Varieties of Fear: Growing Up Jewish Under Nazism and Communism

Judaism, Spring, 1996 by D. Mesher

Most of the works to be discussed here might be considered "recovered literature" of one sort or another, if only because they have been kept covered, delayed, or forgotten for years. Erno Szep, who died in 1953, was one of the most prominent poets in Hungary when he wrote and published The Smell of Humans in 1945, but Szep's reputation languished under the Communists and the memoir, reprinted only in 1984, was not translated into English until now. Charlotte Delbo, who died in 1985, was a non-Jew sent to Auschwitz for anti-German activities in France. Like Szep, Delbo began her memoirs - three volumes collected as Auschwitz and After - soon after she was liberated. She finished the first volume, None of Us Will Return, in 1946, and then waited almost twenty years to publish it, in 1965. The next two volumes, Useless Knowledge and The Measure of Our Days, some of which was written in the post-war years, appeared in the early 1970s; the current edition is comprised of the first English translation of the second and third volume, and anew translation of the first volume. Like Delbo and many other Holocaust writers, Riva Chirurg waited to tell her story, despite a strong motivation to bear witness. "We, who survived the Holocaust, have needed the perspective of time in order to form the events of the past into a shape that can be transmitted to the world around us, a world that was unable to absorb what happened" (p. ix). Her memoir, Bridge of Sorrow, Bridge of Hope, was originally published in Hebrew in 1988. Similarly, Benjamin Jacobs began publicly retelling his Holocaust experiences only after a 1985 trip to central Europe, and produced his written account, The Dentist of Auschwitz, after a brush with cancer. Finally, Peter Kenez, an historian specializing in the Soviet Union, wrote Varieties of Fear: Growing Up Jewish under Nazism and Communism less as a Holocaust memoir than as a personal and professional exploration. "I acquired a consciousness of myself and the world around me during the days of the Nazis," Kenez writes, "and maybe that explains why I have always been afraid of people" (p. 37).

These works can be distinguished in many ways of significance to the Holocaust: the author's Jewish identity, age, gender, class, country of origin, and the level of suffering and personal obliteration experienced, to name a few. Ultimately, however, the broadest distinction can be made, even among these very diverse autobiographies, on the basis of the author's relationship with his or her subject matter. It is not always true, as Joseph Sungolowsky has argued, that "autobiography is written in order to come to terms with oneself."(2) The autobiographies of presidential candidates, to take an obvious example, have more to do with self-promotion than self-knowledge. And Holocaust writers have a special compulsion to tell the truth, not about themselves, but about the horrible injustice they have suffered. The question to be asked of each work, then, is whether the impulse to bear witness is directed outwardly, toward providing the reader with an historically accurate account, or inwardly, toward recovery of personal experience.

Erno Szep's memoir begins five days after the Nazi-supported Arrow Cross coup against a Horthy government wavering in its commitment to its German ally, when Szep and hundreds of other Jewish men - many of them elderly or sick, some among the richest and most important of Budapest's citizens, and several with documents guaranteeing them the "protection" of a neutral government like Sweden or Switzerland - were marched off to forced labor camps. Szep's volume recounts his experiences for nineteen days at such a camp.

Conditions at the brick factory serving as the camp barracks were extremely unpleasant, most of the forced-laborers were too old or infirm for the work, and their rations were insufficient to stave off hunger. But considering that nearly half a million Jews from outside Budapest had been deported to Auschwitz since the German occupation of Hungary in March, 1944 and that, after Szep and the others were marched out of town, the Arrow Cross began organizing ghettos in the capital and sending those Jews to death camps as well, the poet and his comrades might be considered fortunate. But such historical correlatives are never made in Szep's entirely subjective account. Indeed, Szep's provocative title, The Smell of Humans, though it may initially conjure up images of mass graves and crematoria smokestacks, in fact refers simply to the uncomfortably close quarters of the labor camp where some of Budapest's most privileged Jews, Szep among them, were forced to share the plight of their less successful brethren, with little regard to class or position.

The assimilated nature of Szep's social class is clear from his ironic comments that, in his Budapest apartment building, "actual Jews, that is officially of the Israelite denomination, were hard to find among the tenants of this yellow-starred house," and many of them "were anti-Semitic bigots (born Christians or converts of twenty years' standing) who would have nothing to do with Jews - that is, those Christians who had converted recently" (p. 22). Once at the camp, Szep was quick to rue the social consequences of close confinement with his admirers: "every minute some person would come up to introduce himself . . . good heavens, now I would have to say hello to all these folks as long as I lived" (p. 93). The lack of good breeding among the inmates seemed especially objectionable to Szep: "The comradely courtesies that we had been called on to observe, as you may see, had been forgotten. There were many ordinary types, the louder ones, and seedy-looking characters as well, who delighted in addressing those richer and better dressed in casual, informal language, while these latter gentlemen remained reserved, for the most. I must confess to not being ready to hobnob with everyone; it took eight or ten days to politely discourage those comrades who forced their attentions on me" (p. 116).