The Search: The Birkenau Boys

"Yes. The reason I included this one is precisely because of that later search—not so much for what it tells us about Auschwitz as what it tells us about survivors. He’s trying to track down other boys who had been in the family camp and had survived. One of them was Otto Dov Kulka, who also recently produced an almost dream-like memoir called Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death (which didn’t quite make my cut because it’s relatively recent and already much-discussed). What’s interesting about this book is how Durlacher makes an attempt to reconnect with other boys who had gone through the same experience. He finds them in quite different places. One of the stories he tells is about one of the boys, who he tracks down to the New York borough of Queens. He’s living a very miserable, angry life and doesn’t want to talk. There are vast numbers of survivors, tens of thousands, who are able to talk about it at some point. On the other hand, there are many survivors who are completely incapacitated by their experiences, the consequences for whom we see through the writings of psychiatrists who have dealt with them in institutions—people like Dori Laub, who’s done an incredible amount of work with Holocaust survivors who cannot speak about their experiences, trying to help them articulate what they’ve been through to help with post-traumatic stress disorder. So, we’ve got those two extremes: survivor literature and testimonies, and psychoanalytic literature on PTSD. Durlacher tracks down a man who falls between these two extremes. There must have been tens of thousands like that; people who are just miserable, angry, isolated and socially not functioning very well, but also not giving an account of their past and not able to understand it. Not all of them came to the reunion. What becomes very clear is that they all had different ways of dealing with the past. Otto Dov Kulka became a professional historian; he wrote about anything but his personal experiences until his very late memoir. Another one became a painter, another a rabbi. But the miserable man from Queens was not there. He wouldn’t talk. They just had a dreadful dinner in New York and that was it. Durlacher has uncovered that additional variant that doesn’t normally surface: not so severely damaged that you’re in a psychiatric institution, but damaged to the extent that you’re unable to articulate what you went through to the rest of the world. One of the other things that struck me about the book was the way Durlacher, like Otto Dov Kulka, talks about seeing the American airplanes flying across the blue skies above Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. I thought it was fascinating that both boys saw them almost like little toys in the air, independent accounts of the same experience. Otto Dov Kulka said it was so beautiful. He says the little silver airplanes across the deep blue skies above Auschwitz were the most beautiful summer skies you can imagine, more beautiful that anything he’s seen in Israel or anywhere else. This kind of perception and memory is extraordinary. It also echoes perceptions conveyed in some of Imre Kertész’s fictional account, Fatelessness , about the “quiet hour” of the early evening that he was able to appreciate even in camp."