Voices From the Holocaust

Harry James Cargas

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813144153
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

" Interviews with: Yitzhak Arad Leo Eitinger Emil Fackenheim Whitney Harris Jan Karski Arnost Lusting Mordecai Paldiel Marion Pritchard Dorothee Soelle Leon Wells Elie Wiesel Simon Wiesenthal The late Harry James Cargas was professor emeritus of literature and language at Webster University and author of thirty-two books, including Problems Unique to the Holocaust.

ARNOST LUSTIG

Arnost Lustig’s books and stories have been translated into more than twenty languages, including Polish, German, Japanese, Hindi, Yiddish, Esperanto, and French. His best known fiction deals with the Holocaust experience of children. He himself survived the Holocaust as a boy.

Born in Prague, Lustig came to the United States after having a distinguished career in writing and cinema in Czechoslovakia. He was a lecturer in film and literature at universities in his home country as well as in Japan, Canada, Israel, and the United States. His novel A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova (1974) was nominated for the National Book Award, and the television adaptation of that work received nine international prizes. Additionally, he has garnered a number of awards for radio scripts and stories in Czechoslovakia, Australia, and the United States. Among his works are Dita Saxova (1962); his “Children of the Holocaust” series (1977), including Darkness Casts No Shadow, Night and Hope, and Diamonds in the Night, The Unloved (1985); and Indecent Dreams (1988). Lustig was a war correspondent during the Arab-Israeli conflict (1948-1949) and served as a correspondent for Czechoslovak Radio in Europe, Asia, and North America. He later taught at the University of Iowa’s International Writers Program, then at Drake University, and in 1973 he began a long teaching career at American University.

HJC You said in one of your books that you simply want to kill as long as you will be killed. You say you want to drink justice, but you talk about the line between justice and revenge as being a very thin line, since everything around us teaches us to kill. I’m wondering whether in some way you are killing when you write.

AL First, I must tell you that I never killed anyone and I’m very happy for that. I believe that I can be a writer only because I never killed and because I don’t intend to kill. I have a technique when I write that suggests and makes the reader come to his own conclusions—but I wish him to make a certain conclusion. So when I say that my philosophy of writing is either to be killed or to kill, I mean that I would like to make the reader feel that I hate both, that I hate to be killed and I hate to kill. I’m asking, “What should we do to change the world?” But I don’t express this question explicitly because that wouldn’t be writing. That would be a textbook of philosophy.

HJC So many writers (like Camus, Sartre, or Fuentes) have said that, particularly since the end of the Second World War, either you’re on the side of the victims or you’re on the side of the executioners. You have to choose one or the other.

AL I cannot accept this choice, and this is what I am writing about. I am writing about the possibility of changing the human condition so that my children won’t have that question put before them: to kill or not to kill. You know, sometimes everything makes you feel that you are very close to being an enigma. Let us say that you are a fish. You were born to swim near the surface. But at once some unknown pressure you are not used to pushes you down almost flat to the very bottom of the sea, where there are dark waters, and you lose your orientation because you were used to other waters without pressure. Or you are a fish down there used to the dark waters and you come up and see something completely different. This is what happened to the Jews. They were fish swimming in completely different waters than those they were thrown into and asked to swim in. They couldn’t swim, they couldn’t orient themselves.

I was in three camps, in the fortress in Theresienstadt, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz-Birkenau; and I was extremely lucky that I survived. I know that everybody who survived lives only because someone else died. Many times I wished to die, not to see what I saw. And I was not in the worst of conditions. I didn’t have to kill anyone, to eat human flesh, to humiliate anyone. I think that there were many times when I was really mad, not completely responsible for myself but maybe, even then, lucky.

HJC For instance?

AL When they killed my father, who was a beautiful man, who never did anyone any wrong; I was singing a song which I had sung a few days ago with my father, for we saw that in a clandestine cabaret. It was from Die Fledermaus, and it had a line, “Happy is the man who forgets what cannot be changed.” I couldn’t comprehend what happened. I was seventeen years old. I was coming from the world where good was rewarded and evil punished. I was standing there at the poles with wires under high voltage, under cloudy skies, singing for an hour or two, and I refused to go back to the barracks because I didn’t care for life. Thirty yards away or so were the gas chambers. Flames were coming out from the chimneys. Fortunately there were friends with me. All my life I was extremely lucky with friends. They dragged me back into the barracks because after dark I would have been shot. I remember that many times in Auschwitz-Birkenau I wished for an air-raid by the Americans or Russians or British, not just for the destruction of Auschwitz-Birkenau but also for my own destruction. I was young, without much education, except for this experience, and I must have been lucky because somebody always helped me.

I remember in Auschwitz-Birkenau one day in October 1944. I was freezing. Some man, around forty, told me, “Boy, you are freezing, come among us.” I said to myself, “My God, these people are laughing at me. They are freezing themselves.” I didn’t pay attention. They told me, “Come in.” And they took me, put me in the middle, pressed me for five minutes with their own bodies because they didn’t have anything else. They warmed me up and told me, “Now run.” This made me happy. It was a human touch you can dream about. Once you get such a lesson about friendship and solidarity, you know that friendship and solidarity exist. Finally, I escaped the camp, after six days of starving, from a death transport for Buchenwald, Dachau, or to Theresienstadt. I am not certain about the destination. (I didn’t wait to find out for sure.) If it had been going to Dachau, we would definitely have died. In Theresienstadt, maybe. I escaped and lived illegally in Prague and took part in the anti-Nazi uprising during the last five days of the war. My assignment was to cross Paris avenue under the German machine-gun tower and bring food from an apartment to the hospital where I was hiding. My mother and my sister survived. But I cannot forget those moments of truth when the best people were dying and the worst were only postponing their deaths for an hour, a day, two days, two nights. Sometimes for an unbearable price.

I know that man is extremely close to the enemy sometimes. At the same time, I saw many good people, many brave people, many clever or wise or unselfish people. I know that change is possible. For better or for worse. I am interested in the possibility of a change in man for the better. I wrote about these things in what I consider my best book, Diamonds of the Night. And, of course, in my thirteen other books. And I am not finished. I put all that is good or better or around me into them.

The first day after the war, I looked at thousands of German soldiers in Prague marching in captivity. They were beaten by the revolutionary guards and some jumped into the icy river. I had a chance to kill as many of them as I could wish. I had a brief discussion with a liberating soldier who offered me his machine gun to feel free to do whatever my heart wished. I told him I was sick of death. I was sick of beating, of injustice. To be in love with death would bring you close to the Nazis. They were in love with death. Death was everything for them—life nothing. As one Czech writer said, death was their best friend. I was quite satisfied to see that the Germans under the same pressure behaved just as the Jews did. Or the French. The English. The Americans. The Russians. The Czechs. All people are equal. In all ways. I learned that lesson the hard way. It did not make me happy. It was not a merry recognition. But such is life. It only confirmed that man can be good, bad, very good, very bad. Sometimes both. And a thousand shades in between. One for one second, and another for the next. This is what I saw in my life in the camps and immediately after them.

You know, I am writing about camps like Jack London was writing about the Gold Rush, or Joseph Conrad about the people and seas, and Isaac Babel about people smashed by the revolution. What’s in your blood, you heart, your brain. You can write only about what you know, feel, live. I was born into it and I am still fascinated by it because it was such a treasure of human experience that if it hadn’t been paid with such havoc, like the death of your father and the death of the best people you knew, I would say that it was the best schooling I could have gotten. (I hope you understand the metaphor.)

Now, the problem is what am I going to do with it, number one. Number two, if I stick with it, will it darken my horizons about what is going on in the world now? The world didn’t stop. I was a reporter traveling throughout the world, so I know a little. I was in Cambodia, which was a beautiful kingdom. They killed a million—two or three million people. It’s impossible to count. Then I was in India and China. I saw in Calcutta human conditions to compare with what I saw in the camps—you cannot make comparison to Auschwitz-Birkenau—and yet you can compare human conditions. You can, if you know what hunger is, and how hunger diminishes and humiliates you. Hunger, anxiety, fear, cold, insecurity, illnesses, hopelessness, the desperation of children without mothers and fathers, sisters without brothers, men without women and women without men. And I know that Auschwitz-Birkenau and these other camps didn’t come from nowhere. There must have been something in the air already and it didn’t disappear afterwards. The most ashamed I ever was of my own country, Czechoslovakia, and its conqueror, Russia, was when I discovered that long after World War II they had concentration camps, that the idea of socialism went from utopia to murder. So I asked the questions, “And what to do with it? How to behave?”

HJC How do you reflect this in your writing and teaching?

AL I say to my students today, “Why do I teach you the Jewish catastrophe?” I don’t like teaching it, believe me, but I say to myself, “Okay, someone has to do it.” It’s not pleasant; I could be teaching how to write a screenplay, how to write a story. I could be teaching European literature, short stories, world literature. But I’m teaching the Jewish catastrophe (next to the rest), and I tell them, “Look, there’s only one reason, and you should learn it. To be stronger, not for tears. To be more clever. To share an experience dearly paid for by the death of grandfathers and grandmothers and uncles and aunts you could never see. So that you know what happened, that people can be as beautiful as Anne Frank or Janusz Korczak were, and as ugly as Adolf Hitler or Reinhardt Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler. That this can happen to you. I teach you so that in case it happens to you, you will not be weak or desperately trustful like the generation of Jews who did not believe it because they were completely unprepared, because they were too civilized and forgot or suppressed their instinct for survival and had many other shortcomings. You will know enough and be ready to say, ‘No, I’m not going. I know what Buchenwald was, I know what Auschwitz-Birkenau was. I will defend myself. I will fight.’” This is why I teach. And now you have to add what I have learned afterwards. I think that there is a necessity to see.

HJC How is it connected with your writing and your being a writer?

AL First of all, being a writer is the only thing which gives me a wonderful feeling of beauty and meaning, and, of course, some stability. Let me say that only a few other things leave me with such a feeling. But nobody can write about what’s not really in him, and this period which I don’t like to call “Holocaust” is inside of me. (I don’t like it because Holocaust is made up of two Greek words: “destroyed by fire.” This is what happened in ancient Greece, an earthquake or by great fire. Jews were burned by fire, in the end, but only after being humiliated and killed by German Nazis and their collaborators of almost all nations in Europe.) Call it a Jewish catastrophe, a man-made catastrophe which can happen again, perhaps not only to Jews. It must be studied as objectively as possible to help make man stronger. It is in the air. So, I teach about it and write about it as a most profound human experience.

HJC Are you well known enough?

AL You asked me already why these books are not as widely read as they deserve to be. What do you mean, exactly? I think that to write about this Jewish catastrophe and to search for fame at the same time is almost indecent. I’m really content as it is. It’s not entertaining reading, despite my attempts to make it the best that I can. I’m not going to judge it. It’s up to the reader. It is a difficult experience because if I hadn’t been in the camps and somebody invited me to see one, two, three, four films or let me read too many books about this, I don’t know how I would react. I’m not pushing my books too much. I’m happy that they are published. There are editions in English, Japanese, Estonian, Norwegian, Spanish, and German so the best stories are slowly becoming known. I think that my time will come, let us say five, fifty years from today when children from a new generation will be trying to get a picture of what happened. Like today, let us say, we are getting the real picture of Napoleon. Only now, forty-five years after the war, I think it is the duty of all writers who were there to write about it as well as they can. Not to be concerned if they are known or famous or well paid. A good and honest writer will always survive, somehow. This I learned in my writing life, and I am now sixty-three years old. History will select which writers are important for the future. You can’t select yourself. We really don’t know. It’s a relay. … Or a mosaic. We can only contribute with our books.

I know that this generation is at the end. Maybe it will be some inspiration for much fiction. I don’t know how much. After all, Tolstoy did not experience the Napoleonic war and wrote by far the best book on it without having been there. It’s nonsense to claim that a fiction about Belsen is either not a fiction or not about Belsen. I know that there are certain things about which those who were there feel strongly, but those who were there also are handicapped. They do not lie, but can they reveal the full amount of truth? The full amount of humiliation? Who has a stomach for that? I was telling my son today, “The greatest crime of the Nazis was that they killed the Jews: you have only one life, you cannot get your life back. But the very next crime—which was almost as bad as the killing—was that they humiliated Jews before they killed them. They wanted them to accept that they are inferior before dying. This humiliation was so enormous that the mechanism of the mind, even a first-class mind, or the most open, sincere, almost cynical mind, must suppress this humiliation somehow.” Did you read Frankl? Bettelheim? There you have it like an open palm. They testify that this is the core of our problems. This sum of humiliation will never be discovered: Jewish writers—including these two—are unable to overcome the sum of this humiliation because it drowns them. And non-Jewish writers who did overcome it partly, like Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote a most Jewish book really, tell most of it. He commited suicide—he gassed himself. Paul Celan killed himself. Piotr Ravitz, Jean Amery, Primo Levi—all killed themselves. After the war. Liberated. Rehabilitated. Free. Free? That horrible humiliation tied their hands.

It’s impossible to communicate the humiliation. It kills. The humiliation of the killed and of the survivors plus the impossibility of transcribing it forcefully enough. There is no writer who can tell it all. Who can take it all. You kno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Interviews
• About the Interviewer