Poets and Poems: Ayala Zarfijian and “A Corner in the World”

“The war endures in you,” writes poet Ayala Zarfjian, “It lingers in your capillaries, / in your arteries, / in your veins. / The war is a river that bridges the past to the present.”  The war she’s speaking about is World War II and the part of the war that made it unlike any other – the Holocaust. If you’re Jewish, the Holocaust is not something that’s ever over. 

That’s the theme that threads through every poem in Zarfjian’s collection A Corner in the World. She wrote the poems specifically for her father, who survived the Holocaust while most of the family perished. Zarfjian has written them so that the stories they tell, and the people they’re about, will not be forgotten, that the Holocaust itself will not be written off as someone’s crazy conspiracy theory but the real destruction of people, millions of people, that tragically, horribly happened.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

An Overness – poem by Anna Friedrich at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Eve Letter: Home Economics – poem by Kathryn Weld at Every Day Poems.

 

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” poem by William Butler Yeats – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Vogue exploring – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

"The Vanished Collection" by Pauline Baer de Perignon

The great-grandfather of Pauline Baer de Perignon was well known for his art collection, including his eye for the Impressionists. But his artistic tastes extended to other periods and movements, including the Renaissance and furniture. The man, Jules Strauss, reportedly sold his collection in 1932, to help a relative who’d been ruined by depression. He died in 1943. Pauline had heard the family stories about the great collection of art. But it was something in the long-buried past.  

It was an almost offhand remark by a cousin, whom Pauline didn’t know very well, that sent her into a years-long passionate treasure hunt. “Did you know there was something shady about the Strauss sale?”

 

What could have been shady about the Strauss sale in 1932? Pauline starts talking with other relatives. She learns that Jules’s wife, her great-grandmother, had instituted a claim for stolen artworks during the time when the Germans occupied Paris (1940-1944). The more she looks and studies, the deeper and more plentiful the mysteries become. 

 

Jules and his wife remained in Paris during the Nazi occupation. They were Jewish; friends and relatives, including their son-in-law, were sent to Auschwitz. How did the old couple survive, since Jules died of natural causes in 1943 during the occupation? Why did they change apartments? What happened to their furniture? Why would her great-grandmother file a claim if the collection had been sold off in 1932? And what happened to the artworks?

 

Pauline Baer de Perignon

Baer de Perignon tells this story in The Vanished Collection, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer. It’s a tale of great art; vanished warehouses; the Nazis’ wholesale theft of art collections, especially those owned by Jews; veiled references; obstinate museum workers almost desperate to hold on to artworks they shouldn’t have; art dealers and auction houses; old ledgers and lists; and meeting and working with people on the same journey that she is. As her investigations continue and go deeper into the past, she slowly gathers a picture of who her great-grandfather was. Her work is both tantalizing and extraordinarily frustrating, helped by a sympathetic and supportive husband.

 

Baer de Perignon has worked in the film industry, co-authoring several scripts. She’s also conducted writing workshops. She lives with her family in Paris. 

 

This kind of effort that produces The Vanished Collection requires dogged determination and an almost addictive obsession, and the author demonstrates both in the story. As the book shows, the quest to return artworks stolen by the Nazis continues 80 years after it happened. That quest is not always successful, but it does have it victories.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Shades defining – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

How “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” Went from Morbid Omen to Holiday Mainstay – Ellen Gutoskey at Mental Floss.

 

In Praise of Repair Culture – Peter Mommsen at Plough.

 

Claudine Gay’s way with words – Peter Wood at The Spectator.

 

We Were Taught to Hate Jews – Madeleine Rowley at The Free Press.

“The Partisan’s Daughter” by Michael Behagen

Aaron is now in a retirement home in Israel. His granddaughter regularly visits, and he’s told her almost all the stories about his life and the life of her mother Machale when she was a child. But there’s one story he hasn’t told, mostly from a sense of shame. 

In 1940, the German government created the Warsaw ghetto in Poland, an area of 1.3 square miles into which were herded tens of thousands of Jews. Including Aaron, his wife Raizel, and their daughter Machale. For the next three years, groups of Jews would be taken by rail cars to the Treblinka concentration camp and killed.

 

Even though the stories of deportation and death are always denied, even from many of the Jews themselves, Aaron and Raizel know better. And they decide they have to do something to get their daughter to some kind of safety. A Polish friend helps; a bribe to a ghetto guard helps Machale escape. But Raizel is killed at the ghetto hospital where she works, and Aaron is sent to Treblinka. The family that had agreed to hide Machale decide to get rid of her when the money Aaron paid runs out. 

 

Michael Behagen

And the story Aaron tells his granddaughter begins there, with all that as the backdrop.

 

The Partisan’s Daughter by Michael Behagen is the story of what happens to Aaron and Machale, as the war grinds on. And Aaron will learn much about the Poles, the Germans, and himself before the story comes to an end. The story unfolds as both a kind of documentary about Aaron’s war years and escape from Treblinka and his confession about a terrible injustice.

 

Behagen is a filmmaker and writer best known for a 1980s thriller television series called “Late Night Stories.” He’s written and produced a number of documentary and feature films, and he published hi first novel, Lullaby, in 2002. A native of Israel, he lives in both Israel and France. 

“I Love You My Child. I’m Abandoning You” by Ariella Palacz

You’re eight years old. Your father wakes you up in the middle of the night and tells you to get dressed. Soon you find yourself, your four-year-old brother, and three-year-old sister bundled up, [laced in a car, and taken away by two women you’ve never seen before. They take you to a state-run home for orphaned children, and they tell you will never see your parents or your older brother again.

This is what happened to Ariella Palacz. She was living in Paris. The year was 1942. Her family was Jewish. What she will find out years later is that her mother had disappeared from a psychiatric hospital, her father and young-teenaged brother were going into hiding, and she and her two younger siblings were placed in the orphanage in an effort to save them from deportation by the German Nazis occupying Paris.

 

I Love You My Child, I’m Abandoning You is Palacz’s story of that time and what happened afterward. It is a moving, often disturbing, and sometimes horrifying account of what happened to a Jewish girl and her family during the Holocaust. 

 

Palacz spent several months in the orphanage before being sent south to a foster family. On the train, she discovers her younger brother and sister, but they’re once again separated and sent to different families. She won’t see them again for years. She’s housed with an older couple in a small town south of Paris. They did not know she was Jewish; had they found out, her fate might have been very different. Her treatment varied from cruel to kind. She was raised as a Christian, and attended both school and church, where she was enrolled in catechism classes.

 

Ariella Palacz

Sometime after the end of the war, her father finds her and brings her home to Paris. He and her older brother successfully remained hidden during the occupation. Her mother was killed by the Nazis; like in Germany, psychiatric institutions were emptied and closed, their patients and inmates sent to the extermination camps. The family’s large number of Polish relatives did not survive; most died in the Treblinka camp.

 

Palacz tells her story from both a first-person, “this is happening now” perspective that alternates with the years in Jersualem when she’s actually writing the account. Evoking the memories of that time is especially painful, and finds respites in a rare snowfall, a pine tree outside her window, and the beauty she sees in Jerusalem. 

 

In 1970, some 15 years after she marries, she, her husband, and her two children emigrate to Israel. A third child is born there. A woman who had largely rejected her faith or any belief, Palacz eventually convinces herself, and then her husband, to move to Israel. Her account was written in the 1999-2003 times period. A mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, she died in 2017.

 

I Love You My Child, I’m Abandoning You is the story of one woman, what happened to her as a girl during a terrible time, how she survived, and the psychological scars that time left on her. It’s also the story of human resilience in the face of cruelty and horror.

“The 6th Lamentation” by William Brodrick

I’m always on the lookout for new mystery series, and a few weeks ago I came across a fictional detective named Father Anselm, a brother at the Larkwood Catholic monastery in England. He’s a former barrister, familiar with the workings of criminal law, judges, and the Old Bailey (or Royal Courts of Justice).

In The 6^th Lamentation by William Brodrick (first published in 2003 in Britain and 2004 in the United States), Father Anselm unexpectedly finds himself doing detective work, and all because of a man arriving at Larkwood and asking for sanctuary.

The year is 1995. The first issue that has to be tackled is that the man seems to have nothing wrong. Second, sanctuary is no longer a church practice. Third, the brothers gradually learn that the man is suspected of being a Nazi war criminal, who as a young Gestapo officer helped deport thousands of Jews from Paris to the death camps in the east.

Father Anselm is drawn into the case of the man, and is sent to the Vatican in Rome when the monastery seeks guidance. Officials there are more than mildly interested; it turns out that a sister monastery in France may have helped the Gestapo officer and a fellow French police collaborator escape to England.

The 6^th Lamentation would have been a fascinating story with this as the narrative arc, but Brodrick layers in a second story, that of Agnes Aubret, who was almost 21 at the time of the fall of France to the Germans. Her father was Jewish; she is given “total Christian” identity papers to help her survive occupation and help a clandestine group smuggle Jewish children out of the country. But she was caught and sent to Auschwitz, and the German and the collaborating Frenchman were involved. Agnes survived, married an Englishman, and eventually settled in London. She believes her own child, born out of wedlock, did not survive the war.

William Brodrick

In his own life Brodrick reverses the story of Father Anselm. He was a friar in the Augustine order before he became a barrister and a writer. He’s written eight of the Father Anselm mysteries, with The Whispered Name winning the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award in 2009. Born in the UK but having spent a portion of his life in Canada, he holds both British and Canadian citizenship. He, his wife, and three children live in France.

Nothing is as it seems to be in The 6^th Lamentation. Heroes and villains change roles, and more than once. It is a story of how the past is never really the past but continues to affect and change the present. It’s an outstanding story.

Top photograph: The German Army matching on the Champs Elysses after the surrender of France in 1940; via Bundesarchiv and Wikipedia.

The Hiding Place: Invasion

Haarlem, The Netherlands, September, 1939. A family of aging sisters, and an elderly father and aunt, listen to the assurances of the Dutch government on the radio that the country is neutral, it will not be invaded by Nazi Germany and there will be no war. A few hours later, Holland is at war. Five days after that, the queen flees to Britain and the government surrenders. And everything changes.

German military uniforms are everywhere. Curfews are announced. Radios have to be surrendered.

We’ve reached the point in our book discussion of The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom where the introductory chapters are over, and the story turns to one of the darkest times in Dutch and European history. It is difficult time to be Dutch, and occupied by Nazis. It’s an impossible time to be Jewish. The Jews of Haarlem gradually begin to disappear, starting with the rabbi and other religious leaders. (In a separate story, in Amsterdam, the Frank family, including their daughter Anne, goes into hiding, and will evade the Nazis for three years.)

Corrie ten Boom finds a wide array of responses to the occupation. Some people will fight it and join the resistance. Some will embrace the new conquerors and become much like them. Most will try to muddle through and focus on surviving. And some will be consumed, never to be seen again.

The last time any part of the United States was occupied at least partially by a conquering army was the Civil War. Before that, it had happened during the American Revolution. (During the War of 1812, there were battles and forays like the burning of Washington, but no sustained occupation.) Those occupations, while disruptive and often terrible, cannot compare with what happened in Europe with the Nazis. And yet people’s responses were similar – some resist and fight, some collaborate, most try to survive.

Corrie faced a choice in how she would respond. She could have ducked and likely been left largely alone. But Corrie and her family were strong Christians, and they’re horrified by what’s happening. Persecution of a Jewish neighbor leads her to help him escape, and Corrie ten Boom discovers the underground. And more than that, she will become part of the underground. She will offer herself to God to help the Jewish people.

You read a story like this one and can’t help but ask, what would you do in her situation? You’d like to think you would be courageous – we all like to think of ourselves as noble heroes – but the fact is that you don’t know. And you won’t know until you face the kind of choice and the decision Corrie faced.

She chose the path of courage and danger. She could have kept her head down and ridden out the war relatively unbothered, ignoring what was happening to neighbors and friends, ignoring the men, women and children wearing the yellow star, herded into trucks and taken away.

And she knew there could be a heavy price to pay.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “Invasion,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph: German troops rounding up Dutch Jews for deportation to the camps in Poland.

Ingeborg Bachmann’s “War Diary”

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was an Austrian-born poet, essayist, novelist and radio dramatist. Not as well known as other members of her circle, Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass, she is still considered an important member of the post-World War II literary generation that helped Europe find its way out the physical and psychological devastation of the war wrought by Nazi Germany.

Jack Hamesh (1920-1967) was a soldier in the British Army. He had been an older member of the Kindertransport – the evacuation of thousands of Jewish children to Great Britain after the Nazi violence of Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”) in Germany in 1938. After World War II, he settled in Palestine, eventually finding employment as a dock worker and later in harbor administration.

No one connected the two until the publication of Bachmann’s War Diary in 2010 (in German; 2011 in English). The summer of 1945 during which they met Bachmann would always refer to as “the loveliest summer of my life.”

At the end of the war, Bachmann and her family fled to a home in a rural village. Her father, a schoolmaster, was a soldier in the German army and had been captured by the Americans. Their place of refuge was occupied by the British Army. Jack Hamesh was part of the occupying forces.

They discovered love – a love of literature. Bachmann has hated the Nazis, and part of her “resistance” was to read forbidden books – Thomas Mann, Rainer Marie Rilke, Karl Marx and others.

Hamesh had lived in Vienna before he was sent to safety in Britain. His parents had died before the war; his uncle used influence to get him included in the Kindertransport. As a soldier in 1945, what had been left of his family had perished in the Holocaust. He had read many of the same books as Bachmann. And so a friendship began.

Bachmann as a teenager

War Diary, a small work (108 pages, including notes, afterword and translator’s statement) is divided into two parts. The first part in Bachmann’s of the period right after the war. The second is Hamesh’s letters, written after his unit was moved to Italy, his discharge and emigration to Palestine. (Her letters, often referred to in Hamesh’s, no longer exist). He wrote for almost two years, the last posted from Tel Aviv in July 1947, and their tone suggests he was at least a little in love with her. Bachmann was more interested in figuring out how to get into university.

And yet she kept his letters until her death, part of the record of that “loveliest summer.”

To read the diary and the letters today is to see two people sharing their love of literature and a sense of loneliness and displacement. The worlds both of them knew, on different sides of war, were destroyed. She at least had family left; Hamesh had nothing except himself. But they shared their mutual love of books and reading, even if it was only for a few short months.

War Diary also serves as a reminder that our parents and grandparents were young once, with hopes and dreams interrupted by war. It’s a small work, but a moving one.

Top photograph: Ingeborg Bachmann in the 1950s.

A Movie and a Talk

On Friday, my wife and I watched the 2010 movie “Sarah’s Key,” starring Kristin Scott Thomas and based on the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay. The movie is two stories that become one story – an American journalist (played by Thomas) named Julia Jarmond living in Paris with her French husband and teenaged child, and a young girl caught up in the Vel d’Hiv – the roundup of more than 13,000 Jewish men, women and children in 1942 Paris for eventual transport to Auschwitz.

The name “Vel d’Hiv” is taken from the name of the bicycling velodrome where the 13,000 people were brought – with no sanitation and no food.

The journalist is doing a story on the event, but the story takes a turn for the personal. The apartment in the Marais where her in-laws lived for more than 60 years, where her husband was raised, and which she and her husband are remodeling prior to moving into – belonged to a Jewish family who disappeared in the Vel d’Hiv.

The journalist is drawn into the story of this family, and what her in-laws did and didn’t know. Then she discovers she is pregnant. She’s been told she couldn’t have more children. She’s thrilled – but her husband isn’t. He doesn’t want his life to be disrupted, and he doesn’t want to be “an older father.” He wants his wife to abort the baby.

The movie is about many things, but it asks the question, can one live without hope? Can one escape from internment and certain death only to find a more difficult prison to escape from – the prison of memory and guilt and the prison of one’s own mind? The character of Sarah will answer the question one way; the character of Julia Jarmond will answer it another way.

That was our Friday night. On Saturday, we attended a talk by Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias, He is a marvelous speaker and possesses a marvelous intellect. He talked about his latest book, Why Jesus: Rediscovering His Truth in An Age of Mass-Marketed Spirituality, and a lot of other things as well. And he said this:

“The most empirically identifiable fact, and the most intellectually resisted fact, is the depravity of man.”

The scenes from the movie kept running through my mind as I listened. I suspect the movie, as good as it was, ultimately can’t truly convey the horror of what those 13,000 people experienced, and the six million other Jews, and the five million Poles, Russians, resistance fighters, homosexuals and others who died in the Nazi death camps.

We want to believe we are all basically good, that it’s culture or society or something else that causes us to do bad things. Most people don’t rob or kill or hurt or maim, right? We know that if something like the Holocaust confronted us, we would stand up for people, right?

Or would we close our eyes, shut our doors, pull down our curtains and hope they don’t come for us? Or help the authorities round up the Jews, like so many Parisians did? Or separate the fathers from their families, and then the mothers from their children, and send them off on separate trains to the east?

Twenty years ago, a vice president at the People for the American Way suggested that fundamentalist Christians needed to be exterminated. She was criticized for her words, but not much criticized.

Peter Singer, a professor of something called “applied ethics” at Princeton University, criticizes the pro-abortion position by saying they’re attacking the wrong premise – that life begins at conception. The premise to attack, he says, is that it’s wrong to kill an innocent human being, because these kinds of decisions should be based upon a “utilitarian calculation” that compares the preferences of a woman against the preferences of a fetus.

And how exactly does the fetus express its preferences?

The problem is not society or culture. And it’s not “the devil made me do it.” The problem is within us.

Zacharaias also said this: “Maybe we should stop asking if Jesus died on the cross and instead ask why he died on the cross.”

Steve Sem-Sandberg’s “The Emperor of Lies”

Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, dedicated a good deal of his writing life to the preservation of Yiddish stories, language and culture, which had been nearly destroyed by the Holocaust in World War II. Singer was the son of a Polish rabbi; his mother was the daughter of a Polish rabbi. He emigrated to America after Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany, and over the course of his literary life became best know for his short stories.

It was Singer who came constantly to mind while I read Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Emperor of Lies, for what Sem-Sandberg has done is to painstakingly recreate the Jewish ghetto in Lodz in central Poland during the war. With this extraordinary novel, he has preserved the history of the ghetto, its government, its people, its brutality and its horrors, from the time of Nazi occupation in 1939 to the liberation by the Soviet army in early 1945.

Utilizing records, histories, archives, newspapers and other existing materials, Sem-Sandberg has recreated the story of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, “chairman” of the Lodz ghetto through the entire period of occupation. Rumkowski is a historical figure, as are many of characters of the novel, and has been generally understood to have been a kind of collaborator/puppet/despot. He is indeed all those things in the novel, and more that are worse, but the author seems to have almost gotten inside Rumkowski’s head. The reader comes to understand how this man justified his decisions and actions, how he viewed the ghetto, how he sacrificed people to remain in control of his larger purpose – the most productive manufacturing community in the entire German Reich, for that, he believed would ultimately save them.

And, of course, it didn’t. Rumkowski misled his people, and he also misled himself.

The Emperor of Lies is about more than Rumkowski, and as his control begins to slip, we see the other characters coming into sharper and sharper focus. It is in these individual stories, of heroes and collaborators, traitors and everyday people desperately seeking to stay alive, that the world that was the Jewish ghetto of Lodz truly comes alive. These stories are more than just backdrops to the central role of the leader of the ghetto; they become the vehicles through which memory is preserved.

The world of the ghetto was a hierarchal society of a ruling elite, mostly Rumkowski and his family and friends; the Jewish police who enforced order and obedience for Rumkowski and the Germans; the people fortunate to have obtained easier, white collar jobs; the people who did the hard work in the factories; and the “unproductive people,” the elderly, the sick and the young children, the ones who were most expendable and the one who would be the first to be “deported,” which meant sent to the death camps.

The novel is a story of horror, of what people crazed with fear and hunger will do to stay alive, of how people turned on each other for whatever short-term benefit could be had, and people who somehow managed to retain their humanity in the face of a very brutal existence.

The Emperor of Lies is an amazing story, told with understanding and heart. Sem-Sandberg holds back from judgment; it would have been a very different, and far less successful, novel had he sat in judgment of his characters. Instead, he tells their stories, much like Isaac Bashevis Singer told his stories, with understanding and even love.

The novel was an unexpected best-seller when it was published in Sweden in 2009. It is a big novel, with more than 650 pages, including appendices and a very helpful list of characters. The story is told so well, however, that you soon forget the size and get wrapped into the world of the ghetto in Lodz.