BOOKS
tails, their teeth gleaming under their half-open snouts, their
eyes
reflecting the daylight as if they were the beads of a rosary .
. . . Suddenly the shifting sea of rats parted and slowly, un–
hurrying, with the stroke of a swimmer, a bony hand with bony spread–
eagled fingers rose, followed by the man 's entire arm.. .. In between
the ribs , under the armpits , and in the place where the belly was , gaunt
rodents fiercely struggled for the remaining scraps of dangling muscle
and intestine. Mad with greed , they tore from one another scraps of
clothing, skin, and formless chunks of the trunk .
639
The important question to ask is, does "art such as this" take us closer
to what happened to theJews, or is it, as I believe, a kind of
grandguignol,
a substitute horror show, meant to divert us from what the actual atrocity–
most unbearable perhaps in its monotony, its calmness, the way in which it
fit unobtrusively into our world-was like? Compare Kozinski's
grotes–
querie
with a single line from Mary Berg, who, when writing about what she
saw (a rickshaw driver beaten down to the Warsaw snow) does not feel
herself " exempted from the claims ofliteral truth" :
The blood was so horribly red the sight of it completely shattered
me .
But there is no Mary Berg, and no other direct testimony in this book–
which is fair enough . But there is no Rachmil Briks either, with his simple,
funny account of the Lodz Ghetto; nor isJohn Hersey's
The Wall
even men–
tioned, undoubtedly because it is distinguished especially by its extra–
ordinary faithfulness to its sources . Perhaps the best book of all, Tadeusz
Borowski's collection of stories ,
This Way To The Gas, Ladies And Gentle–
men,
which is practically a study of what is commonplace about horror, gets
all of a page and a half. And most surprisingly, since it is rather up Professor
Langer's eerie alley, there isn 't a single reference to Michel Tournier's
The
Ogre .
I do not mean to suggest there are no fine books here. There is
The
Last a/The just,
after all, and Elie Wiesel's masterpiece,
Night.
(And some
of the others that I have not read may not be as bad as they are here made to
seem.) But Langer, with his
sensibilite concentrationnaire,
admires what is
weakest in these two works-Ernie barking like a dog, for instance, or the
way in which
Night
"has uanscended history and autobiography"; it is just
that "uanscendent" element in Wiesel-the fierce, unsublimated rage,
and the sweet religiosity-that has made his subsequent works less and less
valuable
to
read.
I have come , finally and reluctantly, to the conclusion that almost any
honest eye-witness testimony of the Holocaust is more moving and more
successful at creating a sense of what it must have been like in the ghettos
and the camps than almost any fictional account of the same events. I am
