"War Stories"

by

Lev Raphael

Over a million Poles died in Auschwitz and many more were slaughtered by the Germans in other ways because Hitler had harsh plans for Poland as evil as those operating for the Jews. That’s a story not well enough known in the West, as is the one told in The Mermaid and the Messerschmidt, a memoir originally published in English in 1942 by a Pole educated at Vassar.

Rulka Langer describes in plain but riveting prose what it was like to dread war coming and then to be caught up in the Blitzkrieg that led to the constant bombing of Warsaw, the hunger, panic, terror, thousands of deaths and then the closing iron fist of Nazi rule. Langer draws affectionate portraits of her large, haute bourgeois family gathered in well-upholstered apartments or country homes over newspapers and around radios that issued ominous forecasts in the run-up to war. Reading the dread-soaked pages, it’s hard not to think that these same people, or their families, had lived through another terrible war a little over two decades earlier. Here was a new threat, but far deadlier than what had come before.

With the war begun, Varsovians, as they’re called, can’t believe that England and France won’t somehow come to their rescue, or that Warsaw itself won’t somehow manage to withstand a siege, but the noose tightens and hope dies. Gradually the world turns upside down and inside out, literally, as bombed apartment blocks expose their interiors as do dead soldiers and even horses that are quickly stripped of their flesh in a city growing hungrier by the day. 

We see all this through the eyes of a woman who was both mother and daughter, worried about defending her children from every possible threat and trying her desperate best to support and aid her mother. But before Warsaw surrenders, she has experienced being bombed, losing relatives, almost being burned out of her home, and moral dilemmas most of us could never even imagine having to face, let alone resolve. She’s completely honest in describing her sometimes crippling fear and her failings, which makes her courage and inventiveness all the more striking and commendable.

Langer was lucky enough to have a diplomat husband posted in the U.S. who was able to help her leave Poland with her two children before Germany and the U.S. were at war. The story of her tension-ridden exit is worth the price of the book itself. In its outline it may remind us of others books and even films, but it’s uniquely hers. This new edition of Langer’s memoir comes with valuable maps and stunning contemporary photos of a great city being demolished by war.

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Swiss writer Jacques Chessex was haunted all his life about a horrific anti-Semitic murder that took place in his town of Payerne in 1942. A Jew Must Die is the stunning novella he wrote about it, and it packs more power in its ninety-two pages than many novels four or five times its length.

The book is set before Stalingrad, when Europe still lies at Hitler’s feet. His string of victories has emboldened Swiss Nazis. They hold torchlight meetings, bellow Nazi propaganda about a New Europe, dress like their heroes, and threaten the Jews of Switzerland with every kind of punishment.

Peaceful little Payerne in northwest Switzerland is not immune to this agitation. Not far from Dijon in France and Freiburg in Germany, it’s become the stomping ground of a militantly Jew-hating Minister whose words bear fruit in a town with massive unemployment:

In these remote countrysides the hatred of the Jew has a taste of soil mulled over in bitterness, turned over and ruminated, with the glister of pig's blood and the isolated cemeteries from where the bones of the dead still speak of misappropriated inheritances, suicides, bankruptcies, and embittered, frustrated bodies a hundred times humiliated. Hearts and groins have oozed a heavy broth into the black, age-old earth, mingling their thick humours in the opaque soil with the blood of herds of swine and horned cattle. The mind, or what remains of it, inflamed by murky family and political jealousies, is looking for a scapegoat to blame for all life’s injustice and suffering, and finds it in the Jew.

The hatred co-exists with the beauties of the landscape and the quotidian reality of cattle herding and farming, which makes it even more terrible when the well-known Jewish cattle merchant Arthur Block is singled out for slaughter. Led by a local Nazi with delusions of grandeur, the murder is meant to be a gift to Hitler for his upcoming birthday, and a down payment on Switzerland’s entrance into the Reich.

The greatest twist in this terrible, mesmerizing story is when the author appears and tells us of his conflicted engagement with the tale he cannot help but telling. It’s a masterful turn in an extraordinary book whose last pages are on fire. No wonder Chessex won the Prix Goncourt and so many other awards in his long career.

Books mentioned in this column:
A Jew Must Die, Jacques Chessex (Bitter Lemon, 2010)
The Mermaid and the Messerschmidt, Rulka Langer (Aquila Polinica, 2009)

Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.