Literary Review - August 2007

Page 31

MEMOIRS

the Onion, but it’s plain. His life has been driven by three hungers, he tells us: for food, for sex, and for art, and the greatest of these was for art. From his childhood and youth spent obsessively drawing, to his maturity as a writer, his insatiable desire has been ‘to conquer all with images’. His books are more real to him than his life; he has used up every bit of his life for them, and it is as though there is nothing left. At the end of this book,

JONATHANMIRSKY Betrayed from Within and Without

A GARDENOFEDENINHELL: THELIFEOF ALICEHERZ-SOMMER

★

By Melissa Müüller and Reinhard Piechocki (Macmillan 341pp £18.99)

THEDIARYOFPETRGINZ: 1941–1942

★

Edited by Chava Pressburger (Translated by Elena Lappin) (Atlantic Books 161pp £16.99)

A FRIENDWHOwas a child in Israel in the early Fifties told me that in his school the students were taught to honour Jewish heroes. Theirs was a long history, the teachers said, from Old Testament times to the present, including those who had died in the Warsaw ghetto uprising near the end of the Second World War. They were taught, also, to be embarrassed by the millions of Jews who had perished in the extermination camps, ‘like sheep’, without resisting. In his memoir, Of Blood and Hope (published thirty years ago), Samuel Pisar, who survived four camps, described how when the SS razed the ghetto in his birthplace, Bialystok, many young men and women did fight back. ‘Unarmed, their resistance was futile. They were mowed down.’ He concluded bleakly: ‘Acquiescence, surrender, assimilation, conversion – nothing would ever satisfy our executioners. Simply and indiscriminately, we had to be expunged – our blood was tainted.’ Alice Herz-Sommer, one of the 3,500 who survived Theresienstadt (the camp two hours from Prague from which 89,000 inmates were transported to ‘the east’ to be exterminated), made her way to Israel in 1949. She found in the new state an ‘uncomfortable black-andwhite thinking ... here were the new Israeli war heroes and there [in the camps] were the “lambs who allowed themselves to be led to the slaughter”’.

when he has peeled back all the layers of his memory, he remarks that the onion of his life ‘proved devoid of any meaningful core’. That is an extraordinary thing to say of such a rich and profound journey, and I can only think that this is what it means: the meaning is in the books, not the life; not in Güünter Grass, but in Oskar Matzerath. To order this book at £15.19, see LR Bookshop on page 37

Now it is true that Herz-Sommer, who was 103 when this eloquent and painful book was being written, had a privileged time in Theresienstadt. She was a pianist famous throughout Europe. The Germans wanted the inmates of Theresienstadt to remain placid. The Germans also intended – successfully – to gull foreign inspectors, notably the Red Cross, into thinking Theresienstadt was no more sinister than an agreeable ghetto. So HerzSommer was directed to practise almost every day and to give dozens of concerts, at which she played Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Chopin to rapturous audiences – most of whom, unknown to them, were doomed to be gassed and burned. Herz-Sommer’s mother died at Treblinka and her husband at Dachau. Her young son Stephan, later renamed Raphael, was saved because their captors valued Alice and wished to encourage her to play for the camp. In his remarkable preface, Raphael, who died in 2001, writes

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007