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Sunday, March 13, 2011
Edward Herzbaum's "Lost Between Worlds" is stunning, fresh, immediate, and beautiful. Herzbaum's subject
matter is World War Two, but it would be an disservice to call "Lost
Between Worlds" a World War Two book. "Lost Between Worlds" is a
human book, a book about how one human mind and heart responded to
world-shattering cataclysm, a book I'd recommend to women as well as to men.
World War Two buffs must read this book, of course. But anyone who wants to
better understand the human heart and mind, and who values beautiful writing,
will benefit. "Lost Between Worlds" offered this reader one of the
most intimate literary encounters I've ever had with another human being. I
kept turning the pages till I'd read the book in two days. My reward was not a
highly orchestrated plot, but my encounter with Edward.
"Lost
Between Worlds" offers an in-your-face experience of World War Two, Nazis,
Soviets, the Holocaust, the mass deportation of Poles to Siberian Gulags,
Polish-Jewish relations, combat, torture, and simple human misery. The book's great
strength is this: it is an unedited diary, kept on site – in Poland, Russia,
Iran, Israel, Monte Cassino – and in real time. It's as if you are reading the
blog entries of an average guy whose life keeps thrusting him to the forefront
of historical events. You won't learn Churchill's inner thoughts. You'll learn
how it feels to be a teenager who is suddenly hunted by Nazis. Nothing comes
between the reader and Edward Herzbaum's pain as he is tortured, his
contentment when he finally finds enough to eat, his melancholy as he confronts
how completely his previously normal life has been ripped from under his feet.
The original journals of "Lost Between Worlds" source
I've read many Holocaust memoirs; this book is unlike others.
It took historians, journalists, professors and memoirists a long time to
hammer Holocaust and World War Two history into a canon. Herzbaum's eyewitness
accounts are not massaged or mediated. There is a passage, pages 41-55, that
teachers should use to teach the truth of the Soviet camps. Herzbaum makes no
attempt to hide that he is overwhelmed at being slowly snuffed out. Soviet camp
life is designed to wring labor from prisoners while working them to death. Even
the boards used as beds are a menace; bedbugs sift down from them, and they
sometimes crash, crushing prisoners underneath.
A
prisoner manages to hoard enough food to overeat, defecates on himself, is
kicked out into the snow, and, whimpering, dies from the food his starving body
can't digest. Snow sifts down on his corpse. Flowers, a local reports, used to
sport lively colors, but have turned pale from fear of the Soviet secret
police. Herzbaum describes the camp in architectural detail, as if he were a
town planner, while also conveying how unbearably hungry, hurt, and ready for
death he is. Had Herzbaum edited this passage decades after writing it, in
order to prepare it for publication, I'm sure he would have combed out his own
wrenching sense of helpless victimization. But these words were written as the
events described were experienced, or not long after, and this raw writing
creates the sensation that you are hearing the terrified voice of a tiny insect
with a giant human heel coming down on it.
War is
nothing if not absurd, and "Lost Between Worlds" conveys war's
absurdity with crystalline brilliance. Herzbaum's twisting fate is too
Byzantine, and always too close to headline news, to make a believable
fictional plot. He was a prisoner of the Nazis, and escaped. We know, in
hindsight, what he escaped – Herzbaum was Jewish. Herzbaum didn't know what we
now know, though. He was a teenager who made a lucky break, and went off to
flirt with Wanda, a Polish girl who loved him, and to go swimming, before being
captured by the Soviets. Between the Gulag and the epic and bloody battle of
Monte Cassino, Herzbaum has time to watch and review Disney's "Fantasia."
Herzbaum is a natural writer. He sees with clarity and passion
and feels that need that real writers feel to communicate with an audience. He
has his readers by the lapels and won't let us go till he has told his tale. He
describes Soviets torturing him with a lit cigarette (pages 26-7) with the same
immediacy that he describes the beauty of a Central Asian evening (119):
"There is a bright moon and some wind. As we stop for a
few moments, the exotic landscape is striking, like an intoxicating scent. The
tall poplars wave and rustle; the clay walls of the hovels are lit up
brilliantly by the moon and the small windows look completely black. Under some
trees somebody is laughing or talking in a gentle voice and then there is
silence again, but it is full of life. Everything which is dead in the heat of
the day is now awake, a life so lush and vibrant that it is difficult to
describe. There is also the wind, hungry and restless like a young animal,
coming down from the mountains and blowing above the fertile, fragrant valley.
It runs amok and then it's silent again."
Herzbaum
reports what it is like to be shelled, to be shot, to come across a corpse with
no face. He reports what it is like, as a Gulag prisoner, to watch a female
prisoner, unaware of his presence, strip and bathe on the opposite bank. He
expresses disdain for Italian prostitutes, and their pimps, their own little
brothers. He mentions Wanda three times in the book, enough to get a sense of
Wanda's love for him.
Edward "Edek" Herzbaum, author of "Lost Between Worlds" source
"Lost Between Worlds" is
as remarkable for what it doesn't say or do as for what it does. Herzbaum does
discuss his Jewishness, once, briefly, with a Nazi captain (17). This Nazi is
friendly and helpful to Herzbaum. The only time Herzbaum's Jewishness comes up
in conversations with his fellow Polish exiles and soldiers it is to deny him a
pass on Christmas, because Catholic soldiers have priority for passes on that
day (133). Herzbaum eventually does get the pass. He describes his emotional
response to hearing a pianist play Chopin (124), but, otherwise, Herzbaum
barely mentions being Jewish or Polish. Identity politics appear to matter
little to Herzbaum. It's unfortunate that they mattered so much to the monsters
who gave us World War Two. What matters to Herzbaum is his identity as a
19-year-old (in 1939, when war breaks out) and, when the war ends, a man in his
mid-20s. His youth has been stolen. Herzbaum cares about beauty. He cares about
the color of the mountain ranges that are arrayed from his sentry post, one
after another, far into the distance, into China.
I came
away not only loving this book, but loving its author.
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