Four literary recommendations, from fiction to remembrance, from intimacy to shared memory. The Shoah, and a less visible warning: the circumstances that seem foreign to us today always end up addressing us all. Literature, once again, as a way of understanding—and of sounding the alarm.
So: my friend has gone into the second-hand record shop and I have stayed outside, staring at my phone. Not because I didn’t feel like going in, but because the owner said it still wasn’t time to open: his employee hadn’t arrived, and something else besides. As a special favour—presumably so as not to lose a possible sale—he has let only one of us in.
I like second-hand bookshops and record shops. In the plastic bag I’m carrying is my latest find: Les vacances du Fantôme, an eighties novel by Didier Van Cauwelaert—roughly from the same period as the records we’re hunting down for our friend Josi.
The plot is fantastical and comic. The protagonist, Roger Croutin, a twenty-two-year-old apprentice butcher on the brink of marriage, suddenly wakes up in the body of Antoine de Latour Jacob, a celebrated Jewish lawyer of about fifty. The two have swapped bodies without knowing how or why, and Roger is forced to take on the lawyer’s life: the trials, an eccentric family, dealings with Italian terrorists, and even a proposal from the President of the Republic.
It’s a light read, but as I turn the pages on this cold, damp morning, I lift my eyes to the gabled canal house opposite. Behind a window, a fellow countryman is hanging clothes over a radiator, and I can’t help thinking I’d quite like to trade lives with him.
By the way, we are in Amsterdam, that beautiful city where, if you want to see the sun in winter, you have to book ahead.
A little later I see our third travelling companion approaching, back from visiting Anne Frank’s house. The moment she arrives she reproaches us for wasting time in shops instead of visiting museums. It’s her way of beginning—carefully—to say what it did to her.
I tell her I’ve already been there—not in person, but in spirit. How? By reading The Diary of Anne Frank back in the day. And yes: this is the second literary recommendation of the week.
I take a breath, look at her with affection, and let her talk while I rub my hands together. She tells me how the Dutch people stood in solidarity with the Jews, how they took them in when they were expelled from Spain and Portugal, and how they demonstrated on their behalf—calling even a general strike that lasted three days to protest the treatment they were receiving at the hands of the Nazi occupying forces, despite all the danger and the likely reprisals.
In the neighbour’s window a Palestinian flag is flying; it isn’t the only one in the city. This is a people who understood long ago that, on the ship of innocent victims, there has to be room for everyone.
A week has passed. It is 27 January. I am now at Madrid’s Istituto Italiano, at an event organised to commemorate the Shoah. Before the screening of a film about Giorgio Perlasca—an Italian cattle dealer who, in Budapest in 1944, when the Spanish chargé d’affaires Ángel Sanz Briz was forced to leave the country, continued the latter’s work alone and at his own risk—we are given the outline of his story.
Perlasca presented himself to the Hungarian authorities as Sanz Briz’s supposed replacement, the new Spanish “consul”, though he was nothing of the sort, and he carried on the rescue operation the Spanish diplomat had begun.
Although it is impossible, in cases like this, to pin down exact figures, it is estimated that his ‘lies’—or, as the director of the Istituto prefers to put it, his ‘inventions’—made it possible to save between five and six thousand Jews.
Before the film, we listen to speeches from the diplomats in attendance. In general, they all remind us that the victims of the genocide also included other ethnic groups and political opponents.
An uncomfortable question presses itself upon me: what did the Shoah mean not only for the victims, but for those who were not victims—for those who benefited from it?
Many things. For more than a few, at first, it was a feast: they helped themselves, for next to nothing, to what others were forced to abandon. Like someone strolling along a beach, picking up—without asking—what the sea has left behind after a shipwreck.
But after the banquet comes the hangover. And with it, a dreadful message, half-hidden.
When the sea withdraws, what remains written on the sand is this: watch the dissidents, those who do not wish to be like us; they already know the treatment we dispense.
It is a universal message, even when it does not seem addressed to everyone.
Does this matter today? It is hard not to see patterns and circumstances that look uncomfortably familiar.
Today, if I were obliged to travel to the country that first, in modern times, proclaimed liberty as a founding principle, I would feel uneasy speaking my mother tongue in the street.
Amor Towles, in A Gentleman in Moscow, puts an old truth into his count’s mouth: that a man must master his circumstances if he does not wish, in the end, to be mastered by them.
And so we arrive at my third literary recommendation—though there is still a little more to come, because after the screening another book is introduced.
A very special book: Los papeles secretos de Pape (Pape’s Secret Papers) (Nagrela Editores). It is the memoir of Eva Leitman-Bohrer, a Hungarian Jewish survivor born in Budapest in 1944, written with the Panamanian journalist Alexandra Ciniglio.
Eva herself has the courtesy to join us and to give us a summary of her work, which—needless to say—is, in essence, her life.
When the event ends, I stay to the very last. Under the pretext of having her sign the book, I can exchange a few extra words with her. My first impression is confirmed: she is a woman with style, and utterly charming.
Now, as I reread these lines, I have also finished reading her account and can, with a smile on my lips, propose it as the fourth literary recommendation in this article.
José Vicente Rubio Eire
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