it beyond words in a history book and made the horror of it visceral: Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and Sophie’s Choice. They are all beautifully and powerfully made films that I never want to watch again. There’s something about actually seeing it depicted on film that takes what is objectively horrible on the page (all three are based on books) and makes it just a harrowing gut punch almost too much to be borne. It’s still hard to read about, but not as hard as watching it.

William Styron’s original novel of Sophie’s Choice takes us to post-WWII Brooklyn. It’s not the poverty-ridden borough of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, but neither is it modern-day wealthy hipster Brooklyn. It’s in-between, an “ethnic” (read: mostly Jewish) working-class neighborhood. It’s in a boarding house there that our narrator, aspiring writer and native Southerner Stingo, finds himself after he quits his dead-end publishing house job and can’t afford Manhattan any longer. His first day in his new room, he’s treated to the sound of noisy, athletic sex in the room right above his…and not too long after, he meets the lovers, Sophie and Nathan, in the midst of an awful, emotionally and physically violent public fight.

The pair are soon reconciled, though, and Stingo is quickly drawn into their orbit. Beautiful Sophie is a Polish survivor of Auschwitz who does secretarial work for a chiropractor, and the mercurial Nathan is an American Jewish medical researcher, and Stingo falls a little bit in love with both of them as he begins to write a novel based in his experiences of the South. But another messy fight and breakup between Sophie and Nathan ultimately reveals that neither of them is exactly who they seem to be and makes their tragic end seem inevitable.

This took me unusually long to get through: not because the subject matter is tough, even though it is, but because the book is just dense. Styron’s prose tends towards the purple, and while usually I’m down with books that are on the overwritten side, it’s a lot, you guys. It feels like the writing is struggling against the story, almost, trying to keep it from sweeping over the reader. There are plenty of remarkable passages, but the ratio of those to portions that drag isn’t nearly high enough.

The story of Sophie and Nathan, when it manages to take off, is sweeping and powerful and dramatic (if a bit on the Freudian side…there’s a lot of eros/thanatos stuff going on). But what grinds it to a halt is the character of Stingo. He’s an obvious writer-insert character, and Styron badly overestimates how interesting the portion of the book that’s devoted to his sexual frustration is. It’s not only boring, it’s cringe-worthy, especially the section where he jerks himself off while sharing a hotel room with his father and makes so much noise when he finishes that he wakes his dad up. I’m not going to say that no one wants to read about that because maybe someone does, but it’s tonally discordant with a book that’s mostly about the evils humans inflict on themselves and each other and the way we tell our own stories to try to shape the world into a way we can better cope with it. There’s greatness here, but it desperately needed a better editor to cut it and make it shine like it should have. As is, it’s worth reading but not something I’d honestly recommend.

Tell me, blog friends…can you rewatch those kinds of movies?

One year ago, I was reading: The Professor and the Madman

July 7, 2016

Book 32: The Nazi Hunters

“A big part of the motivation for holding the war crimes trials was exactly that: to provide examples of justice at work for the whole world to see. By presenting the record of the Third Reich, aggression by aggression, mass murder by mass murder, atrocity by atrocity, the trials were critical to establishing exactly what had happened- and establishing the principle that the perpetrators bore direct responsibility for their crimes, whatever they understood their orders to be.”

Dates read: March 16-19, 2016

Rating: 6/10

If you’d asked me, after high school, what history looked like from World War Two on, based on what I’d learned in class, I’d have probably said something like this: WW2 started in Europe, but the US stayed out until Pearl Harbor was attacked. There’d be a brief aside about Japanese interment on the home front, but once we got into the war overseas, America kicked ass and took names. We won the battles and liberated the concentration camps. Then there was the Cold War, which meant McCarthyism, the Space Race, and then the glasnost/perestroyka stuff and the Berlin Wall came down. That was usually as far as we got before the end of the year.

If you wanted me to tell you what happened to the Nazi leadership after the war, I wouldn’t have had much to offer besides that Hitler and his mistress killed themselves. This isn’t to tear down public school curriculum or teachers or insinuate that I was taught poorly or anything like that. World and even US history are such broad topics that you kind of have to focus on the highlights or you’d never get through it. But the fact remains that I (and I imagine many others) are largely clueless about what actually happened to the Nazis. Now that it’s 2016 and many of the major players are very old or gone, there is perspective to look back at how it all played out: both with the Nazis and the people who sought to bring them to justice. Hence, Andrew Nagorski’s The Nazi Hunters.

If you’re like me and you have only a vague understanding of the topic but find it interesting, this book is a good choice. It’s very comprehensive. Nagorski begins by discussing the immediate aftermath of liberation of the camps, including military personnel literally looking the other way on some occasions in which survivors assaulted and killed their former tormentors, then the Dachau trials and the Nuremberg trials. This was largely (but not totally) the end of judicial proceedings against former Nazis, and Nagorski covers why that was, with the rising tide of the Cold War cited as a particular distraction for the international community.

It might have been the effective end of the trials, but it was not the end of people seeking justice against senior members of the Nazi party. The most high-profile story is the abduction and Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann, but there’s also the stories of former Nazis Klaus Barbie, Latvian pilot Herbert Cukurs, and former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, among many many others, and their hunters, like Simon Wiesenthal, Tuvia Friedman, Isser Harel, and Beate and Serge Klarsfeld.

I’m not sure quite what I was expecting going in, but I think it was more along the lines of a narrative/non-fiction novel style book. This is not that. It’s very factual…not quite as dry as true academic writing, but more like newspaper reporting. It’s very well-researched and thorough, but if you’re looking for a thrilling true life pageburner, this will probably disappoint you.

Tell me, blog friends…what gaps did high school history leave in your knowledge?

**I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

January 7, 2016

Book 6: The Nazi Officer’s Wife

“You see, even the inhuman ones were not always inhuman. This was a lesson that I would learn again and again—how completely unpredictable individuals could be when it came to personal morality.”

Dates read: October 25-27, 2015

Rating: 10/10

An Austrian Jewish woman survives the Holocaust by marrying a member of the Nazi party. When she meets him, he is initially a high-ranking factory official, but by the end of the war, when everyone is pressed into active duty, he is an officer within the party. And the kicker? He knows she’s Jewish. Totally made up, right? Wrong. That is the actual story of Edith Hahn Beer.

The Shoah has, understandably, sparked a lot of significant literature. The Diary of Anne Frank. Night. Sophie’s Choice. Why this incredible memoir hasn’t been included in the canon is beyond me, honestly. It was (like almost all of my Kindle books) a sale selection, the title promising a fascinating tale although memoirs aren’t an especial favorite of mine. And it’s been one of the few books I’ve read recently that I literally couldn’t put down.

One of the upsides of the Kindle is its portability. And I have the Kindle app on my phone, although I hardly use it usually. Not here. I was reading on my eight-minute walk to work. I was reading in the bathroom. I was reading every spare second I could grab. Beer’s writing voice feels like a story your aunt or grandma is telling you…it’s immediate, it grabs you and doesn’t let you go. From the moment that she’s sent to her first work camp assignment, missing her mother’s departure for the ghetto, to her friend’s bravery in giving Edith her identification documents (which the friend then reported as “missing”) so that Edith, unable to draw rations on her false ID, will at least be able to try to find work, to her first meeting with her future husband Werner, to her refusal to have any pain medication during the birth of their child so that she won’t spill her desperate secret, all of it is incredibly compelling and although we know she survives her experience because she wrote a book about it, we can’t help but eagerly turn pages to see how it plays out. Basically I was completely swept away and never wanted it to end and recommend it to anyone who enjoys a well-told story.

Tell me, blog friends…do you like memoirs or am I the weirdo that finds them very skippable?

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