A Death Somehow Survived

...Having emerged from a Hell that defied even the extremes of medieval imagination, how did these people rejoin the world of the living...

...Paul Celan, the Romanian poet who composed Death Fugue...

...Herman Broder in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, A Love Story (1972) is a passive cynic whose amorality fails to protect him from the return of his repressed past...

...Major General Sidney Shachnow, a Green Beret officer in Vietnam, became the commander of U.S...

...Helmreich, asociologist at the City University of New York Graduate Center, is not oblivious to the emotional wounds his subjects suffered in Nazi-occupied Europe...

...Altogether the author spent nearly six years on this project, and amassed "over 15,000 pages of raw data" in the course of his interviews...

...Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker (1962), one of the first fictional portraits of a survivor, shows Sol Nazerman, a "Muselman" of the camps, living as a zombie in an urban jungle...

...Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night,' said Elie Wiesel in his memoir of a pitch-black childhood, aptly entitled Night, and finally issued in English in 1960 after 20 publishers rejected it as unmarketable...

...Yet at the same time she recognizes how unfathomable is the experience of those who emerged, now half a century ago, from "the other kingdom...

...Unfortunately, Helmreich draws few specific conclusions from his general findings, robbing Against All Odds of a force it might otherwise have...

...His prose is fluent and assured, and he obeys the first rule of Holocaust writing: Record the horrific actualities matter-of-factly, without rhetorical inflation...

...Abraham Foxman, saved by being baptized as a Catholic during the War, today is the national director of the Anti-Defamation League...

...Dorothy Rabinowitz' earlier portrait of survivors living in the U.S., New Lives (1976), may not be social science, but I think her journalistic probing comes closer to conveying a sense of the unknowable...

...The chasm between, say, Auschwitzand postwar existence was far too wide to be crossed easily...

...Like Helmreich, she allows her subjects to testify to individual resiliency and Jewish continuity...

...A number of writers who lived past V-E Day to recount the wartime terror eventually succumbed to suicide: Tadeusz Borowski, the Polish author of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen...

...William Helmreich's new book focuses on a different aspect of life after a living death...

...But to its estimated half a million survivors the Holocaust was an ordeal that could not ever be explained??or blotted out of memory...

...Perhaps because his research has been so prodigious, an anecdotal quality pervades Helmreich's narrative...

...and, most famously, the Italian chemist and Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi...

...Jack Tramiel opened a typewriter repair shop in New York, later founded the computer company that grew into Commodore International, and currently heads Atari...

...Their religious observance similarly appears stronger than that of their fellows, and marriages have proved to be more durable...

...And then there is Wiesel, the most articulate spokesman for those whose voices were forever stilled during Hitler's reign...

...His main intent, though, is to demonstrate how many severely scarred refugees adapted to American social customs and economic rules, how fully they triumphed over their despair??and over the claims of a past too harrowing for their new countrymen to comprehend...

...The short answer is, of course, with great difficulty...

...Scant attention is given to the booming economy that absorbed those who fled Europe and carried many other Jews to suburban affluence...

...Some survivors say they continue to live in fear of anti-Semitism, with a small fraction dreading another Holocaust (but there is little evidence that anyone's bags are packed...

...There is indeed, a mystery to the evil of the Holocaust and to the fantastic luck of those who outlasted it that is too gracefully treated in Against All Odds...

...He is too quick to praise the blessings of American opportunity and democracy, too reluctant to linger over the price his subjects paid in guilt, depression and anxiety...

...troops stationed in the very city where the Final Solution was launched, Berlin...

...or to the common decencies and amenities that largely characterize the U.S...

...Maybe this is an inevitable result of trying to faithfully report the views of a broad range of people...

...to the climate of increased tolerance and civil rights activism created in part by a realization that the logical culmination of bigotry was genocide...

...with obvious exceptions...

...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Professor of American studies, Brandeis University In the early post-World War II years, the signature event of 20th-century evil was wrapped mostly in silence and subjected to the psychic mechanisms of denial...

...How did they adjust to normality...

...In the final chapter, he lists 10 attributes that contributed to the group's flourishing here...

...Both novels illustrate the "psychic numbing" Robert J. Lifton detected among the hibakusha ("explosion-affected persons") of Hiroshima...

...Although he is regarded as a bare-knuckled business competitor, Tramiel's generous contributions to a host of causes, Helmreich believes, reflect his earlier experiences...

...It is a rather conventional recipe for anyone's success in this country, however, a mixture of the maxims of Poor Richard and the traits Horatio Alger bestowed upon his heroes of upward mobility...

...Of the 170 survivors the author interviewed at length, several have been exceptionally successful...

...One of them, Gilbert Metz, is the lone Holocaust survivor among the roughly 2,000 Jews of Mississippi and a conspicuous champion of a fairly unpopular idea there, the strict separation of church and state...

...Helmreich instead emphasizes the virtues of the survivors themselves??their flexibility and courage, intelligence and initiative, indefatigable optimism, and capacity to surmount the fanatical hatred that overtook them and destroyed their families and communities...

...It may also account for the absence of much detail about the context of the book's success stories??postwar American society...

...Jean Amery, the Viennese memoirist who found himself At the Mind's Limits...

...Despite Helmreich's impressively affirmative study, doubt remains about the extent of the survivors' recuperation and the facility with which they achieved "normality...

...The vast majority tend to be highly patriotic as well as committed supporters of Israel, visiting the Holy Land more frequently than most American Jews...

...Helmreich also spoke with a wide variety of less prominent individuals...

...Hungarian-born Tom Lantos received a doctorate from Berkeley, became a professor and business consultant, and since 1980 has been a member of Congress...

...In addition, while each story is different, all of them share one or two elements...

...Against All Odds records instances where the human spirit vigorously reasserted itself, enabling shattered Displaced Persons to start over again in the United States...

...By now, the horror that once dared not speak its name??that until about three decades ago had no name??has become a moral challenge to novelists, historians, sociologists, theologians...