Unforgiven
What the agony of Jesus on
the cross is to Christians, the Holocaust is to Jews. Except that the massacre
of millions whose only crime was to be born Jewish has no transcendent meaning,
no sacred closure. To theologize the Holocaust is meaningless even to the
super-Orthodox who accept everything as God's will. To secular skeptical Jews,
the horror is still just another episode, though the worst, in the unending
suspicion and hatred of the Jews.
What some
piously accept and others try to explain is to Aharon Appelfeld "a central
event in many people's lives that has become a metaphor for our century. There
cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it." Appelfeld, a survivor from
Czernowitz in Austrian Galicia whose first language was German, now lives in
Jerusalem and writes in Hebrew. He is the most telling novelist of the
Holocaust, for he has no need to describe it directly. He has put his own
suffering--as a boy he saw a Nazi kill his mother--into short narratives of
self-absorbed Jewish life before the war that are so ominously toneless,
artfully simple and repetitious, deceptively compressed in feeling, that the
reader, aware of the horror about to descend on these people, feels like
screaming but knows he will not be heard.
The best-known of these narratives are Badenheim
1939 (1980) and To the Land of the Cattails (1986). In The Iron
Tracks Appelfeld has reversed his usual strategy. The war ended long ago,
but for Erwin Siegelbaum, who at 15 saw the Nazi officer Nachtigel murder his
parents, the war has never ended. For 40 years he has been living on trains
that remind him of the train on which he was once deported. His purpose is to
find Nachtigel and kill him. This is mad, but it signifies the depth at which
the Holocaust can enter a Jew's soul.
Since
the end of the war, I have been on this line, as they say: a long, twisted line
stretching from Naples to the cold north, a line of locals, trams, taxis, and
carriages. The seasons shift before my eyes like an illusion. I have learned
this route with my body. Now I know every hostel and every inn, every
restaurant and buffet, the vehicles that bring you to the remotest corners.
Boarding still another train, he gets "a sort
of constant renewal." One can live on trains. The officials now know him so
well that they drop the loud, jangling popular music he detests on the
loudspeaker and put on chamber music. Shaving on a train gives him a new start
in life. There is one station where he is met by a regular driver, now a sort
of friend. There are two stations on his route for which he has "love,"
stations he can return to knowing he will be able to refresh himself with a
solid meal and a cup of really good coffee. But for the most part "I live by
signs, by codes whose meaning I alone know." There was even a terrible moment
when he spent two weeks in bed "because it seemed to me that a new war had
started."
"I
confess, I have no faith in anyone outside the train." He is so frozen inside
that he remains completely detached from the occasional woman on board who
attracts him:
There
is nothing like love on a train. Sometimes it lasts only a station or two. The
main thing is that you'll never see the woman again. Of course, sometimes you
get entangled, and you suddenly have, aside from your valise, a sluggish
creature who keeps demanding coffee and cigarettes. Thus I repeat to myself:
love for two stations, and no more.
In his apathy he remembers the farce lived by Jewish
orators and organizers such as his Communist parents. They were always moving
about, depriving him of a proper home--and always resolute. They could not take
in the fact that their comrades disliked them for being Jews.
My memory is my downfall.
It is a sealed well that doesn't lose a drop, to use an old expression. Nothing
can deplete it. My memory is a powerful machine that stores and constantly
discharges lost years and faces. In the past I believed that travel would blunt
my memory; I was wrong. Over the years, I must admit, it has only grown
stronger. Were it not for my memory, my life would be different--better, I
assume. My memory fills me up until I choke on a stream of daydreams. ... But
in recent years I have learned to overcome this. A glass of cognac, for
instance, separates me from my memory for a while.
Where does
he find the funds for this endless life on trains? This is one of the subtlest
issues in the book. He lives by buying up old ceremonial objects retrieved from
synagogues nearly destroyed by the Nazis. And in this merchandising of the
once-sacred there is no relief for him, no peace. He has competitors also
searching for these objects, and what is more, they too are looking for
Nachtigel in order to avenge themselves.
The peasants and army veterans Siegelbaum
encounters think favorably of the war. An innkeeper who lost his hearing at
Stalingrad and communicates by writing answers Siegelbaum's saying, "Hitler
deceived the world":
"Not true,"
he replied without hesitation.
"Why?"
"Hitler
wanted to destroy the Jews, and indeed he destroyed them," he explained.
When I
didn't answer, he added in big letters: "It was a great mission, and it
succeeded."
"But they
still exist," I couldn't refrain from writing to him.
"A
mistake," he didn't hesitate to reply.
Siegelbaum wants to kill the
man for revealing his hidden desire. "I ought to have killed him. There is
nothing simpler than killing a man, and yet for some reason, I cannot do it."
Eventually he does locate Nachtigel and, after some false pleasantries, he
shoots him. The event leaves him pretty much as he was before. The Jewish need
to find an answer to the Holocaust is not forthcoming. It would have to be as
monumental and world-shattering as the terror itself. In the face of prosperous
postwar Germany, retribution is a joke. When Siegelbaum finally cries out, "Why
can't I pray?" he cannot find an answer within himself. His "melancholy" is a
well-known Jewish disease. The Communist leaders he knew even spoke grandly of
a "war against melancholy."
Its real name is despair,
that central human emotion in the face of overwhelming odds of which tragedy is
made. There are no accommodating solutions after the fact. There is no
forgiveness for so much pain, and no one to reconcile with. But a story as
piercing as this goes to the heart of the matter, for it embodies the terrible
event in such a way that it steals up on us and will haunt us in our sleep.
