My Shadow Beside Me
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In spring 1943, a few weeks before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a teenaged girl named Irka left the ghetto. Most of the Jews of the city, including her parents, had been deported to Treblinka and murdered. Irka had no family left and nothing of her own, aside from the clothes she was wearing and an extra sweater.
She did have a friend. A few thousand Jews, or Poles of Jewish origin, had not followed the German order to resettle in the ghetto, and had remained on what people called "the Aryan side." Irka sought out a classmate, Maria Rundo, who was herself of Jewish origin, but whose family had not gone to the ghetto. Maria was studying literature an underground university, where she met and fell in love with a working-class Polish teenager named Tadeusz Borowski. The two of them were trying to build something like a life together.
By spring 1943, Warsaw had been occupied by the Germans for more than three years. The bombing that killed some twenty-five thousand people, the mass murder of educated Poles, the establishment of the ghetto, the deportations to Treblinka: for people of Maria and Tadeusz's generation, this was the setting in which they came of age. He was homeless, and slept in the warehouse where he worked. Her parents were unenthusiastic about the relationship, and opposed their having sex. This was the only youth Maria and Tadeusz had, and they wanted to be together.
Maria and Tadeusz had been saving money, some of which he earned by distilling liquor in the warehouse, so that they could afford to rent a place of their own. Until Irka appeared, this plan was the center of their lives. We know more than might be expected about their relationship: Tadeusz was a poet, and his erotica about Maria was quite mature. As a very young man he was able to express the realization that intimacy deepens our sense of the otherness of the other person, that love is a recognition of difference.
Will you come back to me? A wave
in the dark catches legs from below,
heavy sky abreast. You are like that:
like my shadow beside me,
as real as my body; elusive
and as deep as the reflection
of my unlit face in a pane already
black from night
As soon as Maria saw Irka, she changed her plans: Irka would come and live with her and Tadeusz in their new place. This was generous in two ways: she was setting aside life, and she was risking death. She was giving up the prospect of having a place with her boyfriend, of making love in peace, of having something like a quiet corner in a city of horror. Maria was already living a life of great risk. If anyone denounced her as a Jew, she would be murdered in prison or deported to Treblinka to be gassed. Now she was choosing to add to the danger she faced every day. In occupied Poland, sheltering a Jew was a crime punishable by death.
Maria did not hesitate. She was active in the left-wing resistance. She worked in a laundry, a place where people enter and exit carrying bundles. She passed things on for friends in the communist underground, and made conspiratorial telephone calls from work. She had the connections she needed, or so she thought, to help Irka start a life beyond the ghetto. The first necessity would be to establish a non-Jewish identity for Irka, which meant arranging false papers that would identify her as a Catholic Pole. Maria rushed to see a friend who she knew had arranged such matters in the past. The friend, however, had just been arrested, and the Gestapo had staked out his apartment. When Maria rang the bell, she was arrested by the Gestapo in her turn and taken to prison.
Just a moment before, Tadeusz could dream of living with the woman he loved. Now she had disappeared. It was he who now undertook an act of generosity and courage. Suspecting what had happened, he chose to follow her. He went to the same apartment, rang the bell, and was also arrested. When Maria saw him in prison, his head shaven, she burst into tears. She particularly liked the way he wore his hair, combed back and bushy on the top. "Don't worry," he told her when they crossed paths, "I wanted us to be together." It was an impulsive act, perhaps a gesture of youth. And yet, like Maria's decision to try to help Irka, it demonstrated a firm sense of what life was about, of how life was to be lived.
Maria nearly lost her life. An elderly aunt who bore the same last name had been denounced as a Jew and also sent to prison. Not grasping the situation, the aunt sought out Maria. The aunt was shot, but Maria survived. She and Tadeusz were both sent to Auschwitz as Poles. Unlike people deported to Auschwitz as Jews, they would not be selected at the platform for murder or labor. As Poles they would automatically be sent to labor. Auschwitz had been founded by the Germans as a punishment camp for Poles, and about seventy-five thousand non-Jewish Poles lost their lives there. In 1943 and 1944, however, Auschwitz was becoming the central site of the Jewish Holocaust, a place where about a million Jews were gassed.
Tadeusz found ways to support Maria in Auschwitz, and both survived. After the war, he wrote a few stories about the camp and about the murder of Jews. In his stories, which are now being published in English, the protagonist usually a character called "Tadeusz" who behaved much worse in the camp than the author himself did. This method allowed him to present the social dynamics of the camp with a persuasive ruthlessness. Auschwitz in his account is the intensification of normal, predictable human behavior. Unlike other writers who survived the camp, he seeks no meaning in the death and suffering, and supplies no positive characters or moments that would allow the reader a sense of redemption. Taken together, his stories are perhaps the most important chronicle of the camp.
And yet his Auschwitz prose arose from human contact, from love. Tadeusz would not have been in Auschwitz had he not chosen Maria. His very first story, "Here in Our Auschwitz," arose from letters he wrote to her in the camp. The story for which he is best known in Poland, "Farewell to Maria," is about the day she was arrested in Warsaw. In it, a character called Tadeusz does not know what to do, and Maria is murdered. In life, Tadeusz Borowski chose to follow her. And from that choice arose some stories that we all should know.
In postwar Poland, Borowski joined the communist party and renounced his own prior fiction in a Stalinist self-criticism. At the very height of Polish Stalinism, in 1951, at the age of twenty-nine, he took his own life. Or, as his fellow poet Czesław Miłosz put it in a poem, "he escaped where he could." The prose that Borowski wrote after Auschwitz will last, as the Polish writer Jerzy Andrzejewski put it, "as long as Polish literature will last." That might be an understatement. These stories will be read so long as anyone seeks to understand the Holocaust.
My Shadow Beside Me
Timothy Snyder, In Prose After Auschwitz, I read a poem full of youth and generosity; life moving through love, evil, art and death. It came to me at a time of uncertainty here in America. You sustained a sense of vitality and tragedy in My Shadow Beside Me. Thank you.
This is beautifully written. Permit me to re-enter the Adorno debate (if you will) a different way. Not least because I take it these two recent posts are also intended to be responses. It seems to me that there is a problem with this genre called Holocaust literature. That it is a 'genre' at all. Like so many other literary genres. It therefore takes its place in such a series. It can be incorporated into literature or whatever our notions of literature might be by being placed into one of those canonical boxes we call genres. And therefore contained. Perhaps Adorno was resisting such an economy of genres. Perhaps he did not wish that economy to continue 'after Auschwitz'. Not because he doubted good or great literature could be produced about the Holocaust but that he did not wish for a literature reducible to genre in the usual ways. Because after all every genre codes all kinds of institutional politics. Inasmuch as there is Holocaust literature it too has always already submitted to such institutional hierarchies. It is precisely this last bit that perhaps.. Adorno's remark was directed at. If we should be interrogating all kinds of political or philosophical or bureaucratic or economic (and so on..) histories to try to analyze the Holocaust how can we forget the literary (or indeed any other art form) that bears the mark of these histories as much as anything else?
The Gulag Archipelago has been an enormously importantly, extremely iconic work in this other allied 'field' of gulag literature. These days it's not very provocative (if at all) to claim that a seminal work of journalistic history though it might be it's not necessarily a great artistic work otherwise. The author has of course been that greater artist elsewhere in his work. In fairness his aim here was to document as comprehensively as possible. Nonetheless, more ruthless than the master from Deutschland is the one that is art. The truths of Holocaust literature are in turn also caught in its aesthetic traps as easily as samples from other genres. If we insist on these literary traditions without questioning how they come about or how they are disseminated we also agree to aesthetic categories (Kantian or otherwise) that will have always already contaminated (I use this word with care...) and much in advance the 'truth' of Holocaust writing. Isn't this precisely why Celan moves away from the more obvious rhythms of his earlier work to the almost indecipherable strains of his later period? He produced 'great' works either way, he was enigmatic at each end of the spectrum but the latter might have been more to the point. In that same Adornoian vein. Todtnauberg rather Todesfuge!
To summarize a bit differently it might be that there are deeply affecting works of Holocaust writing that move us in very human ways and because we things about the impossible histories that gave rise to them but that are for all this not the equal of Charles Dickens at his best. I indulge in this somewhat ridiculous analogy to drive home a point. That this is the risk we run if we take the achievements of Holocaust literature as 'given'. I am not at all arguing that such a literature ought to be vacuum-sealed to avoid this possibility. It would be quite impossible to do this in language. How could one possibly not be heir to a language? How could the infections (not only Nazi ones) of this linguistic history not carry over into even the work of the most iconoclastic poet or prose writer, irrespective of his or her intentions? We don't simply switch off the lights and exit the room of language! In this sense Adorno's will always have been an impossible aspiration. In this sense one must even imply terms like 'impossible' and 'barbaric' and so on with great care. At one level these are 'impossible' events to the degree that they exceed any predictive economy of language and politics. But on the other they will always have been extreme possibilities precisely of our everyday language and politics. Otherwise these [events] could not have come about in the first place. Language will have always been equally hospitable to both life and death and indeed fates worse than death.
I do wonder how much a certain genre of 'impossibility' could be multiplied? Not just Holocaust or Gulag literature. One could think of camp literature from China (or about the Cultural Revolution), there is the genre of slave narratives in the US, there is Partition literature in the Indian subcontinent, there is the literature of the Naqba, there could be a literature of people imprisoned in all the refugee camps of the world today on all kinds of borders, there might be one of those constantly drowning in the Mediterranean. 'Impossibility' sadly, tragically, infuriatingly, is always very historical, very normal, very present, very possible. I don't mean to suggest any sort of artificial equivalence among some of these examples (but of course there are countless) I've listed. Even with this catalog of atrocities some fates are indeed worse than others. But for a human life the 'impossible' happens long before it registers on the scale of historian or the theorist of any sort, much less the politician. And in this sense we come full circle to humanism. Modulated differently perhaps, not as complacent a category as before, but still an ideal worth preserving.
The Holocaust cannot not be a genre. But it should not be one. The same for the gulag. The same for.... . If we always wish for the arts to transcend its very specific categories, if art ironically endures through the ages on the condition that it outlive its original contexts, we must be a bit wary of literature that is genre-bound not in the usual ways but because it is tethered to an event. This should be so. And it should not be so. This is the entire problem. A Holocaust poem is great, must be great even if many of its contexts are lost to time. One hopes that the latter never happens but art achieves universality only when those original references are at least forgotten. I don't necessarily share Heidegger's melancholy about this but increasingly I've come to appreciate his wisdom -- that the immediate world of the artwork is always, even definitionally lost over time. Or else it would simply be a dated work.
Will Holocaust literature avoid getting dated? Or will it transcend this history because it has been so profoundly good? I'm not sure what the better answer here is. I would prefer it be the latter, indeed I think it is this... but I would not want to lose the former. Specially not here. Or with the gulag. Or..... .
There is no solution here. Adornoian or otherwise. None. But the question is worth raising. In literature as much as in politics.