Hell within

 

The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena describes a carefree man leaving Poland to start a new home in Buenos Aires in 1928. His mother expects weekly updates about his new life, but Vicente scoffs, and despite his Jewish heritage, Vicente and friends scoff at the old-fashioned ways of their Jewish parents. Early on, Vicente makes halfhearted attempts to convince his mother and other family members to flee Warsaw, and as the decade progresses, he mostly stops writing. By 1938, her letters stop, too.   

Vincente’s indifference and scoffing soon transform into despair as news about the war in Europe and atrocities gradually filter through. He receives two final letters from his mother, in 1940 and the other in 1941, describing deteriorating conditions and an uncertain future with Germans herding Jews into a ghetto, treating them worse than animals. In what would otherwise be an ordinary, peaceful life, Vicente’s spirit is crushed, tormented over his mother’s last communications, obsessing if she went hungry or still wore a favorite shawl. 

Vicente sinks into a deep depression, spending some time with family and friends but no longer speaking, instead mostly gambling to confirm his own failure as a human being. His wife and her family are understanding, trying to accommodate him. Rosita and Vincente, both with “the hesitant, pale, mute fragility that revealed they had been much loved as children,” simply cannot comprehend the full extent of cruelty.

He describes scanning the newspapers for any bit of news before receiving his mother’s last letter – “for signs, for cluses, for hints that might help him understand – and searching, like everyone else, for reasons not to understand…. Like every human being, Vicente had wanted to know and, at the same time, had preferred not to know.” He longs for ignorance and the ability to erase his memory. “It is perhaps one of the most singular traits of a human being: just as the body, when it has endured too much suffering, or has grown too weak, temporarily lapses into unconsciousness… so that it can survive, or rather so that something can survive – something that is at once still human and already less than human, something that is still ourselves and is already no one.” 

Forgetting is impossible though. Every morning is the same for Vicente, “the same memories, the same guilt, the same longing to forget.” He waned to forget words and sentences and meaning, longing for "a silence so powerful, so constant, so insistent, so relentless that all things would become remote, invisible, inaudible." He walks miles to be alone, hoping to escape his fears, but silence brings no relief. "[U]nfortunately, though stillness is the opposite of motion, there is no opposite to thought, nothing that counters the workings of the mind: not thinking is merely another form of thinking."  

Most of all, he hopes to flee the voice of his conscience, even as he tortures himself about his inaction. “Something must be done to counter the nothing that I can do. I can do nothing. I cannot do anything. I have never understood the difference.” 

One account of the camps describes an inmate who asked why after being given an order an the guard pushing the man and retorting: Hier ist Kein warum. Here there is no why: “these words summed up the determination of the Nazis in the camps to create a space that was utterly different, a space in which there was no why.” Vicente determines his life is worthless, also lacks “a why,” and so, “He became another, another devoid of meaning, devoid of hope, devoid of a future.”  He describes feeling alone, sinking, heading only toward a grave. He becomes a shell, neglecting wife, children, job and friends.

Later Vicente’s grandson assumes that his grandfather must have wrestled with the notion that escape made him a traitor. Amigorena himself fled dictatorship in Argentina for Europe: “I was not where I should have been.” 

But the grandson does not complain or accepts the life given to him. “I do not know whether, before he died, Vicente realized that remaining silent was not a solution,” Amigorena concludes. Instead, language is intertwined with memory, providing guidance as guilt and despair pass to subsequent generations. To avoid being complicit, survivors and their descendants must reject attempts to forget or deny the evil. 

"What you could be..."

 

 

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr follows two children, one in Germany and the other in France, mostly between 1934 and 1944. Marie-Laure LeBlanc is blind and depends on her father who works for the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, for constant directions in moving about their home in Paris. Werner Pfennig, an orphan in the coal region of Essen, relies on books found in the trash to study mathematics and physics.

The two characters spend only one terrifying afternoon together, but there are earlier connections. Werner and his younger sister find a broken radio, which he repairs, so they can listen to broadcasts from around Europe, including a science program for children hosted by Marie-Laure’s grandfather. Ambitious, longing to do anything but work in the mines that killed his father, Werner tries to overlook the horrors of a fascist system, fearful when his sister speaks out. After the Nazis ban devices that access foreign programming, he smashes their radio, incurring his sister’s wrath.

Passing competitive exams, Werner is sent to a national political institute run by Nazis, a place where “every ounce of their attention has been trained to ferret out weakness.” Werner is protected by helping a professor research use of radio waves to locate transmitters. He befriends a wealthy, connected boy who loves nature and birds and refuses to humiliate others. Frederick recognizes that a cruel system traps them all and at one point advises, “Your problem, Werner, is that you still believe you own your life.” Werner “has the sensation that something huge and empty is about to devour them all.”

Werner is curious, keeping a notebook and logging all the questions he wishes to explore. Yet the fascist system, like extremist religions, is intent on control and preventing people from thinking for themselves. One instructor suggests: “Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.” Later, on the front, another colleague marvels about Werner, “What you could be.” Werner finds himself missing the coal town he was so eager to leave and his sister: “her loyalty, her obstinacy, the way she always seems to recognize what is right.” She could see through  the Nazis’ angry propaganda: “How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked? While he knew so little?”

Marie-Laure, unable to see, is understandably fretful and anxious, full of questions about the impending invasion of France, and the writer is skilled in describing her surroundings through only the senses of taste, smell, sound and touch. Her father makes a model of their neighborhood and drills her on using her cane, counting drains and curbs, touching fences and tree trunks, to find her way home from unnamed locations. She possesses a few Braille workbooks along with a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. She comes to view the world as complex mazes: “The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models…. None were more complicated than the human brain… one wet kilogram within which spin universes.”

The father and daughter flee Paris for the coast and his uncle’s home, and the museum entrusts the man with a rare diamond, rumored to be cursed. Her father rejects such stories. “There is luck maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.”

Marie-Laure and their housekeeper convince her introvert uncle to support the resistance. Werner’s unit detects the family’s hidden radio, and the two children connect in person and help one another. One survives and the other perishes. 

The war teaches that ordinary life – simple, normal secure routines rather than power or riches – is heaven. Those on either side who survive the war are traumatized. Every bite of food, any comfort, feeling like a betrayal to those who did not. Brutal memories sabotage pleasant ones, and grief about those who did not survive prick any scrap of happiness. Decades later, the character who survives wonders if the war’s dead and missing might travel the sky in flocks – “That great shuttles of souls might fly about… They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour… someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We will rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”

Ordinary beauty can be the most rewarding, and some we do not notice until it vanishes.