The Dark Room, by Rachel Seiffert

The Dark Room is comprised of three novellas joined by setting and theme, but with completely different characters (I’m not really impressed when something touted as a novel contains three lengthy short stories, but that’s just a personal hang-up). The first part, “Helmut”, tells the story of a young photographer’s apprentice in Germany during World War II. Helmut meticulously documents the disappearance of people from Berlin, and witnesses many of the horrors of the holocaust through his camera’s lens, yet is ultimately unable to connect with the people in his photographs, who are merely numbers in his ledger – a precursor to depersonalizing statistics to come. I must admit, I didn’t find the first story overly compelling, for Helmut’s lack of empathy is too easily mirrored on the part of the reader. Fortunately, the stories improve, and the realizations of the later stories enrich the first one.

The second story, “Lore”, tells the story of Lore and her 4 siblings, who must cross occupied post-war Germany to reach their Oma in Hamburg. Lore’s parents are imprisoned for Nazi war crimes, leaving the children to fend for themselves. They must struggle to find food and travel illegally, and Lore bears the heavy burden of her younger siblings, while she struggles to understand recent events and her parents involvement. (As an aside, I couldn’t help but remember a novel I read in the third or fourth grade, Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt, where a young girl had to care for her siblings on the road.) Unlike Helmut, Lore starts to understand the possibility of evil, and realizes that her parents may have been involved, though she has difficulty reconciling these budding realizations with the parents she remembers.

In the third story, the budding awareness that has been developing between the different characters is fully realized, as  “Micha”, a young man in the present day, struggles to determine whether or not his grandfather had killed people during his time in the SS. Whereas most of Micha’s family would rather not know, he becomes obsessed with finding out, travelling even to Belarus, where he meets an old man who had turned on his people and joined the Nazis. For me, this was the most important story in the collection, for it asks us what allowances are to be made in times of great violence. It also questions whether someone who killed could still be a good person. Can a man who killed still love his wife, play with his grandchildren, have an honest career?  Can we be defined solely by our actions, even in times of war? Must most importantly, this story forces us to reconsider love, which may be more conditional than we would like to believe.

Seiffert’s writing is restrained, some would say sparse, and initially I found it off-putting (favouring what some would call overwraught writing like I do), but I gradually started to appreciate this restraint not only as appropriate for the content, but as another way, maybe the only way, for a German to look back on this dark period in history. For this is not so much a novel about the holocaust, but about its legacy in German history and the German psyche. It is not only about the persistence of humanity in the face of atrocity, but the difficulties in seeing atrocity’s face.

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A History of Forgetting, by Caroline Adderson

“The first thing she learned working at Vitae was about history: that the present rests upon layers of the past, but is a stratum so unstable, so shot with fault lines, that now and then the then rears up and knocks down the now.”

Often, when I’m choosing a book to read, I stand in front of my bookcase and pull possible titles. Usually there is one that just feels right. In this case, it took me by surprise, as did the story itself. A History of Forgetting has two protagonists: 1) Malcolm, a hairdresser who is dealing with his partner’s worsening Alzheimer’s and 2) Alison, the salon receptionist, and the story’s ingenue. Both are shaken by a brutal event that leaves Alison diving into the history of the Holocaust, and Malcolm even more unable to recover from the loss of his lover. Both are plagued by remembering what others would rather forget – for Malcolm it is personal history, and for Alison, social history, which all of the sudden, has become personal. This painful situation is laced with such love and hate that neither can adjust to normal life and so they take a pilgrimage to Auschwitz together.

Adderson’s language is compelling and poetic without ostentation. I read this book in two days, charmed by the wonderful relationship between Malcolm and Denis, horrified by the cruelties inspired by hatred, saddened by our obligation to remember. This book is a fantastic illustration of what I would have explored in my never-written phd thesis: that fiction is as an effective a vehicle for history as so called “historical” writing, indeed more effective, permitting multiple perspectives and forcing us to participate imaginatively and emotionally in the past.

The only part of the book which I felt didn’t work was the intrusions of strangers linked by the use of second person. While I understand the need to draw the reader into the story, Adderson’s prose is quite sufficient to the task. Each of these passages is heralded by foreign signs, here signposts of a history we can’t quite understand as we journey back. Thus Adderson forces the reader back outside, away from intimacy with the characters, staring at the incomprehensible actions of others – in the present and in the past. For this is the most dangerous thing of all – to forget the personal, to generalize, to fall prey to History and forget the “histories”. Even as the “you” draws us into the story, it makes us spectators, complicit in the violence of inaction and lack of empathy. Unfortunately, the heartbreakingly beautiful final scene of the novel is somewhat overshadowed by one of these heavy handed interludes. But at the risk of ending on a similarly unsatisfactory note when the novel was for the most part well-wrought and moving, let me leave you with a piece of Adderson’s beautifully rendered prose that contains what I think is the novel’s principle message. [Looking at a case of leftover shoes in Auschwitz]:

“The shoes were once all colours – here a red slipper, there a white Cuban heel – but only just. Most are now a near-uniform lustreless brown. Gradually, they have blended together into a mass, indistinguishable and, again, impersonal. They are becoming, once again, abstract. The shoes are fading as memory is fading, melding as they disintegrate…How to put ourselves into these shoes, when these shoes no longer exist?”

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An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943

To begin, I must thank the lovely Anne Lewis, for introducing me to Etty. Even in the first few pages of her diary, I felt I knew Etty well. She was the kind of woman that transcends time. As a fairly well-off Jewish woman living in Amsterdam, in the beginning her diaries are not unusual for a young girl. She writes about learning, about her friends, about the men in her life, including the one that she loves though she knows she should not. She is extremely well-educated and self-aware, though her diaries reflect those little ironies that often creep into our journals – for example, a declaration not to need to be with men, followed a few lines later by the need to call a particular man. I could not help but smile, and feel I had found a friend.
But aside from her candour, what is most special about Etty is her astute and poetic observations about herself and the people around her. Being a reader, my favourite passage of this remarkable book is the following:

“Slowly but surely I have been soaking Rilke up these last few months: the man, his work and his life. And that is probably the only right way with literature, with study, with people or with anything else: to let it all soak in, to let it all mature slowly inside you until it has become a part of yourself. That, too, is a growing process. Everything is a growing process. And in between, emotions and sensations that strike you like lightning. But still the most important thing is the organic process of growing.” 106

And it is this organic process of growing that we follow over the course of the journal. As the situation from which she has thus far been sheltered grows steadily more threatening, Etty leaves behind some of her concerns about her oft put off translation of Dostoevsky and her many lovers, and turns to concerns about human nature and about God. Though And ultimately the God she seeks is deep inside of herself. It is an ever renewable sense of strength and conviction, and consequently devoid of any specific religion – a remarkable thing in a time of religious persecution. Eventually her diaries become more like a prayer, with frequent refrains of “Oh God”(which I’ll admit does become a little overbearing eventually) But despite the horror unfolding around her, Etty embraces all of life, the good and the bad, and finds the beauty in every day.

“And so I can sit for hours and know everything and bear everything and grow stronger in the bearing of it, and at the same time feel sure that life is beautiful and worth living and meaningful. Despite everything. But that does not mean I am always filled with joy and exaltation. I am often dog-tired after standing about in queues, but I know that this too is part of life and somewhere there is something inside me that will never desert me again.” (160)

Eventually Etty is sent to a work camp, and she goes passively, feeling her life is no more important than anyone else’s. She sends a few letters from the camp, describing the situation, but she is still not hateful or embittered, rather the remarkable last line of her diary is “We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.” (243)

Etty died in Auschwitz in 1943, but left a remarkable gift for generations to come. Her confidence, her love for life and her good faith seep out of the page and into the reader. I would like to give this book to my daughter at this age, because this simple, but profound wisdom deserves to be shared. I think that Etty will be with me for a long time.

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