Stephen Feuer,who is the publisher of Gihon River Press in Pennsylvania, informed me that Joanne Gilbert’s new book Women of Valor had just been published by his press. He asked me if I was willing to review it and I declined. However, we agreed that I would send him I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust, a collection of short stories, which was recently published and he would give me Women of Valor, a sharing among brethren. Without the pressure of having to review the book, I read with no preconceptions.
As a historian Gilbert is well-versed with the Holocaust, much more than knowledgeable and her opening chapters that set the scene in Poland are very well done, detailed and informative. One can argue that this book could be used in a course on women’s studies, for it has much to say about gender and gender roles.
Since I approach the Holocaust as a fiction writer I count upon my imagination and whatever empathetic skills I own as a man, setting out to describe the unfathomable – am I wasting my time? I have written a novel and a book of short stories about the subject and I will not be writing any more on it. Gilbert has interviewed and taped, and edited narratives from four women of exceptional courage and remarkable strengths. One or two of them have published their own memoirs. All of them have lived long lives since the Holocaust; they have similarities and differences but essentially they share how fortunate it is to have survived and how important it is to give witness to what they experienced as Jews.
Ms. Gilbert has three overarching themes, which I will sum up as that Gentiles and Jews did help one another and that this was not uncommon; that shared miseries crossed religious boundaries; that Jews abetted in their own destruction is a lie. Gilbert writes to take testimony from these survivors, to add to the collective archive of Jewish memory. My purposes are different but have similar goals. I write to feel, to write how it was to be a Jew in the Holocaust; to give the reader my feelings about what it was to be dehumanized. A wise man wrote that not even a survivor understands the circumstances of his plight. In the dazed, confused, and exceedingly cruelly randomized world of the Holocaust this was a given. I suppose as I look over my writings I deal with the dehumanization of the Jew. Women of Valor is saturated with that experience and so I approached the book differently. I wanted to see if I would be touched or given insight from such behaviors, which is my background as a writer and a retired psychotherapist.
So here are observations I would like to share about Women of Valor. In a short declarative sentence in one of the narratives, it doesn’t matter which one, as it is latent in all four, the word “terror” is mentioned. Terror immobilizes, it paralyzes, cells freeze up, the mind cannot fathom, cannot respond; first there is the horror, and then there is terror. One indelible insight I uncovered as I read the book is how each of these women idiosyncratically experienced sheer terror, grappled with it and stood their ground. Somehow and in some fashion, they metabolized this fear, unlocked themselves, fought back at attempted rapes, learned to shoot a gun, to outwit and outsmart the Hun. In short, to act. They would not use this word, but they acted existentially. I see this in all four testimonies. I choose to live. I choose to resist. I am Sisyphus. Arrival is not the issue. It is all in the struggle. It is a monumentally brave thing, is it not? Each one moved from real fear and the pungency of terror so as to unlock her self and fight back, to resist, to self-actuate one self. Quite remarkable. And since women throughout the ages have suffered the collective backhand slap of men, it even takes on a larger measure of strength, character and that great word, resolve.
As I say terror was a constant, and I must add that to mobilize one self to resist was a choice these women also had to make. Psychological surrender would have been the comfortable way, paralysis and numbness the alternatives. Just examine the people about you and one can only surmise who would endure, who would resist and who would be shattered by the relentless Nazi machine of dehumanization, unprecedented in the history of man because it was systematic and organized. With people about you who would be traitorous, and who might very well reveal your identity, your very hiding place, one can only imagine what inner strengths had to be called upon so one would not commit treason against one’s self. Capitulation was always an available option.
A constant state of anomie prevailed in this environment. And how to engage that often became a test of character. Fortitude is the word that comes to mind. All of the women in one way or another, gave up their adolescence and assumed the mantle of adult behaviors. It had its cost much later on. It is often said that young people in the camps, after two weeks, had already garnered the behavior of men. One of the delayed savageries of the Nazi system was the indelible cost it made upon the survivor in later life. Survivors suffered twice over.
Indeed, at the end, one woman of valor who became a scientist and has a brilliant mind speaks of post traumatic shock disorder. The word is not the thing itself, one philosopher has said. And before we had the term, the disorder had been with mankind for centuries. Survivors who have had relentless dreams and flashbacks decades later can attest to this phenomenon. In my own stories I enter here with my own skills and try to grasp the psychological mayhem done to survivors. Ms. Gilbert gives the facts and her empathy; I relate feelings based on such facts as she has supplied as well as others, Primo Levi, Olga Lengyel and Wiesel.
It takes guts, if you think about, to be a living, feeling, thinking, and compassionate human being! Imagine the task for a young teenager who must psychologically defend herself and at the same time sustain her own inner-directedness as her culture collapses about her.
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