Our eyes light up at this apparition. "Did you see? You did see, didn't you? A tulip."

From Kurosawa, let’s move further on to Fanya Heller, one of the few Holocaust survivors much akin to Charlotte Delbo! And in this post, me thought of giving a few interesting convergences and divergences in the narrative style of these two authors, Fanya and Delbo, and their perspectives on the Holocaust, on a bird’s eye view at that! No spoilers attached though!

But first, let me begin this post on a note of thanks and appreciation to the reading community at Readers’ Rendezvous, a vibrant little garden of readers from far and near, of all hues and vibes on Whatsapp! I extend a special note of immense appreciation and thanks to Ms. Pheba & team at Rendezvous, for giving us all reading challenges that have so stimulated us to go that extra mile, and make us all look ahead eagerly for books to be read in that little extra time that we set aside for ourselves, on ‘declutter mode,’ for the sheer joy and delight of reading!

And this year as is wont and usual, RR has come out with its own exciting Reading Challenges neatly arrayed up for its members! Most of the members were so eager to take ‘em all up in full throttle, all geared up! And for once, we were all real eager-beavers, so enthusiastic and so thrilled to take up the challenge head on, and rightaway at that!

In fact, it real requires some reasonable degree of confidence, alley! But readers @ Readers Rendezvous are of a high-resolve calibre!

‘If I can do it, then you can! If you can do it, then we can! Yes! we can! Together we all of us, we can!’

That’s our shloka! Our mantra! Our enthu-tonic that keeps us going!

Come what may! Let’s take the Ulyssean resolve!

That which we are, we are,

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

And thanks a million to Pheba mol and all lovely hearts at RR! For their patient striving! For their sustained endeavour in making reading a part of our daily routine! As one saying goes would like to go thus - Dosa for the stomach! Tennis for the body! Music for the soul! Reading for the mind! And where’s the yummy cuppa in the scheme of things? Yesss! The cuppa is for the stomach, the mind, the body and the soul put together! Howzaaat!!!

This stated, let me take y’all to Delbo and to Fanya! Two highly regarded, greatly respected holocaust survivors!

First Fanya!

Fanya’s memoir is titled, Love in a World of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl's Holocaust Memoirs (first published in 1993,) and it documents with such astounding simplicity a girl’s memories of the holocaust, in a way that’s nayver been said before!

Of course some of us might have been real familiar with the Night, Dawn, Day trilogy by Elie Wiesel, that’s been described as one of the pioneering ‘bedrocks of holocaust literature’ per se! And some of us might have been quite familiar with ‘The Kitty’ or The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank! Some of us might have been very familiar with Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After trilogy!

Well, looks like, Love in a World of Sorrow, though not a staple, or a default read in holocaust literature as such, is surely a cut above the rest in any many ways!

In this post, I would like to take a little-o-little peek into Delbo’s memoir vis-à-vis Fanya’s, to draw some vibrant connects and contrasts!

Charlotte Delbo’s epigraph to her intense memoir, Auschwitz and After, (published in English, 1995) and the insightful introduction to the memoir by Lawrence L. Langer, (LLL) serves an amazing focal point and a foregrounding of sorts, that steers ahead the Delbo-narrative that follows! In addition, Rosette C. Lamont’s ‘Translator’s Preface,’ albeit quite ‘minimalist’ in degree, helps the reader get a quick preview into what’s in store for the reader!

On equal measure, what makes Fanya click much in her autobiographical read, Love in a World of Sorrow [first published in 1993,] is her amazingly spontaneous way with words, which she’s managed with finesse, without the use of an interlocutor, a mediator or a translator! She opens her heart and her mind on to reams and reams of paper white! And the result is an astounding narrative of impactful proportions!

Any avid reader of Holocaust literature is sure bound to be in awe and wonder at her profound convictions that she puts forth in her ‘Author’s Preface’ on writing this book!

I can say with a certain amount of reasonable conviction that this Author’s Preface by Fanya Heller really merits a rock-solid place in any Department/Institution that specializes in Holocaust Literature!

Fanya and Jan

A poignant narrative in such sober prose makes it a representative narrative of sorts, on the holocaust and its horrors! A must-read at that, for paapas or toddlers in Holocaust Studies!

Well, personally I’d suggest that you take some little time off, to read this extraordinarily simple elucidation by Fanya, and her impressions on Holocaust literature, in such a delightful style, with immense poignancy, bared out in such gripping fashion, for the reader!

Here goes a Fanya treat for y’all, from her Preface -

Since the publication of my book Love in a World of Sorrow more than a decade ago, I have traveled around the country, speaking primarily to high school and college students about my experiences. My message is simple – that one person can make a world of difference.

Students today may view the Holocaust as ancient history, but the lessons of the Holocaust are more relevant now than ever, and we must be creative in our teaching to ensure that they will always be relevant.

Our mantra in Holocaust education is “Never Again.” But where was “Never Again” in such places as Bosnia? Kosovo? Rwanda? Sudan? Darfur? and on September 11? So many question marks mark the passing of so many hundreds and hundreds of thousands whom the world dismissed as “not living here,” as “the other.”

Unfortunately, the world continues to demonstrate that the human potential for evil lurks just below the surface and that hate only breeds more and more hate. To indoctrinate us as young Communists, we were forced to watch the hanging executions of “traitors.” Today, we are just steadying ourselves from the stark and disturbing images and videos released by ISIS as they bear the similar trademark of unbridled malevolence and tyranny. Or from the terrorist attacks that have unfortunately taken place in France, Spain, England, Kenya, Israel… again.

I write this knowing that I am a member of the last generation of Holocaust survivors. With the survivor population growing older, with most of us in our seventies, eighties, and nineties, there is an urgent need to record the events of this most tragic period in our history.

But first-person accounts of the Holocaust were rather rare until about twenty-five years ago. This poses a number of serious questions: Why were we silent in the years after the war?

Why have we just begun to speak out in the past decades?

And now that we are talking, what can audiences learn from listening to us? In the years immediately following the war, we wanted to be “normal” again – to get married, have children, get an education and a profession.

We didn’t want to talk about our experience. The famous philosopher Nietzsche has suggested that “without forgetting, it might be impossible to live at all.” So, we as survivors busied ourselves with getting on with life, putting the past behind us, and making up for lost time. Our energies were totally consumed by trying to adapt to mainstream society and to making a new life in the countries that had adopted us.

The prospect of telling my story was also accompanied by enormous hesitation. How could I describe the unparalleled horror, hunger and humiliation? Do I even have enough words to describe what I have experienced? Is there language that captures the stench of burnt bodies and the sight of rivers flowing red with Jewish blood? And what if people didn’t believe me? Ultimately, it would mean reexperiencing tremendous losses. And that too was frightening.

When my husband died in 1986 at the age of sixty-three, the truth of my survival weighed heavily and it became important for me to integrate my past with my present.

I sat down to write.

To remember.

To record for my children and for my children’s children.

And for all the children of this world – the future generations.

The world should know what people did in extreme situations when there was no normative behavior.

What one would endure just to live one minute more. Recollection, another term for memory, is an interesting set of events. You sit down, you step in and before you – in fact, surrounding you – is all that has been done, all that the soul has inhaled and tried vainly to spit out. Memory of a lonesome birthday can be laughed away. Memory of death’s haunting stays. And remains.

Writing, I sat down to recall the rivers of blood that flowed after each Aktion.

Writing, I sat down to remember fleeing one hiding place only to later learn that everyone else, all those members of my family who had been with me, were slaughtered on the spot.

So why do we write these memoirs? What did I discover in sitting down to relive each agony in painstaking clarity?

That there are answers… That there are no answers… That there are only questions and more questions… The suffering was exquisite; of a type undefined and indecipherable. To have lived through it is a testament to heart and soul.

And God.

To have lived through it means carrying within me a never-depleted source of anguish and confusion. I will always carry with me a sense of shame for the lengths I took to save myself and the lives of my loved ones. Not because I did something shameful. Not because I was wrong. Not because memory serves me incorrectly.

But because there are those who refuse to remember all in its entirety. There are those who refuse to break open the shell and reveal every kernel of truth. And so, they will feel threatened when they read my words. What true memory does to those still hiding from themselves is force them to confront the truth of their own memories – and regrettably they find themselves back in a cave of fear.

As I look back I realize that it took a great deal of courage for me to put so much of my life on paper. And I stand up straight and with faith that God has kept me here to do just this and proclaim: This is as I remember.

It is my wish for you to take these memories, mine and the voices of all those who had the courage to put down on paper their fears, desires, pain, anguish, courage and hope. Learn from them. Be inspired by them and most certainly share these stories with others.

Because that is how we will be remembered.

And as Fanya Heller’s parting words on her Preface says, with such reassuring conviction –

I hope the message you take away from my story is that you can come from anywhere, even the most horrible conditions and go on to achieve absolutely anything that you set your mind to.

Also, please don’t forget to read through the delightful foreword by Irving Greenberg to this Fanya read!

Added, if Fanya’s Preface would necessitate inclusion into academic studies on the Holocaust, Delbo’s memoirs in toto, would really merit inclusion in academia worldwide, because of her rich literary sensibilities that adorn her autobiographical read skyhigh! In fact, some of the poems that find a mention in her trilogy are so heart-rending, and so impactful to any empathetic heart! This could be another added reason for the astounding advocacy of this, her autobiographical read in a host of universities! The fact that, she was first and foremost a human being with an innate poetic sensibility, and a playwright with such an observant eye, has holpen her much in depicting the horrors of the holocaust with such profound, picturesque descriptors, that is a varam, a boon hardly found in any other holocaust writer’s oeuvre! With such an amazing sprinkling of images, signs, symbols, foregroundings, forebodings, and their ilk in such profuse splashings, Delbo appeals to our sensibilities with such refined elegance and grace!

Therefore, trauma to Delbo is a kinda cultural testimony that bespeaks to the tremendous fortitude and the immense resilience of the victims in walking through the metaphorical waters and fires! Delbo’s ‘anguished memory’ therefore results in an impactful narrative technique that Rothberg would classify as traumatic realism, a realism that reproduces traumatic unassimilated experiences, or traumatic experiences that stem from an indescribable traumatic grief!

Delbo on the News, The Evening Star, April 1970

However, Fanya’s trauma narrative doesn’t happen at Auschwitz! Rather it happens at a non-descript town in Poland, where the Poles where a majority and the Jews were a miniscule minority – hardly 1500 in number! Fanya’s narrative brings out the harsh realities, the traumatic realities that bared its ugly claws with the arrival of the Nazis on this little town, that shattered once and for all her beautiful past, her pampered childhood and her dreams for a delightful future ahead! The struggle for survival in the war-torn region, to Fanya, also foregrounds the importance of sympathy, love and compassion, even as a golden thread of an interfaith love runs through the narrative, lending the book its aura, its charm and its immediacy!

Sample a snippet now, from Delbo -

Sample this – hardly a hundred words, on the memorable tulip scene in Delbo’s None of Us Will Return, that’s sure bound to have such a high-intensity appeal on our sensibilities! An incident that so moved me! And pray, is sure wont to move thee too!

We are walking in the direction of a home.

It is next to the road. Made of red brick. The chimney is smoking. Who could be living in this remote house? It draws nearer. We can see white curtains. Muslin curtains.

We utter "muslin" softly in the mouth. And in front of the curtains, in the space between the window and the storm sash, there is a tulip.

Our eyes light up at this apparition. "Did you see? You did see, didn't you? A tulip." All eyes converge on the flower. Here, in a desert of ice and snow, a tulip. Pink between two pale leaves. We look at it. We forget the stinging hail. The column slows down. "Weiter," shouts the SS. Our heads are still turned toward the house that we passed a long time back.

All day we dream of the tulip. The melted snow fell, adhered to the back of our soaked, stiff jackets. The day was long, as long as all our days. Down at the bottom of the ditch we were digging, the tulip's delicate corolla bloomed.

On our way back, long before reaching the lake house, we were on the lookout for it. It was still there, against the white background of the curtains. Pink beaker between pale leaves.

During the roll call, we said to our companions who had not accompanied us on this detail, "We saw a tulip."

We were never taken back to this ditch. Others must have completed it. In the morning, at the intersection where the road to the lake began, we experienced a moment of hope.

Added, Delbo’s ample splash of poems all over None of Us Will Return is testimony to her skyhigh poetic sensibilities that have really holpen her to convey the ‘anguished memory’ of her ‘anguished soul’ in such an impactful narrative!

No spoilers though! Do read for yourselves this wonderful trilogy to appreciate Delbo’s suave way with words – and and and... for once, here, credits and plaudits by the dozen go to her translator Rosette C Lamont, who’s done a highly endearing rendering into English, without compromising on the essence, the coherence, the felicity and the intensity of the original, for us all!

Now, contrast the above descriptive prose of a Delbo, with a Fanya’s direct, unembellished, unswerving lines that are so quick, so fast and have an immediacy of a different order on the reader!

While Delbo’s descriptive narrative has the power to touch our hearts first before having their sway over our minds, Fanya’s narrative appears to be so direct and quick, that it appeals to the mind first, before it could rub off on our hearts! Each its charm! Each its aura!

Fanya speaks –

One brutally hot day, at the end of July, we heard the motorcycles and trucks of the approaching German Army and ran to hide in Grandfather Jakob’s cellar. Peeking through the little barred window, we saw the Germans pitch their tents in the lumberyard. They jumped from their motorcycles and sidecars and shed their jackets as they lounged against my grandfather’s stacks of lumber. After gulping from a jug of milk, one German began to sing a ditty and the rest picked up the refrain. A large jar of tanning cream passed from hand to hand and they slathered it onto their exposed skin. The grease glistened on their faces and arms as they angled them toward the sun for optimum bronzing. Their buttons, buckles, visors, glasses, shiny boots, even their hair and fingernails took on a dazzling sparkle with thousands of prisms reflecting the light of Hades’ fire. I knew this glitter spelled night and death.

While they bantered and bellowed, their guns and gear spread over our property, I knew I wanted to see them grovel for mercy in the dirt of the yard, their faces glistening with the sweat of fear.

The entire night before the Germans arrived, our dachshund, Ralf, had howled and cried pitifully. We couldn’t find him when we ran to hide in the cellar. When we came out, we found him lying dead in the garden. He had not been killed — he had just lay down and died.

We buried him among the flower beds in my grandmother’s garden.

Each morning felt like a starting line on an obstacle course — no one knew what hurdles the day would present as we stood poised, and waiting, calculating how to dodge the whack of clubs and the bite of bullets.

The worst day of the week for me was Thursdays, when I had to lug buckets of water to fill the bathtub for the week’s baths. We had to lug water ourselves, since the Russians had abolished the water carrier trade and the Germans had conscripted the Jewish water carriers to perform forced labor. The pump well designated for use by Jews was a twentyminute walk away and, besides lugging the full pails home, pumping the handle called for well-muscled shoulders. On winter days, when the water froze in the pipes and I came home with empty buckets, my mother’s disappointed shrug hurt me more than the weight of full buckets would have.

My mother seemed to sense that we would not be living in our home much longer and insisted, while she was still the mistress of the house, that the house look its best. She polished and scrubbed, swept and beat the rugs with renewed energy, and folded and refolded the one spare sheet we had. She brushed the few items of clothing we still owned, then hung them at measured intervals along the closet bar.

Even before the German invasion my mother had banished my father’s books to the attic, calling them “dust collectors.” I had been delighted with this arrangement, since it was a joy to find a fragrant nook for myself up there with Heine in hand and apples just an arm’s length away, each one laid out separately on rows of pans so no rotten fruit would infect another.

Now the apples were gone and the books collected their dust, undisturbed by my father or me.

Just observe the pace of the narrative, that’s so zippy and so snappy, so fast-paced and so rapid-fire on our minds, in Fanya’s account –

Jan sat down next to me.

“So, Blacky, do you miss school? What do you want to do after you finish school?” he asked, looking straight into my eyes.

“Medicine,” I told him, “I’m going to Paris to study medicine after the war. My father promised me.”

Jan seemed pleased. “Yes,” he said, “Yes, Paris.”

My father came back at that moment and repeated, “Paris,” and then a soft, drawn-out “Paris.” In a time of hunger and perpetual menace, at the far rim of Europe, each of us carried a Paris of our own in our imagination.

Let’s now impishly imagine the above dialogue through Charlotte Delbo’s memoir! Just on an hypothetical realm! And here we go -

Reimagining one line of Fanya’s, ‘Jan sat down next to me,’ through Delbo’s pen for us all –

Jan quietly stole his way down the still pathway, a quiet pathway at that, that usually goes off into a gentle lull and stupor in the evenings, ambling up further to yet another narrow way leading to a pebbled pathway, to launch himself in such a gentle, unassuming fashion, starry-eyed, and quite nervous in his demeanor, with a certain degree of an impish warmth radiating in his genuine smile that darted quickly across his visage, even as he sat down next to me, cross-legged, his right hand supporting his chin, coupled with a shy glee on his chubby cheeks that gave out his nervous propensities quite effortlessly to me!

He he! ;-) that was quite a nonchalant, whimsical try on a Delbo delight, meant to highlight the literariness innate within the real ‘Delbo delight’ for us all, and to contrast Fanya’s narrative style vis-à-vis a Delbo’s!

This apart, coming back to Charlotte Delbo’s memoir, one aspect that quite surprised me on the book was Rosette C Lamont’s (the translator to Delbo’s memoir) ‘380 word’ ‘Translator’s Preface’ to us, her readers! That’s hardly a square page on the demy! In fact, for such an amazing translation at that, anybody woulda sure expected a high-intensity, high-decibel package on the translator’s preface that would have been an insightful elucidation into the myriad ordeals that she had gone through, in translating Delbo to English! It’s no wonder then, that she’s given a candid admission vouching to her vibes and her innate spirit, where she considers herself to be a minimalist like Beckett, ‘a minimalist of infinite pain, a voice of conscience.’

For this, dear Rosette, we are beholden to you! for bringing us alive in our language and in sensibilities of our own standing, Delbo’s agonies and anxieties in all their potent intensity! A Delbo, if it hadn’t been for a Rosette, her impactful translator, would have gone swaing into oblivion in the entire realm of holocaust literature in English!

For this again, dear Rosette, our admiration for you would remain until the end of days!

A descriptive doodah on this Delbo delight is due meet for another day, on a different dissertation altogether!

Well, then, one possible way to enter these two memoirs would be to have cognizance of the fact that, if Delbo is first a poet and then a prisoner, whereas Fanya is a prisoner first and then a poet! Alternatively, to put it another way, Delbo is foremost and primarily a poet at heart, and then a prisoner! To Fanya it’s the other way round! And this helps much when we take a plunge ‘knee-deep and further’ into their respective memoirs!

And that i guess, has made all the difference!

Yesss! A difference there is, to approaching each memoir, for a fuller, richer, and better understanding of how they treat their respective subject matter, with regard to their use of language, their style, their diction in the making of their own voice and their own narrative, in a much more impactful way at that! In fact, it is this uniqueness that makes their narratives stand distinct in the entire gamut of holocaust literature in English!

And this has real holpen them immensely in their tryst with penning down their unique trauma testimonials for posterity!

To be continued…

images: amazondotcom, fanyakellerdotcom