Drawing on the abyss

Two crossed approaches: essay and novel

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, new possibilities for exploring and studying the history of communism appeared but – more unexpectedly – ​​the disappearance of the Iron Curtain which cut European memory in two also made it possible to renew the approach to the Shoah and complete our knowledge. Extermination by means “ classics » – what we now call “ Holocaust by bullets » – found its place in the apprehension of the Final Solution. Passed through Theresienstadt (Terezín, in Czech), survivor of Auschwitz, Otto Kraus published his novel in Prague in 1993. Obviously, it would have been difficult for him to do so before 1989 under the communist regime. Catherine Coquio to whom we owe (with Aurélia Kalisky) the volume The Child and the genocide tells us very precisely about the difficult emergence of this memory in post-war Czechoslovakia. Otto Kraus had to go into exile in 1949 from his country where the communist regime “ strived to stifle the country’s Jewish memory “, drowning it like everywhere in the “ popular democracies » in a fake anti-fascist speech. Otto Kraus’ book and Catherine Coquio’s essay therefore form a whole.

Otto Kraus’ book is therefore dependent on the historiographical moment inaugurated in the 1990s, but it differs from other works since it is not a work of a historian based on recently exhumed archives. . It stands at the confluence of history and testimony and has as its subject what we could call the daily life of deportees in a specific place of the immense machine of death. It concerns, in fact, one of the seven sections of Auschwitz-Birkenau: the Family (“ family camp “) where deportees from Czechoslovakia, brought specially from Theresienstadt, were grouped together. The specificity of this section and – within it, block 31, that of children – leads us to understand an essential point in the history of the camps: the real function of this “ family camp », as in the Theresienstadt ghetto. The novel by Otto Kraus and the careful reconstruction of the history of the camp by Catherine Coquio make this “ unique collective experience in the history of Nazi camps “. Otto Kraus’ book reaches a completely new dimension and a completely different meaning with the historian’s look at the back story of the novel. We have two crossed approaches which show, among other things, that negationism is immediate and accompanies the implementation of extermination.

THE Familyship in the middle of the storm

But the word “ novel » is it really appropriate to qualify Otto Kraus’ text ? because he himself is at the same time victim, actor and, therefore, witness – exceptional status for a writer – of the history of this place located at the very heart of the killing center and organized under the high authority of the section IVB of the Reich Central Security Office (RSHA) directed by Adolf Eichmann. The creation of this camp within the camp is part of the operation set up by the Nazis aimed at poisoning those responsible for the International Red Cross. This operation was to include two stages intended to make the latter believe that the deportations of Jews to the East were intended to resettle them in work camps and not to lead them to immediate death. The first stage consisted of a visit to the ghetto of Theresienstadt, a former garrison town a few dozen kilometers north of Prague, a visit prepared and organized, of course, so that it took place in conditions which in no way reflected reality. of the condition of the internees: everything was disguised, camouflaged, organized to deceive the representatives of the ICRCotherwise very naive or little aware of Nazi methods. The second stage envisaged was a visit to Auschwitz, again in a specially designed camp, that of families precisely. This did not take place, the Red Cross officials being satisfied with what they had seen in Theresienstadt. Direct consequence, established as such by the archives of the RHSA found, the deportees from Family were liquidated in July 1944. We understand that the aim of RSHA who made a film (The Führer offers a city to the Jews) was “ save face in the eyes of the outside world » in order to thwart the dissemination of information on the Shoah, the implementation of which, since the fall of 1942, was no longer in doubt, thanks in particular to the documents transmitted to the Polish government in London by the Polish internal resistance (mission of Jan Karski) .

The link between Theresienstadt and Auschwitz-Birkenau is immediate since the “ family camp » was created with deportees brought from the Czech city in five convoys – a total of 17,517 internees. The conditions of survival there were particular: first the families were reunited there, even if men, women and children were scattered in different blocks. ; no one was shaved or dressed in a deportee uniform. Within this particular camp, the organization of cultural activities, tolerated or clandestine, extends what had already been put in place in Theresienstadt by young adults playing the role of educators. Whether they are Zionists or Marxists, these young men and women, previously already involved in associations, devote themselves to the education of children by means of all possible forms of art: drawing, writing, singing and music, theater. It is around these cultural activities that Otto Kraus built his book. “ Art (has) become the only possible place of community », explains Catherine Coquio. The reader enters a strange universe which puts him in a position to understand the questions from which those who were at the very heart of this story could not escape – remember that the life granted by the Nazis was not to exceed six months. An idea creeps into the reader’s mind: this camp was like a ship in the middle of a storm – a metaphor used by Otto Kraus -, a ship taking on water from all sides, helmed by a team without illusions. Catherine Coquio’s study, which synthesizes all the information available today, reinforces the idea of ​​this macabre precariousness.

A collective life on borrowed time

Otto Kraus uses the argument of a newspaper written collectively, in a spirit of resistance and transmission, which allows him to describe a variety of characters and attitudes in his characters, all inspired by real people. Lisa Pomnenka whose name is rooted in the Czech word “ pamet “, that is to say memory (all the characters in the novel have names with hidden meanings), is a young girl who obtains permission from Doctor Mengele to paint a landscape of her own composition on one of the walls of the children’s block. This painted wall existed, it was not completed, but we know that it was decorated with a false window opening onto a landscape, an elsewhere difficult to interpret today. The novel, through these characters, reflects the ambiguity of an educational enterprise in a situation whose outcome is determined by the Final Solution. It is also about the organization of a revolt which could not take place and whose stages Catherine Coquio retraces on the basis of the testimonies of Rudolf Vrba, Zalmen Gradowski, Filip Müller. Lisa participates in its preparation. This “ collective life on borrowed time » magnified by culture raises many questions: What sense does it make to educate children on the threshold of the gas chambers? ? Is this a response to inevitable death ? Isn’t this resistance in itself an illusion? ? Catherine Coquio leans towards the hypothesis that in Theresienstadt she made “ Implacable Nazi logic impenetrable to Czech Jews » (p. 264), but once they were in Birkenau, she played a completely different role. If in Theresienstadt, art “ put on hold for a time the order of the unanswered why “, in Birkenau “ everyone understood that they were condemned to death, (and that) it was necessary for an adult who was uncertain about everything to give the children the opportunity to experience something ideal in the present “. Thus these condemned children would no longer have been reduced to the status of victims, but they would have been able to experience moments where they were themselves, child artists, poets, aware of their destiny, children who could “ mentally escape the certainty of extermination » (C. Coquio, p. 291). We think, of course, of the way in which Janusz Korczak prepared the children of his orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto to face death, notably through the use of theater. Of this Familienlager, there were survivors including Otto Kraus and Otto Dov Kulka.

Otto Kraus’ novel is therefore far from the hasty novels which claim to transmit the memory of the Shoah with easy processes sometimes close to falsification. On the contrary, it leads the reader to meditate on a story that says “ the humanity of lies » (C. Coquio, p. 301) since it was for these extraordinary educators – each of them a singular figure – to give their students “ vital illusions » while they had “ understood what awaited them, which they had even assimilated in a disturbing way » (ID.). But no angelism in his “ novel » – « kids weren’t perfect », writes Otto Kraus – nothing comes to dull it, so much so that he succeeds in transmitting, undoubtedly his initial ambition, this dramatic story by restoring its human and historical dimension.

With this dialogue between a “ novel » deep with multiple colors and the excellent and rigorous development of Catherine Coquio, we can consider the edition of Wall by Lisa Pomnenka as a successful attempt to combine fiction and history, each careful not to annex the qualities and specificities of the other.