Book of the Week
Two Book Reviews
Two gripping reads for those have have an interest in World War Two or the Holocaust.
Gotz and Meyer by David Albahari
The Nazi purge of Serbia’s Jews in 1942 led to the death of more than 5000 people. The perpetrators of this atrocity, those closest to the action, were two SS soldiers, Gotz and Meyer. This pair was assigned to drive a truck designed to deliver carbon monoxide from the vehicle’s exhaust to the back of the truck. Effectively a gas chamber on wheels, Serbian Jews were loaded once or twice daily, transported to the outskirts of Belgrade, a sufficiently lengthy journey for asphyxiation to take its toll, and unceremoniously dumped into mass graves.
To the narrator, one of a handful of children to escape the purge, Gotz and Meyer are men without faces, names known to him only from records of their deeds. Daily adult life for him revolves around creating images of Gotz and Meyer, repeated attempts to mould their person. It is a harrowing journey, revealing itself in his ever-deepening obsession with the character and daily lives of these men, and which ultimately leads to a kind of madness in him.
This is a bleak story. Be prepared for the despair expressed to overwhelm. But also savour the comic moments, the genius of the climactic action, and the profound and positive message put. The latter, expressed as the narrator’s struggle to fill in the faces, to comprehend Gotz and Meyer as human beings, strives to assure that the memory of human tragedy can not be erased, and thereby, nor aroused.
Let me go: My mother and the SS by Helga Schneider
In Let me go, Helga Schneider’s discovery of Nazi atrocities is more serendipitous. Helga is abandoned as a child by her mother. It is not until years later, in a first meeting with her mother as an adult, that she learns the reason for her abandonment: her mother’s enlistment into the ranks of the SS.
Helga’s adult life becomes a struggle to comprehend her mother’s infatuation with power, an infatuation felt so passionately that it would lead a mother to abandon her child. Then out of the blue, thirty years after the first disastrous meeting, Helga receives a letter asking her to attend her 90 year old mother’s bedside. Why the summons? And why now, after thirty years silence?
The tension of the second meeting is electric. Will the mother condemn, at last, the calculated barbarism practised by the SS? Will she repent her personal involvement in concentration camp brutality? Will she express her loss and love for the child that she forsook to pursue her national-socialist ambitions? And will the daughter be able to love in return? Or forgive her mother her monstrous past?
31 August 2008
