One could make 24 novels out of this

by Oleksandr Boichenko

“So, how was translating Borowski’s Auschwitz stories for you?”, asks Mikolaj Grynberg, a psychologist, photographer, and, as of late, author of a few mind-blowing books.

“How was it? Well, it was hard”, I answer, “But the worst started afterwards. I could not read anything. I read, of course, but could not understand it. I could not understand how anyone was able to even think of writing about all that. Love stories, quotidian problems, conflicts arising out of nowhere, fake struggles… Over there, people are being gassed to death on an industrial scale, and over here someone is delving into their sophisticated inner world. I do realize this is too harsh, but still…”

“Post-trauma”, says Mikolaj, “You’ve been hit by a ricochet. Now imagine what goes on in the heads of those who survived the concentration camps themselves and had to adjust to an emptied world without any professional assistance.”

Ukrainian readers enjoy grumbling about contemporary Ukrainian literature. I, too, grumble sometimes. We don’t have this, we don’t have that, this is not enough… The only thing I have no complaints about is the almost complete lack of the so-called “big novels”. I do not need them. I have had enough. I consumed so many of them in my previous professional life that I am still a bit nauseated. Instead, I need at least a few books like I accuse Auschwitz by Mikolaj Grynberg.

In short, this book is about Holocaust - but not directly. It is about the second-generation of the Holocaust. Its characters-storytellers are children of the few surviving Jews in Europe, born after the war. It was not rare for these children to discover – without much detail – what their parents had gone through only after they grew up. Sometimes only after their parents died. They usually have trouble understanding words like ‘uncle’, ‘aunt’, or ‘cousin’ because for them those are no more than theoretical concepts. None of them ever existed in their surroundings. Every one of the 24 stories told by them could be extended into a novel. Fortunately, Mikolaj Grynberg does not do that, so the reader receives a quintessence capable of shocking even someone who knows Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz stories almost by heart.

Grynberg’s interlocutors could roughly be split into three groups based on their country of residence. These countries are Poland, Israel, and the United States. I am not sure whether comparative adjectives such as ‘harder’ and ‘easier’ are appropriate here, but, in any case, those who grew up under fake last names in post-war antisemitic Poland often had been living without a clue that they were Jewish for decades. Such as Mr. Zygmunt, born in 1947, whose father often used the derogatory ‘zhyd’ towards people he did not like. After his father’s death and funeral in 1982, Zygmunt opened his father’s cabinet and poured himself a glass of whiskey:

“Then enters my mother and asks, “What are you doing?” I say, “Drinking whiskey”. And she starts yelling at me, “How dare you, it’s your father’s whiskey!” I reacted very strongly, “You are behaving like a niggardly Jew”. I see my mother turn pale as the wall and fall into the armchair. She is sitting there, barely alive, and asks, “How do you know?” …She finally confessed. This was the only moment she dared to have a candid conversation.”

As I said, I am not sure whether comparative adjectives are appropriate here, but, it seems, the survivors’ children who were growing up in Israel had an even harder time. Before the Eichmann trial, until the early 60s, the young state of Israel simply refused to mention the Holocaust, since it aspired to build a new national consciousness not on passive victimhood and defeat but on active heroism and victory. Having lost their families and possessions, physically and psychologically broken, European Jews made their way to the promised land where, suddenly, dishonored and disoriented, they once again ended up in ghettos and listened to sabra calling them sheep to the slaughter or German soap. Thus, they raised children whom, out of fear and shame, did not want to talk about the past and whom they surrounded with silent overprotection instead, becoming their own camp guards.

The situation was different for those who settled down in the US after the war. On the one hand, they had a safe and favorable environment where they did not have to hide anything. On the other hand, there was the availability of psychotherapy, which enabled those who had survived the Holocaust to at least try to learn to speak about their tragic experiences. As a result, almost all of Grynberg’s American interviewees state that since their childhoods, they have more or less known what their parents had gone through. Among them are Doron and Roger, the sons of Kristine Chiger, the author of The Girl in the Green Sweater – the book which partially inspired Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness. However, the ability to speak freely also sometimes leads to problems: not so much for the speaker but for the audience. According to the author, during his many years traveling around the world, he has always felt the most aggression from American Jews. One of his interviewees, Sara, intolerant towards everything but her own opinion, directly calls Mikolaj an idiot for still living in Poland and insists, “Europe is ruined by that war. Everyone has something on their conscience and blood on their hands. Poles, Ukrainians, German, the Swiss, and everyone else are nations of murderers.”

Sara’s example clearly demonstrates that despite all the differences between Poland, Israel, and the US, despite the enormous therapeutic efforts over the past decades, the second generation of “Holocausters” consists of people who, just like their parents, are to a greater or lesser extent affected by PTSD. People whose lives from the very beginning were subconsciously devalued by their parents because all their – the children’s – problems seemed silly in comparison to the Holocaust and were accompanied by comments such as, “Not tasty? You should have been in Auschwitz, you would have seen what not tasty is. Oh, you don’t like your clothes? Do you know what people in Auschwitz wore? You don’t like your job? Who is keeping you there? It’s not Auschwitz”. Perhaps the most telling example of this disorder can be seen in another of Grynberg’s interlocutors, Jossi:

“I do not think it is possible to survive Auschwitz.”

“What about all those who did survive?”

“They are Hitler’s biggest victory. If they had died, the story would have ended there. But Hitler let them out. He let them have children and continue destroying the world… Those who survived and later killed themselves did more for restoring the post-war Jewish world than those who came out of the camps and started families. If everyone had done the same as the former, there would have been no mess with the second generation.”

These are the words of a Jossi, an Israeli Jew. Jews in the 20th century suffered an unspeakable trauma, but for a long time now they have been trying to articulate it and recover from it. We, Ukrainians, still have not properly processed either the Holodomor, committed against us, or our own participation in the Holocaust; and today we are living through a new collective traumatization by the war in the East. Crimes against us and crimes by us poison our minds for generations to come in the same way. If we do not learn how to properly, without twisting the narrative in any direction, articulate it, the amount of poison might become incompatible with life in the rather near future.

Translated by Oleksandra Boychenko