Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Representation in the Postmodern World

4. By the Light of Darkness: Six Major European Writers Who Experienced the Holocaust

4 By the Light of Darkness: Six Major European Writers Who Experienced the Holocaust HUGH NISSENSON I write In the barracks At night, By the light Of darkness. Etty Hillesum (1914-1943) My subject is the work in translation of six major twentieth-century European writers who experienced the Holocaust: Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum, Jacob Presser, Emmanuel Ringelblum, Tadeusz Borowski, and Primo Levi. I've chosen the writers whom I consider to be the best stylists on that subject. The five adults among them share a common theme—a vision of the Holocaust as a new historical reality. Borowski, Levi, Frank, Hillesum, Presser, and Ringelblum were acutely sensitive to their respective spoken and written languages. Levi translated fragments of Dante's The Canto of Ulysses into French and repeated his verse as a gift to a fellow prisoner in Auschwitz. Anne Frank was particularly proud of her Dutch:1 September 2, 1942 . . . the two ladies speak abominable Dutch . .. Whenever I quote Mother or Mrs. van Daan, I'll write proper Dutch instead of trying to duplicate their speech.1 Even in translation, the work of all six writers shares two stylistic characteristics : clarity and concision. Their unadorned, vernacular prose often has the impact of poetry. Listen to the letter Etty Hillesum wrote to a friend 57 58 HUGH NISSENSON in Amsterdam while on a train to Auschwitz from the Westerbork concentration camp. Her words were scribbled across an addressed postcard, which was thrown from the train and found by Dutch farmers on September 7, 1943, outside Westerbork. Christine: Opening the Bible at random I find this: "The Lord is my high tower." I am sitting on a rucksack in the middle of a full freight car. Father, Mother and Mischa are a few cars away. In the end, the departure came without warning. On sudden special orders from the Hague. We left the camp singing, Father and Mother firmly and calmly, Mischa too. We shall be traveling for three days. Thank you for all your kindness and care. Friends left behind will still be writing to Amsterdam; perhaps you will hear something from them. Or from my last letter from camp. Good-bye for now from the four of us. Etty.2 The simple, soaring sentence, "We left the camp singing," was written by an artist at the height of her powers. Three months earlier, while still in Amsterdam, the twenty-eight-yearold Hillesum wrote in her journal, Looked at Japanese prints.. . this afternoon. That's how I want to write. With that much space round a few words. They should simply emphasize the silence.3 On April 5, 1944, in another part of the same city, fourteen-year-old Anne Frank embraced her vocation as a writer: I know I can write . . . I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and express all that's inside me! (250-251) Anne Frank was an awakening artist; she linked the development of her gift for words to her inner life and her hope for literary immortality— and said so clearly, in colloquial speech. Shortly after the twenty-three-yearold Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski was liberated from Auschwitz, he wrote: I take out fresh paper, arrange it neatly on the desk .. . and with a tremendous intellectual effort I attempt to grasp the true By the Light of Darkness 59 significance of the events, things and people I have seen. For I intend to write a great, immortal epic, worthy of this unchanging , difficult world chiselled out of stone.4 Each of these authors is an intensely self-conscious stylist. On Sunday night, September 20, 1942, Etty Hillesum, awaiting deportation from a Westerbork barrack, gave herself in her diary the best three words of advice about being a writer that I know: Verbalise, vocalise, visualise. (175) Later she wrote: (September 30, 1943). . . How much I want to write. Somewhere deep inside me is a workshop in which Titans are forging a new world. (186) Emmanuel Ringelblum, the epic historian of the Warsaw Ghetto, who wrote in Yiddish, used a cinematographic technique to dramatize the typhus epidemic raging around him on March 10, 1941: A scene: An auto with [Germans] riding in it comes along. A Jewish hand wagon blocks the way at Karmelicka Street. The car...