Different Ways of Enduring

...Our difficulty in this regard, we are told, stems in part from the inherent nihilism in Western culture, a "nihilism [that] is the outcome of allegiance to a mind-body split which makes hateful the body and its functions, and storms against the whole of existence as soon as life is no longer justified by firm belief in 'higher' values...

...Don't disown or condemn your and your children's Jew-ishness," he pleads...

...Although I have some reservations about the final chapter, "Radical Nakedness," stressing views obtained from the biological sciences concerning the nature of "life itself," I was nevertheless swept along by the conception of the whole, which lifts the work above the level of treatise...

...They were confident Peter's surname and family connections would protect him...

...Peter's first letter to his mother, written shortly after the infamous Kristallnacht drastically altered the situation in Germany, introduces a major point of contention between them: differing attitudes toward being a Jew...

...Peter, a native of Berlin, was the son of a Jewish woman who disavowed her faith, and had been married successively to three Aryan men...

...Reviewed by Robert Rosen Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Baruch College, City University of New York No one who has seen a film of a concentration camp at the moment Allied troops first entered it is likely to ever forget the sight of the emaciated men and women who somehow managed to survive...

...The editor's notes at the end of the book, and some additional letters, complete our picture of Peter and his mother, who dies a few years after the war...

...Perhaps...

...By contrast, we get a very clear picture of one man caught in the turmoil of World War II, Peter Schwiefert, from the 60 letters he wrote to his mother, gathered together in The Bird Has No Wings...

...He goes to the German Consulate in Lisbon to request that he be "regarded henceforth as a Jew subject to all the laws concerning Jews...

...After more than three years of silence, the letter, running to some 12 printed pages, poignantly conveys a sense of lost years and loneliness: "I've forgotten how to write and even how to talk I've become dumb...

...Some six weeks later, he announces his decision to convert to Judaism: "I am a Jew, I belong to you and yours, and I want to signify outwardly that this is so...

...Peter is furious about the conversion, decrying as opportunism what his mother tries to defend as a matter of preference...

...The Bird Has No Wings: The Letters of Peter Schwiefert Edited by Claude Lanzmann Translated by Barbara Lucas St...

...In the three decades since the horror was exposed to our common view, there have been many attempts to deal with these questions...

...They remind us again of the familiar, yet now all but forgotten, plight of the refugee: the struggle for work permits, funds, visas...

...We learn subsequently that his efforts to arrange a circumcision operation were thwarted...

...Peter is in France, having joined the Free French Forces and fought in Syria, Tunisia, Lybia and Italy...

...You see, Mother, what they've done to our own people, to all the Jews who hadn't a chance to get away—what they've done to them in the Polish camps and in the ghettos...

...The book centers around quotations from accounts written by survivors, judiciously chosen and arranged (reminding one of the work of the critic Walter Benjamin) to provide us with images for what is expressed in its subtitle: "An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps.' In the three middle chapters?Excrc-mental Assault," "Nightmare and Waking,' "Life in Death"—we are overwhelmed as scores of eyewitnesses describe their agony...

...Perhaps even more than the unburied corpses, the skulls and limbs strewn about, the picture of these living witnesses to the greatest crime in history burned deep into our consciousness...

...The experience itself has been studied by sociologists, historians and psychologists (former inmates among them) who have emphasized, on the one hand, submis-siveness of victims (or worse, even imitation of SS behavior), and on the other, various forms of resistance...

...Her German husband arranges a marriage of convenience for her, to a Bulgarian, so that she can move to Sofia with her two young daughters...

...Ironically, while Peter is taking these steps his mother is being baptized...

...I want to be there at the precise moment when reckoning is made...

...Would the "life force" so strong in his letters have aided him there...

...In the end, though, we can only lessen our grief and frustration by retreating to another thought that has become a source of some small comfort...

...Don't forget that you can escape from everything, but never from yourself...

...Much has been written about the location, size, organization, and speoific purpose of the camps, as well as the number and origin of victims processed...

...Fearing he may reveal her true identity, his mother discourages him from coming to Sofia, promising instead to visit him in Greece...

...in fact, they testify, it was impossible to go on without help from others...

...Who were they, those survivors...

...What enabled them to escape the relentless process of selection, to wage an unending war against disease and despair...

...His father, a minor German playwright, his mother and his stepfather, a member of an influential and rich Prussian family, all opposed the departure...

...I don't need Germany any more I shall be a stranger among you...

...And we have altogether missed the fact that beyond our lust for disaster there is another, far deeper stratum of the human psyche, one that is life-affirming and life-sustaining...

...We tend to denigrate the act of survival, the author charges, and when we say of someone "that he or she 'merely' survives, the word "merely' carries real if muted moral objection...

...Arguments between the two continue, complicated by the intensity of Peter's love for his mother: "I love you more than sons usually love their mothers, for I don't love you only as a mother, but also how can I put it...

...Then, with the help of a Jewish committee, he travels to Athens...

...It demands the most terrible vengeance...

...He was 21 years old and hoping to become a writer when, appalled and frightened by Nazi anti-Semitism, he left Germany for Portugal in October 193S...

...Several chapters, indeed, have the impact of long sustained prose poems, of hymns to life...

...For my satisfaction, for my vengeance, so that they can see that I was right...

...Before the letter reaches its destination, Peter is killed in Alsace, in the final German offensive of January 1945...

...These qualities, des Pres implies, are biologically determined, and in their purest form some of them have been demonstrated in fiction...

...The trip never takes place...

...For des Pres, it is a remarkable phenomenon that even in the death camps the desire to live remains?life goes on, if only through routine and habit...

...The author's research, the amount of painful reading he has absorbed, is truly impressive...

...Then I shall go away again, and never return...

...When Premier Antonio de Oliveira Salazar agrees to expel all German Jews in November 1939, Peter is arrested and spends three months in prison...

...What conclusions, if any, can be drawn from the fact that there were human beings capable of adapting to conditions that killed the average prisoner within two to six months...

...The people we glimpse in these letters stay with us long after we have put down The Bird Has No Wings, especially Peter...

...His words on the point reach a magnificent eloquence...

...Martin's...

...By March 1941 the correspondence ends, except for one last letter written in November 1944...

...The author quotes one prisoner who speaks of "an overriding thirst —perhaps, too, a talent for life, and a faith in life...

...Peter Schwiefert, like Anne Frank and Moshe Flinker and Yitzkhok Rudashevski and Chaim Kaplan and Emanuel Ringelblum—like all those who put words to paper before they were killed—is in an important sense a "survivor" too...

...Thus in his opening chapter, "The Survivor in Fiction," he draws examples from Albert Camus' The Plague, Bernard Malamud's The Fixer and the novels of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...

...Peter exalts the approaching end: "Germany lies before us...

...There is more in these letters...

...Hasn't everything been silliness, frivolity, levity, thirst for pleasure, erotic delight, selfishness...

...she asks in a letter to Peter's father...

...But prior to her return, she writes, again to Peter's father: "I suppose I'm really a Jew after all...

...And we say it all the time, as if to be alive, and simply to struggle for life, were not in itself enough...

...One dreads such thoughts, yet in the light of des Pres' book it is hard to resist wondering: Had Peter Schwiefert been taken into the concentration camp hell, would he have been a survivor...

...For years she had gone on feeling that "the Germany where mind and spirit flourished" was her fatherland...

...How they've tortured, massacred, systematically exterminated, coldly annihilated...

...If Terrence des Pres' study adds no new information to this store, it does put the subject into an unusual and extremely interesting perspective by focusing on the value of "survival in itself...

...And what I want most of all is to enter Berlin...

...He finds it equally extraordinary that inmates developed personal bonds...

...Our most profound insights into the nature of the camps, however, have come from the personal reports of survivors, men and women willing to relive their ordeal, to "bear witness," so that we may learn what they have gone through...

...but also as, well then, yes, as a woman, there's no other word...

...The "survivor" of des Pres' title is an archetype, a figure emerging from the presentations of dozens of inmates who is necessarily somewhat shadowy...

...8.95...

...180 pp...