Because the darkness is never so distant,’ ————-W. H. Auden
Brian D. Freese writes in the preface that ‘all literary depictions of the Holocaust end as failures’. ‘Holocaust is but an approximation of what happened. The species cannot grasp its nature for the word is not the thing itself’. The species, he asserts elsewhere, is ‘damaged, for only a damaged species could have committed the Holocaust.’ The author starts with a pessimism born of long years devoted to understanding the phenomenon. The book under review is a collection which may briefly be described as occasionally weird, but deeply disturbing and conveys the whole range of horrors with which the Holocaust is associated.
Holocaust, as we know, was the Final Solution which the Nazis found to the Jewish question and led to six million Jews being tormented with unimaginable atrocities and murdered over a period from 1942 to 1945. It needs to be kept in mind that another seven million people were also victims of the Nazi genocide during the war. This included about half a million ‘Gypsies’ (the Sinti and the Roma). Historians, in their quest to find answer to the question of who or what was responsible for the horror, have come out with a variety of answers. Hitler, his minions and the Nazi ideology are most obviously responsible for the horrors, but Daniel Goldhagen, for one, talked of a ‘historically embedded anti-Semitic DNA of the German people’. But his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners has been effectively dismantled by other historians. Ian Kershaw and others have dismissed it simply as ‘a bad book’. As Hannah Arendt had once said where ‘all or almost all are found to be guilty no one is’. Christopher Browning has found that Civilian Order Police, Battalion 101 was involved in the forcible deportation of Jews to death camps in Poland. Browning does not see them as ‘uniquely evil’, but a group of men from lower middle class and working class background who conformed to peer group pressure to volunteer to carry out the horrible acts. And they were part of a repressive apparatus whose head was Himmler. Ian Kershaw, who has spent nearly half a century researching Hitler, the Nazis and contemporary Germany, notes that historical consciousness has came to be dominated as never before by the shadow of the Holocaust since the early 1990s. The greater the distance from the horrible events and ‘more the memory is being replaced by memorial as the generation of the victims dies away, the less the psychological scar on national consciousness appears to be fading’. It is this continuing engagement with the horrors of the Holocaust and its ramifications that provides the backdrop to Freese’s stories and indeed his quest to come to terms (or perhaps, not being able to come to terms) with the phenomenon.
The stories do not deal with events, but situations, emotions, images of horrors or peeps into fantasy or perhaps magic realism. Each story is preceded by a quotation taken from an earlier novel he had written. The frontispiece of the first story says, ‘words are useless’. Yet, the author plays with words right through his stories and, one would say, sometimes with telling effect. His short observations reveal a deep insight into the minds of the victims and occasionally of the perpetrator of horror. His expertise as a psychotherapist comes in handy. He is full of irony as can be seen in most of the stories. ‘The medical experiments made on inmates by our Nazi doctors must have provided some valid scientific data; yet the world refuses to use this information because it is “tainted”. Some good must come from “evil” .’ In the story a doctor working in a camp denies that he was a ‘willing’ tool of the state, ‘I am not a monster’.