Facing fearful odds
Carole Angier
SILENT REBELS by Marion Schreiber, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside Atlantic Books, f14.99, pp. 308, ISBN 1903809894 BROTHERS IN ARMS by Peter Duffy Century, £16.99, pp. 302, ISBN 0712676961 Are we secretly — or not so secretly — suffering from Holocaust fatigue? I suspect so, partly because of new antiSemitism (anti-Zionism), and partly because of old, which like a weed is always ready to regrow. Apart from Holocaust junkies, therefore, I suspect that few people will want to read these two new Holocaust books, or any others. But they would be wrong. First, what happened to Europe's Jews could happen to anyone, and has done so several times since, if never on such an industrial scale. Second, we need reminding of what lies behind the tragedies in Israel. And third, this is a new generation of stories, which not only retells the crimes and failures of the majority, but reveals the heroism of resisters on both sides, who are always few.
Both these books focus on three young men : three friends in Silent Rebels, one of them Jewish, and three Jewish brothers in Brothers in Arms. But from this point on their stories could not be more different. Brothers in Arms is set in Eastern Europe, in what has sometimes been Poland and sometimes Russia, and is now Betorus. Even those with Holocaust fatigue will know the depths of anti-Semitism in prewar Poland, which meant that the Nazis found willing executioners there indeed, and 97 per cent of Polish Jewry perished. By contrast not even Holocaust junkies like me know about Belgium. I knew about Italy, where 85 per cent of Jews survived; I even knew that tiny Denmark and Bulgaria had bravely defended their Jews. But I did not know that over 200,000 Belgians were active members of the Resistance; that even more helped and hid their Jewish fellow-citizens, including 4,000 children; and that as a result over 50 per cent of Belgian Jews escaped deportation. Compare that to France, for instance; or to Holland, where only 12 per cent of Jews survived. Though the resisters in Belgium were still a minority, they were a large one; and that ought to be better known.
I hope Silent Rebels will make it so. It tells how the three friends — Youra Livchitz, Jean Franklemon and Robert Maistriau — did what no one else in Europe dared to do, and survived: they ambushed one of the trains carrying prisoners to Auschwitz. It tells the stories of several of those who escaped as a result, as well as the stories of the friends themselves, and of their families, friends and accomplices. I am glad to know about them all, especially the brilliant brothers Youra and Alexandre Livchitz, both of whom were later shot by the Nazis; and about the train driver Albert Dumon, the priest Otto Gamann, and dozens of other Belgian helpers, most of them anonymous. I am also glad that a few more perpetrators have been named — though hardly shamed, since most of them seem to get off lightly as usual, and live to a ripe old age in Germany.
The story is gripping, but I have to say that it is not well told. Some of this may be the fault of the translator (whose punishment' cannot mean that of the person who inflicts it, for example). But most of it is the fault of the author, who never trusts us to remember anyone, but reidentifies them each time they appear, at the same time hunting wildly for variations (one poor comrade, for instance, is repeatedly the Communist' and 'the engineer', and once even 'the thoughtful and incorruptible Bessarabian patriot). She overdrarnatises where no drama is needed, and she constantly inserts snappy bits of scene-setting which are meant to increase the sense of reality, but do exactly the opposite ('Hertz Jospa paced nervously back and forth in the little room.'). Less of this would definitely have been more.
Brothers in Arms, by contrast, is cleanly and clearly told. Peter Duffy sees that the facts speak for themselves: the murder of hundreds of thousands of unarmed Jews by the Nazi Einsatzgnippen even before the gassing of millions — 'a killing spree unequalled in the annals of history,' as Duffy says; the appalling eagerness of their Polish and Lithuanian and Ukrainian helpers; the fatal inability of the victims to believe that the plan was to murder them all, so that they went on trying to negotiate instead of flee. All of this — the ghettos, the starvation, the massacres — he tells again, now in the area around Novogrudek and Lida, near Minsk. But mostly he tells the new, or newer, story of resistance.
It is an extraordinary one — even more extraordinary than the Belgians', because of the overwhelming odds. The three brothers, Tuvia, Asael and Zus Bielski, set up a family camp in the woods after the murder of their parents, and of Zus's wife and child, in December 1941. The Bielskis were already famous for their fierce resistance to local persecutors, and the news of their forest haven spread. Escapers from the ghettos and work camps arrived, directed by the brothers' few brave friends — the peasants Kosiovsky and Kot, and the Russian partisan Panchenkov. Many were young, and joined Asael's and Zus's fighting units; but Tuvia, the leader, insisted that all should be given shelter, and they were. Soon there were 300 of them, then 800, then 900; by the end, in 1944, they were around 1,200 in all, including 60 children, and several people as old as 80: as many as on Schindler's list, and the largest group of Jews rescued by fellow Jews in the second world war.
Duffy tells their hair-raising adventures well, as they move from wood to wood to escape the Nazis, and finally build a city in the forest, complete with workshops for tailors, leatherworkers and watchmakers, a bakery and forge, a school and infirmary, even a cemetery and a jail. He details the terrible struggles against enemies inside the group as well as out, and does not hide the moral ambiguities of his heroes in war: Zus in particular shot first and asked questions after, and even Tuvia killed a fellow Jew in anger at the end. But that end in particular is especially moving. The villagers watch the long line of 1,000 Jews leaving the forest, and ask in disbelief, 'Are you ghosts?' And after the end there was a sad lack of recognition for the brothers, two of whom ended their lives as poor immigrants in America. But Zus, at least, didn't change. At 82, in an interview for the Washington Holocaust Museum, he was asked what he remembered about the Nazis. 'I remember they were bastards.' he said.
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