False Papers: Deception and Survival in the Holocaust (review)

There is certainly no shortage of Holocaust survival accounts. We are now able to read the most amazing first-person narratives of what it was like to exist in one of the many ghettoes and camps of Nazi-occupied Europe. Although no two stories of the Holocaust are alike in their content or horror, there is enough of a similarity among these narratives to create a kind of identifiable sub-genre. Within this grouping, however, the book before us stands out as different.

The book is different in both form and content. In terms of form, it is the remarkable story of the Melson family’s survival as told by the various members of the family. The story is broken down into chapters according to the event’s chronology. For each segment, the author allows his father (“Willy”) to relate his recollection or his mother (“Nina”) to tell her story and, in some cases, allows both voices to be heard. On occasion, Melson adds some historical background to place the recalled events into a context. As he himself begins to have memories (Robert was born in 1937), he adds his own fragments of memory and impressions. When differences or tensions in memory arise, these are not harmonized away, but allowed to stand on their own merit. This gives the story a three-dimensional aspect that is of necessity missing from single- person accounts. We learn not only about the events, but how different participants experienced and understood them. Thus, Robert Melson, a political scientist at Purdue University, has created both a survivor’s account and an academic document.

But it is not only the form that is different. The account of how the family managed to hide out in the open is in itself an amazing story. I won’t give away all the surprising twists and turns and the innumerable close shaves with the usual cast of suspects: Austrians, Poles, Russians, Nazis. Suffice it to say that the family managed to steal the identity of a member of the Polish nobility and passed themselves off as such, going so far to keep up appearances as hosting dinner parties for Nazi officials and taking vacations in Innsbruck. Along the way we get an insight into the world of the perpetrators and especially by-standers that we rarely have a chance to glimpse.

There is a sub-theme working its way through the book as well. It is the theme of the family’s alienation from Judaism before the war, its rediscovery of its Jewishness during their harrowing experience of eluding the Nazis, and the family’s return to its Jewish roots after the war. In my view, one of the most understated scenes in the book is when, after the war, Willy and Nina break the news to the young Robert (who had grown up knowing himself to be the Catholic Polish aristocrat Boguslaw Marian Zamojski, with more or less the typical attitude toward Jews that that would imply) that he was himself a Jew. The last chapter of the book (“Jews”) and the Epilogue (“A Normal Life”) deal largely with the struggle of Robert to come to terms with his past, his parents, and his identity.

In the end, this is really a trifold document. It is of course mainly an account of survival. But it is also a view, however brief, of what the Holocaust looked like from the “outside.” And finally it is a study in memory and the process of recalling and coming to terms with memory. In this it is really a valuable addition to the literature of Holocaust survival.