Inferno - Max Hastings [331]
MANY GREAT TESTIMONIES by victims of the Holocaust have been preserved, but one of the most astonishing was revealed to the world only sixty years after its author’s death. Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a rich banker who had translated himself from the Ukrainian ghettos and pogroms to a large mansion in St. Petersburg. She grew up in lonely luxury, travelling regularly with her family to France. They fled the revolution in 1917, enduring considerable hardships before reaching Paris two years later, where her father rebuilt his fortune. Irène had been writing since she was fourteen. In 1927, she published her first novella; by the outbreak of war she was an established French literary figure, author of nine novels, one of which had been filmed, and married with two daughters. In 1940, when the Germans occupied Paris, she retreated to a rented house in the village of Issy-l’Evêque, in Saône-et-Loire. There, in the following year, she embarked upon what she intended to become a trilogy about the war, on the epic scale of War and Peace. She had few illusions about her own likely fate, and wrote despairingly in 1942: “Just let it be over—one way or the other!” Though she had converted to Catholicism, there was no escape from the Nazi blight upon her race: on 13 July she was arrested by French police and deported to Auschwitz, to be murdered at Birkenau on 17 August. Her husband was killed shortly afterwards.
Némirovsky had completed the first two volumes of her remarkable work. Her daughters, who survived the war in hiding, miraculously preserved her manuscripts, written in a tiny script reflecting the author’s shortage of ink and paper. The girls could not bring themselves to read this sole memorial of their mother until more than half a century had passed. Then one of them, Denise, painstakingly transcribed the manuscript with the aid of a magnifying glass, and hesitantly passed it to a publisher. Suite française was published in France in 2004 and became a worldwide sensation. Its first volume describes the French experience of June 1940, the plight of millions of refugees. The second focuses upon the relationship between a German soldier of the occupying army and a Frenchwoman. The pathos is extraordinary, of a Jew doomed to die portraying with acute sympathy the sentiments and behaviour of those who would become her murderers. Her account of French society under occupation, its sufferings, manifestations of quiet courage and also of moral betrayal, forms one of the most remarkable literary legacies of the war. Cool, wry analysis was matched by a warm compassion, displayed as she herself awaited a death in which she knew that the French people were complicit with the Germans. Némirovsky is now recognised as one of the most remarkable witnesses of her time and of her race’s tragedy.
WHILE A VAST NUMBER of Germans were directly or indirectly complicit in the massacre of the Jews, a small minority displayed high courage in succouring the persecuted, at mortal risk to themselves. A young Berlin shoemaker named August Kossman, a communist, hid Irma Simon, her husband and son in his little apartment for two years. The teenager Erich Neumann’s mother, a café owner, sheltered a young Jewish family friend in Charlottenburg for five months. A Jewish fugitive named Max Krakauer compiled a list at the end of the war of all those Berliners who had assisted his long struggle to escape death, and recalled sixty-six names. Rita Knirsch’s mother sheltered a young man named Solomon Striem, a family friend, saying to her daughter, “Rita, you must tell nobody about this! … I cannot just turn this poor hunted man away.” Such extraordinarily courageous people sustained a shred of the honour of German civilisation.
In 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary and Slovakia, it was the turn of most of their surviving 750,000 Jews to climb aboard transports,