Memories of My Life in a Polish Village
Reimer, Jack
MEMORIES OF MY LIFE IN A POLISH VILLAGE, by Toby Knobel Fluek, Alfred A. Knopf, $19.95,110 pp., illustrated. I am not a great expert on art but I can tell you that this is a very special book. It...
...And as she does, the art changes in tone...
...And yet I found that on more than one occasion I had to put down this book to dab my eyes and to calm myself...
...And this is something the young need to know about and to understand...
...I recommend it to people of all ages but especially to young people, for it is not a horror story...
...I did not think it was possible for another book about the Holocaust to get through to me...
...There is one page in this book in which the author talks about what it was like to follow the Russian army through the snow, with rags wrapped around their feet, trying to keep ahead of the Nazis...
...There is a remarkable quiet dignity to this book...
...the paintings and the prose are calm, yet, or perhaps therefore, the total effect is shattering...
...That is all she says-no more, no less...
...All she does is paint and write...
...There is a pristine power to her words and to her art that is more riveting than there would have been if she had yielded to what must have been an almost irresistible temptation to scream out with anger...
...She leaves that judgment for the reader to make...
...At one point, one of the Russian soldiers who was guarding these prisoners offered her a gun and asked if she would like to shoot one of these Germans...
...And then she describes what it was like when that world came to an end, first, when the Russians invaded, and then, when the Nazis came...
...JACK REIMER...
...She describes the life there with its piety and its poverty...
...The pictures are almost matter-of-fact and the prose is restrained...
...There is, for example, a charcoal sketch of two shawled figures crawling through barbed wire, and with it a four-sentence commentary that simply says that her mother sent her and her sister away so that they might live, and that she gave them a few pieces of sugar for nourishment because that was all she had...
...This book is special...
...Quietly she tells of how she said no to the offer, without even being tempted for a moment, because, even though the Nazis had destroyed their lives and their souls, she still could not take another person's life...
...She is never maudlin, never sentimental, even when she describes the most gruesome realities...
...She simply records it just the way she records all the other facts of her journey and all the other stops along her way from shtetl to hell and from hell to a new world...
...She says this simply, matter-of-factly, with no boasting, with almost no awareness of how special, how civilized, that made her...
...I was wrong...
...Whereas in the first part of the book, the part that describes the Sabbaths and holy days and the ordinary days, the colors were bright and vivid and cheerful, now as she describes hiding in the cellars and in the woods and what it was like to live behind barbed wire, the paintings become grey and dark and grim...
...The artist, Toby Knobel Fluek, tells the story of her childhood in a small Polish shtetl...
...It is a jewel of a memoir in which words and the art combine to tell a story that has an enormous emotional impact...
...She makes no judgment on a world in which a mother has to do something like that...
...She never manipulates your emotions...
...But I found myself turning back to this page, to the portrait and to the prose, many times after I finished this book...
...The sketch of Jews carrying wagons full of dead bodies or the drawing of the burning hospital that was set on fire by the Nazis, with all the people inside, or the painting of the teenager hiding in the woods, are overwhelming in their impact precisely because the artist does not spell out the horror of what she is portraying and recording...
...She just quietly tells and draws things as they were...
...In their group were some German prisoners of war...
...It is a story about how one human being endured and survived horrors...
...Scene by scene, page by page, she lovingly describes her family, her neighbors, and the values by which they lived...
Vol. 117 • November 1990 • No. 19
