Seven months after these directives were given, in September 1943, the Nazis set up a "family camp" as an extension of the Auschwitz precinct, in the birch forest of Birkenau, which included a separate block, "number 31," built especially for children. It was designed to serve as proof to the world that Jews deported to the east were not being killed. In fact, they were allowed to live six months before being sent on to the same fate as the other deported victims. Eventually, having served its purpose as propaganda, the "family camp" was permanently closed.260
While it lasted, Block 31 housed up to five hundred children together with several prisoners appointed "counsellors," and in spite of the severe surveillance it possessed, against all expectations, a clandestine children's library. The library was minuscule; it consisted of eight books, which included H.G. Wells's A Short History of the World, a Russian school textbook and an analytical geometry text. Once or twice an inmate from another camp managed to smuggle in a new book, so that the number of holdings rose to nine or ten. At the end of each day, the books, together with other valuables such as medicines and bits of food, would be entrusted to one of the older girls, whose responsibility it was to hide them in a different place every night. Paradoxically, books that were banned throughout the Reich (those by H.G. Wells, for instance) were sometimes available in concentration camp libraries.
Although eight or ten books made up the physical collection of the Birkenau children's library, there were others that circulated through word of mouth alone. Whenever they could escape surveillance, the counsellors would recite to the children books they had themselves learned by heart in earlier days, taking turns so that different counsellors "read" to different children every time; this rotation was known as "exchanging books in the library."261
It is almost impossible to imagine that under the unbearable conditions imposed by the Nazis, intellectual life could still continue. The historian Yitzhak Schipper,
Liberation ofthe survivors ofthe Birkenau Concentration Camp.
Image not available
who was writing a book on the Khazars while he was an inmate of the Warsaw ghetto, was asked how he did his work without being able to sit and research in the appropriate libraries. "To write history," he answered, "you need a head, not an ass."262
There was even a continuation of the common, everyday routines of reading. This persistence adds to both the wonder and the horror: that in such nightmarish circumstances men and women would still read about Hugo's Jean Valjean and Tolstoy's Natasha, would fill in request cards and pay fines for late returns, would discuss the merits of a modern author or follow once again the cadenced verses of Heine. Reading and its rituals became acts of resistance; as the Italian psychologist Andrea Devoto noted, "everything could be treated as resistance because everything was prohibited."263
In the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, a copy of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain was passed around among the inmates. One boy remembered the time he was allotted to hold the book in his hands as "one of the highlights of the day, when someone passed it to me. I went into a corner to be at peace and then I had an hour to read it."264 Another young Polish victim, recalling the days of fear and discouragement, had this to say: "The book was my best friend, it never betrayed me; it comforted me in my despair; it told me that I was not
alone."265
"Any victim demands allegiance," wrote Graham Greene,266 who believed it was the writer's task to champion victims, to restore their visibility, to set up warnings that, by means of an inspired craft, will act as touchstones for something approaching understanding. The authors of the books on my shelves cannot have known who would read them, but the stories they tell foresee or imply or witness experiences that may not yet have taken place.
Because the victim's voice is all-important, oppressors often attempt to silence their victims: by literally cutting out their tongues, as in the case of the raped Philomela in Ovid, and Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, or by secreting them away, as the king does with Segismundo in Calderon's Life Is a Dream, or as Mr. Rochester does to his mad wife in Jane Eyre, or by simply denying their stories, as in the professorial addendum in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. In real life, victims are "disappeared," locked up in a ghetto, sent to prison or a torture camp, denied credibility. The literature on my shelves tells over and over again the victim's story, from Job to Desdemona, from Goethe's Gretchen to Dante's Francesca, not as mirror (the German surgeon Johann Paul Kremer warned in his Auschwitz diary, "By comparison, Dante's inferno seems almost a comedy"267) but as metaphor. Most of these stories would have been found in the library of any educated German in the 1930s. What lessons were learned from those books is another matter.
In Western culture, the archetypal victim is the Trojan princess Polyxena. The daughter of Priam and Hecuba, she was supposed to marry Achilles but her brother Hector opposed the union. Achilles stole into the temple of Apollo to catch sight of her, but was discovered there and murdered. According to Ovid, after the destruction of Troy the spirit of Achilles appeared to the victorious Greeks as they were about to embark, and demanded that the princess be sacrificed to him. Accordingly, she was dragged to Achilles' tomb and killed by Achilles' son Neoptolemus. Polyxena is perfect for the victim's role: innocent of cause, innocent of blame, innocent of benefiting others with her death, a blank page haunting the reader with unanswered questions. Arguments, however specious, were made by the Greeks to find reasons for the ghost's request, to justify compliance with the sacrifice, to excuse the blade that Achilles' son drove into her bared breast. But no argument can convince us that Polyxena's death was merited. The essence of her vic- timhood—as of all victimhood—is injustice.
My library witnesses the injustice suffered by Polyxena, and all fictional phantoms who lend voice to countless ghosts who were once solid flesh. It does not clamour for revenge, another constant subject of our literatures. It argues that the strictures that define us as a social group must be constructive or cautionary, not wilfully destructive, if they are to have any sane collective meaning—if the injury to a victim is to be seen as an injury to society as a whole, in recognition of our common humanity. Justice, as the English dictum has it, must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. Justice must not seek a private sense of satisfaction, but must publicly lend strength to society's self-healing impulse to learn. If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
A Hasidic legend collected by Martin Buber tells of a man who took God to trial. In Vienna, a decree was issued that would make the difficult life of the Jews of Polish Galicia even harder. The man argued that God should not turn his people into victims, but should allow them to toil for him in freedom. A tribunal of rabbis agreed to consider the man's arguments, and considered, as was proper, that both plaintiff and defendant retire during their deliberations. "The plaintiff will wait outside; we cannot ask You, Lord of the Universe, to withdraw, since your glory is omnipresent. But we will not allow You to influence us." The rabbis deliberated in silence and with their eyes closed. Later that evening, they called the man and told him their verdict: his argument was just. At that very same hour, the decree was cancelled.268