I Truly Lament: Working through the Holocaust, Mathias B. Freese (Wheatmark, Arizona USA 2015)
2015 sees the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War (for the countries of Eastern Europe that ending only came in 1989). Many archives are still to be opened. Millions of voices remain unheard, yet of all the events of those war years, those of the Holocaust challenge the bent heart of our humanity. The Holocaust still requires work, as award winning writer and psychotherapist, Mathias Freese stresses in this gritty collage of twenty-seven hard-hitting stories. Using black humour, language that is spare and sometimes shocking, Freese takes readers into the heart of the Holocaust and we dare not look away.
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Mauthausen and many other places of death are now on display. We see mounds of murdered women’s hair, battered spectacles, suitcases that victims brought to Auschwitz from all over Europe. In Treblinka mass murder is represented by stones – the Nazis destroyed the evidence of their crime. In Majdanek, outside Lublin, death is represented by a vast mound of ash. Dust… ash… stone… Words fail, and as Freese says in one of his many memorable aphorisms, “words are useless” Nevertheless, Freese gives victims voice – and gives voice also to other participants in murder: a chillingly detached “Herr Doctor”, a guard, a golem, an editor who reveres Nazi memorabilia (including Hitler’s underpants), but denies the Holocaust, scurrilously also to Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun. We are hunted along with a “caftan-wearing” young man fleeing from the burning shtetl (small predominately Jewish town) – we meet a similar young man in another story and indeed, several persons represented here appear more than once and it is rewarding to trace their stories. Above all, though, we are immersed inescapably in the dark, godless, brutal world of the death camp. The Holocaust challenges our belief in moral goodness and even more profoundly challenges our theology; these masterfully crafted stories pose questions many Christians rightly feel highly uncomfortable with. “Answers,” says a Rabbi in the first story, “are dead chickens in the barnyard. The question is in the butcher’s life.”
Abraham climbs the mountain with Isaac, but for the Jews of Europe there was no rescuing angel nor ram and these stories show us that those who managed to outlive brutality and starvation found no escape. Memories, “deep, billowing clouds of dismal and dank despair” deprive survivors of joy even in simple things. “The last thing survivors are good at is surviving…” Mr Ginsburg who can skilfully renovate an old table, is afraid to catch a plane to Israel.
As the title suggests, the stories lament, and Lamentations are central to our Scriptures, startlingly contemporary and so apposite for the horror that was the Holocaust, when “those who were my enemies without cause have hinted me like a bird; they flung me alive into a pit and hurled stones at my head.” (Lamentations 3: 52-54)
Let us then lament and allow the dark world of these powerful stories to sink into our souls for, says Freese “The Jew aches for Christian awareness and accountability. He will never get that. For sure.”
Jenny Robertson, author Don’t go to Uncle’s Wedding, War Hero Bear, From the Volga to the Clyde and others.
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