When Death Was Mercy
Lynn, David H.
BOOKS When Death Was Mercy I Remember Nothing More Adina Blady Szwajger Pantheon, 1990.184 pp., $20.00 Reviewed by David H. Lynn "I understood more and more clearly that you had to bring help...
...Remember Nothing More is a compelling book, one that rescues a few more memories, a few more souls from oblivion...
...How striking, then, is the vividness of many of the scenes...
...And just as, during those two years of real work in the hospital, I had bent down over the littie beds, so now I poured this last medicine into those tiny mouths...
...This may be the most important lesson—moral as well as practical—that a young Jewish doctor, Adina Blady Szwajger, learns while laboring in the Warsaw Children's Hospital from 1940 to 1942...
...Do we know more, understand better, attest to the meaning of meaninglessness any more powerfully...
...The hospital staff, its supplies exhausted, its members themselves starving, retreats from attempting to save ill and hungry children to helping them to an "easy death" with attention, affection, even a modicum of dignity...
...Have we heard similar stories too many times...
...BOOKS When Death Was Mercy I Remember Nothing More Adina Blady Szwajger Pantheon, 1990.184 pp., $20.00 Reviewed by David H. Lynn "I understood more and more clearly that you had to bring help right up to the very end, but first you had to be made of stone...
...Ryfka who now cares for her father alone, who washes, cooks and cleans, who despairs because she could not, also, save her sister...
...Or later, German soldiers are downstairs wrenching the sick out to the cattle trucks...
...This inversion of a hospital's fundamental purpose is a touchstone of the grotesque agony of daily life in Warsaw...
...Ryfka, leaving with the bundle, "wrapped in rags, turned and plodded away with the tired, shuffling step of an old woman...
...The answer to the last question must, it seems to me, be a defiant no...
...I Remember Nothing More is a journal constructed not during the events recounted here but as an act of memory, reclamation, even confession after many years of silence...
...And many of the connecting threads have, of course, been lost to time...
...No doubt as long as survivors remain such books of testimony will continue to appear...
...Adina brings vials of morphine to children already at death's door and administers it to save them further anguish, to give them sleep...
...Six-year-old Ryfka, for example, collecting a parcel of belongings left by her three-year-old sister who has died...
...David H. Lynn teaches at Kenyon College and is associate editor of the Kenyon Review...
...Or do readers, even well-intentioned readers, begin to grow numb...
...One may wonder whether anything new is added, whether the horror is any better documented and gauged with each new book...
...If the great danger that lies always before us is the blending of six million into a number, into a ragged, undifferentiated mass, then each new voice bearing witness adds to the insistence on the individuality of those who had no voice of their own...
Vol. 16 • August 1991 • No. 4
