There are facts that, literary, return again and again to us, readers, offering new dimensions or perspectives of the drama that they once represented. Two books, El ghetto interior, by the Argentinean Santiago H. Amigorena, and The book of names,From Norwegian Simon Stranger, they propose an approach to the Jewish persecution carried out by Nazism, confronting us with the terrible and inhuman experience of the Holocaust from the point of view not of its direct victims, but of the descendants of the victims. So the horror of those dark years comes to us through those who did not suffer materially, but everything that happened did affect them and affected their future, like the concentric circles that are formed in the water when receiving the impact of a stone in its surface.
The literary proposals from which both texts start are very different, but curiously they coincide in focusing on a short period of time, between 1942 and 1943, when the anti-Semitic persecution increased, turning it into a massacre. Let's go with El ghetto interior , a novel originally published in French and translated by Martín Caparrós, a well-known and admired writer in Spain, and the carnal cousin of Amigorena, as the author and translator share the family affiliation with the protagonist of the book, Vicente or Wincenty Rosenberg, grandfather of both. The title could not be more accurate: Amigorena emphasizes her narration on the emotional effect it causes on him to know that his mother, Gustawa Goldwag, remains in Warsaw, confined, after the occupation of Poland by the Nazis in 1939.
The Warsaw Ghetto, the largest in Europe, was established in October 1940, a year after the German Army occupied the country, and its situation rapidly degenerated. Of the 400,000 Jews crowded into it initially 50,000 survived, most of whom were taken to the Treblinka death camp when the so-called "final solution" was adopted. Gustawa's (real) letters to her son, installed in Buenos Aires since 1928, are progressively scarce until the last one, where the mother expresses in a very restrained way the suffering and scarcity experienced in the ghetto. Then comes silence. And with the overwhelming maternal silence comes the impotent and guilty blockade of the son, who feels responsible in some way for not having cared enough about his mother, logically absorbed in taking a new life in a new host country. In the face of the mother's distress call in her last letter, that illusion of arrival, of the formation of her own family, of the love that Rosenberg feels for his wife…, all this will be darkened before a reality that is imposed on the conscience against any logic. Thus an insurmountable wall of silence and solitude rises in the spirit of Vicente Rosenberg, a subtle extension of the Polish wall, and which will accompany the character until his death.
In front of The Inner Ghetto, probing the insides of an interiority devastated by the absurdity that someone by the mere fact of being a Jew, and nothing more than a Jew, deserves death, we read The Book of Names, a more ambitious work as a novel and conceived in the form of a dictionary where as the letters of the alphabet advance, the narrator reels off fragments of another family history. In this case it is about the persecution suffered by the grandparents of the author's wife, Simon Stranger, and, in parallel, the story of one of his executioners, the Norwegian collaborationist Henry Rinnan, recruited by the Gestapo to infiltrate the Resistance in 1940 and that he would end up having his own initiatives when it came to persecuting fellow citizens who showed the least dissent with the invading regime. At the end of the war, he would be accused of monstrous crimes and executed in 1947. The point of convergence between the two narrative situations is provided by a house, space for torture and executions in the Rinnan era and inhabited by the Komissar family at the end of the war. . Is it possible to forget what happened between those walls? The young couple that settles in reacts very differently to information that weighs like a stone tied around their necks.
Stranger does an excellent job delving into the roots of the Gestapo agent's behavior, treating it in terms of a certain social reality that would push him into abjection. An apparently insignificant fact, his short stature to be Norwegian, makes him a withdrawn, silent young man, accustomed to the contempt of his classmates simply because he is short. Inside, however, things work differently and a superhero capable of transforming the humiliations received into heroics and disrespect grows. Nazism will place in Rinnan's hands the greatest instrument of vengeance, impunity: if he suffered for being short, the Jews will suffer for being Jews and the enemies of Nazism — accepted by Rinnan as a measure of world unity for the fact of seeing himself recognized by him - they will suffer for their dissent. All without mercy, as part of the new order imposed by an absurd supremacy. But not everything is evil. Hope in humans is provided by Stranger through the owner of a small trucking company, Carl Fredriksen, who will risk his life transporting Jews threatened with death to the Swedish border, thus saving them.
Neither Amigorena nor Stranger explain the behaviors of their characters to us through a single reality, but in a kaleidoscopic way, in the same way that the consequences of our acts are dense and go much further than we suppose: that should always be a reason of reflexion. In any case, there is a desire for clarity, to delve into the psychological truth of two family stories crossed by irrationality and the murky passions that took over the world in the 20th century. All of this was managed with great silence in tow. That demand for clarity that the narrators impose on the past will allow them to overcome the river of time, bringing life closer to its most naked reality.
The inner ghetto
Santiago H. Amigorena
Translation by Martín Caparrós
Literature Random House, 2020
156 pages. 17.90 euros.
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The book of names
Simon Stranger
Translation by Kirsti Baggethun and Asunción Lorenzo
Seix Barral, 2020
334 pages. 19.90 euros
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