The painful truth about survival

He says it was not until the advent of the internet — and specifically Forstater’s discovery of www.Jewishgen.org — that the thing became deeply personal for him and he was able to trace a web of ancestors whose existence he had barely considered but nearly all of whom had perished at Majdanek — a concentration camp where Jews from Lublin were sent — and Belzec, its closest extermination camp. The chance discovery of Reder’s testimony in a museum gift shop “with the title Belzec printed in rough red letters on a glossy black cover” led to this project. Forstater realised when reading it that Reder had probably dug the graves and carried the bodies of his relatives. So, then, a retelling of his own stateside family history, done with an eye for the telling detail, has become a meditation for the extended family he never knew: the domesticity of 1950s and ’60s Philadelphia a small compensation for the abrupt silencing of the massed ranks of European Jewry.

It is an extraordinary book. To say that the section containing Reder’s testimony — surely one of the pre-eminent documents of the Holocaust — is a “primary source” would be strange because the effect when reading it is of being crowded and jostled by the fictionalised versions of these events that have become standard fare such as Schindler’s List and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. And yet there is something else.

Every so often, the various lenses — the writerly eye or systems analyst — that we must use to view the horror of the events at Belzec, described here in almost unbearable detail, slip and the realisation that they happened to the person actually telling them to you is like a punch in the face, in the sense of a weirdly altered personal reality. To ensure the story made any kind of sense I had to focus on details.

And so I found myself dwelling on the bizarre idea that music was an integral part of the camp’s routine: that an orchestra of inmates playing instruments belonging to the dead accompanied the removal of bodies from the gas chamber. That the SS decreed songs should be sung on certain occasions and that one particular SS guard forced the orchestra to play a tune called Highlander Aren’t You Sad? over and over again.

I found myself wondering whether, as Forstater says he was told, it is really possible for a person’s hair to go white in a matter of minutes (internet says no) and what it would do to one’s psychosexual development for one’s first sight of a naked woman to be in a picture of Belzec inmates running to their deaths, an experience Forstater describes having had while reading The Scourge of the Swastika by Lord Russell of Liverpool. I found myself wondering also, given Reder’s detailed descriptions of the behaviour of some of the SS guards, whether psychopathy was a job requirement and how exactly the candidates for the SS were selected? How is it possible — though apparently it was — that Reder was an “oven specialist” and yet did not know about Zyklon B?

It is the issue of empathy that has stayed with me more than anything, though. Unavoidably, the nature of Reder’s testimony is matter-of-fact: its value as a historical document being in direct proportion to its credibility.

And yet in order to remember the events that he lived through without killing himself as many others did — Reder died in Toronto in 1968 — a deadening of the mind must have taken place. Would this be a human strength or a weakness?

Forstater’s warm rememberings of Philadelphia suggest that empathy is a joy and yet, in the context, of Belzec empathy would kill you. Moreover, what are the ramifications of this for modern Jewish identity?

Forstater has made something of enduring value here: he and Reder both survived Belzec in a sense. I urge you not to look away.

‘I Survived a Secret Nazi Extermination Camp’ is available from Psychology News. There is an audio version read by David Suchet available on iTunes.