A Book for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) was a novelist and literary scholar at the University of East Anglia in Britain. He was born in Bavaria, and wrote in German. Austerlitz, his last book, is about the life of a man named Jacques Austerlitz, who was born in Prague in the 1930s. As the Nazis take over Czechoslovakia, his  Jewish mother in desperation sends him, at age four and a half, on a Kindertransport to England, He is taken in by a cold-hearted Welsh couple who never tell him his origin. As an adolescent, he finally learns his real name, but discovers that all paperwork about his family and where he came from had been lost in the bombings of London. 

The narrator of the novel is of an acquaintance of Austerlitz, who has occasional contact with him, and who relates a series of narratives that occur when he, the narrator, gets together with Austerlitz. The descriptions of his search for his birth parents and family are related with an overwhelming sense of alienation, which is in any case intrinsic to the existence of a man desperate to know who he really is. For years Austerlitz cannot even remember his own early life, and recovers a few faint memories through a series of coincidences and voyages to discover his identity.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day

From the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC:

“The United Nations has designated January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day—a time to remember the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the millions of other victims of Nazi persecution. In 2024, the commemoration coincides with a surge in antisemitism worldwide.”

The background events of Sebald's novel are not as well known as the major events of the Holocaust. While millions of murdered victims died in Auschwitz, there were a number of other camps. Millions of Jews from Eastern Europe were shipped to these camps, but smaller numbers of victims came from other countries, where Jewish communities were also destroyed, Jewish property stolen, and synagogues, made unrecognizable, were converted to other uses. Very few efforts to save Jewish people occurred during this era. Here are a few of the facts and how Sebald's novel includes them.

An Early Effort to Save Jewish Children: The Kindertransport 

Children arriving in England brought by the Kindertransport (source)

The Kindertransport was an effort in 1938-1939 to rescue Jewish children from several countries in Nazi-occupied Europe. Ten thousand of these threatened children were taken from their parents and brought to England. Most of them were adopted or fostered by British families. Although the intent was that their rescue would be temporary until they could return to their homes, most could never be reunited with their families because the families had perished in the Holocaust. 

In the novel, Austerlitz for years is unable to recall his journey to England, but eventually he goes to Prague and finds an elderly woman named Vera, who had been a friend of his mother Agata Austerlitz. Finally in conversations with Vera, he learns about his early childhood. Vera explains that his mother, because she was Jewish, was banned from her profession as an opera singer and deprived of all the freedoms she had enjoyed. As the Nazis implemented their anti-Jewish policies, she slowly realized the danger to her life and that of her child:

"She finally decided, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, that she would send me at least to England, having succeeded through the good offices of one of her theatrical friends in getting my name put down for one of the few children’s transports leaving Prague for London during those months. Vera remembered, said Austerlitz, that the happy excitement Agáta felt at this first successful outcome of her efforts was overshadowed by her grief and anxiety as she imagined how I would feel, a boy not yet five years old who had always led a sheltered life, on my long railway journey and then among strangers in a foreign country. ...She was torn between wishful thinking and her fear that she was doing something irresponsible and unforgivable, and who knows, Vera said to me, whether she might not have kept you with her after all had there been just a few more days left before you were to set off from Prague." (p. 173)

Austerlitz himself has never had more than fleeting and unreliable memories of his journey, and almost no memory at all of his mother. Vera offers him his first real grasp of his childhood experience:

"I have only an indistinct, rather blurred picture of the moment of farewell at the Wilsonova Station, said Vera, adding, after a few moments’ reflection, that I had my things with me in a little leather suitcase, and food for the journey in a rucksack—un petit sac à dos avec quelques viatiques, said Austerlitz, those had been Vera’s exact words, summing up, as he now thought, the whole of his later life. Vera also remembered the twelve-year-old girl with the bandoneon to whose care they had entrusted me, a Charlie Chaplin comic bought at the last minute, the fluttering of white handkerchiefs like a flock of doves taking off into the air as the parents who were staying behind waved to their children, and her curious impression that the train, after moving off very slowly, had not really left at all, but in a kind of feint had rolled a little way out of the glazed hall before sinking into the ground." (pp. 173-174).  

One of Many Camps: Theresienstadt

Austerlitz continues with his efforts to discover his mother's fate, and learns that after he had been sent to England, she was deported from Prague to the Theresienstadt ghetto.

“Theresienstadt, established as a ghetto and transit camp in 1941, was presented as a model Jewish settlement for propaganda purposes. Despite congestion, hunger and forced labor, educational and cultural activities abounded. 35,440 Jews died in the ghetto and 88,000 were deported.” (From Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum)

A detailed history of Theresienstadt, as documented in a book that Austerlitz finds, makes up quite a long passage of the novel, but learning about this does nothing for his alienation and isolation. 

One of the somewhat mysterious illustrations from the novel (p. 244)

The Deportation from Paris

Austerlitz has much more difficulty discovering the eventual fate of his father, Maximilian Aychenwald, who had left Prague and had gone to Paris where he hoped to be safer from the Nazis. Living in Paris decades later, Austerlitz tries to find any documented record of his father. He studies the fate of the large Parisian Jewish community where his father presumably had lived. His efforts to imagine his father in Paris as the Nazis are destroying the Jewish community are poignant:

"I sat in this bar too for hours on end, trying to imagine him in his plum-colored double-breasted suit, perhaps a little threadbare now, bent over one of the café tables and writing those letters to his loved ones in Prague which never arrived. I kept wondering whether he had been interned in the half-built housing estate out at Drancy after the first police raid in Paris in August 1941, or not until July of the following year, when a whole army of French gendarmes took thirteen thousand of their Jewish fellow citizens from their homes, in what was called the grande rafle, during which over a hundred of their victims jumped out of the windows in desperation or found some other way of committing suicide. I sometimes thought I saw the windowless police cars racing through a city frozen with terror, the crowd of detainees camping out in the open in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, and the trains on which they were soon deported from Drancy and Bobigny; I pictured their journey through the Greater German Reich, I saw my father still in his good suit and his black velour hat, calm and upright among all those frightened people. Then again, I thought that Maximilian would surely have left Paris in time, had gone south on foot across the Pyrenees, and perished somewhere along his way." (p. 257).

In this blog in the past, I've written about the horrendous deportation from Paris, when the Jewish population was rounded up, held in appalling conditions at a bicycle-racing stadium called the Velodrome d'Hiver, and eventually deported to Auschwitz to die. I remember this because our apartment in Paris on one of our long stays was extremely close to this site, and I often walked past the commemorative marker on the street. My memories seem appropriate for this Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Memorial to the Parisian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz.

His Father’s Fate

Finally, almost at the end of the book, Austerlitz learns of his father's fate, which he relates to the narrator:

"When I met Austerlitz again for morning coffee on the boulevard Auguste Blanqui, shortly before I left Paris, he told me that the previous day he had heard, from one of the staff at the records center in the rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier, that Maximilian Aychenwald had been interned during the latter part of 1942 in the camp at Gurs, a place in the Pyrenean foothills which he, Austerlitz, must now seek out. Curiously enough, said Austerlitz, a few hours after our last meeting, when he had come back from the Bibliothèque Nationale and changed trains at the gare d’Austerlitz, he had felt a premonition that he was coming closer to his father." (pp. 290-291). 

 It's hard to describe how sad and desperate the character of Austerlitz is, and obviously the use of history -- including the reproduction of many photos -- makes the book a masterpiece of fictional use of historic facts. I can't tell you how sad the book made me, and I am not able to do justice to its literary accomplishment. Reading it seems very appropriate as a commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day, and also as a reminder of how Jews in our own time, right now, are struggling for their very existence. We are more and more being reviled and persecuted again by a new wave of antisemitism and antipathy to Israel, which was hoped to be a refuge from a future Holocaust.

Review © 2024 mae sander

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