Review of Jack Eisner: The Survivor. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1981.
Published May 1981 in Chronicles of Culture.
Republished with permission.
“Learn to be silent”–so Elie Wiesel advises those who would speak of the Holocaust. Especially those who were not there: “In intellectual, or pseudo-intellectual circles, in New York and elsewhere too, no cocktail party can really be called a success unless Auschwitz sooner or later figures in the discussion. Excellent remedy for boredom….” (Legends of Our Time: New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).
The Jews, he observes, died because they had no friends, and even friends should not judge one another until shared circumstance teaches them understanding. Savants’ chatter camouflages their secret indifference along with their ignorance.
Wiesel knows that “the only ones who were, who still are, full conscious of their share of responsibility for the dead are those who were saved.” Here, responsibility means guilt–not the unreasoning guilt of one tormented by his own survival, but the all-too-reasonable guilt of one who remembers the terms of survival. The Nazis death quota, that engine of arbitrary selection, seems a triumph of collectivism, a perfect expression of indifference to the individuality of the victims. But the quota forced another excruciating individuality upon the survivors: “the one who had been spared, above all during the selections, could not repress his first spontaneous reflex of joy. A moment, a week, or an eternity later, this joy weighted with fear and anxiety will turn into guilt. I am happy to have escaped death becomes equivalent to admitting: I am glad that someone else went in my place.” Some of those who admitted this tried to forget the dead. Others joined them in death. Still others initiated a silent monologue, continued to this day, “which only the dead deserve to hear.”
What is this monologue? Those of us who ask risk becoming cocktail party cognoscenti, pretenders to understanding. Yet we should ask, I think; we may not deserve to hear the monologue, but if we do not hear of it, if we do not face the memories of the Holocaust, our silence will begin with tact and end with the cowardice tact may conceal.
Jack Eisner calls his memoir The Survivor. He knows the silent monologue of which Wiesel speaks. After the war he spent much time with other survivors. “We understood one another’s silences.” Did they? Surely they understood each other’s need for silence, but I doubt that all these monologues with the dead were alike. Both Wiesel and Eisner call themselves gravestones, markers commemorating the dead. But they are different men with different things to say to us–whatever they say to the dead.
Guilt enters Eisner’s monologue to us, like Wiesel’s. Not as Wiesel’s: “I am one in a thousand who survived. Why me? Was I better than the half million Jews in Warsaw who did not?” Eisner tells us how he survived. Although in this passage he means to deny his superiority to the dead, his memoir shows us in what ways he was `better’ than those who died, why he was a better survivor. Acts concern him more than thoughts. Wiesel, who cares much for thoughts and less for action, tortures himself with the question, “Why did you not resist?” Eisner did resist, did act, at times with a prudence that Wiesel might find profoundly disconcerting. These two men could not say the same things to the dead any more than they can say the same things to us. Guilt touches them differently.
To Eisner, thought undirected toward acts weakens the thinker. “My father was a dreamer a philosopher, a gentle man.” “He believed in the goodness of humanity” and “had faith in a civilized Germany.” “I loved and respected him, but sometimes I wished he were a more forceful man.” The means by which the 13-year-old Jack Eisner might have begun a life of the mind disintegrated by the grace of the Nazis: in 1939 they destroyed the Warsaw Music Conservatory, which had awarded him a scholarship. After that, his thoughts served action and his acts served survival. Action, in this circumstance, required courage first of all. “I knew that my Christian friends didn’t believe in Jewish valor…. But I also knew, in my heart, that they were wrong.” Indeed they were. When the Nazis tried to destroy the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, Eisner was there. They “entered the ghetto in their usual way, firing guns in the air and screaming for all Jews to come out of their buildings.” Eisner adds proudly, “But we weren’t the usual Jews.” After repeated invasions failed, the Nazis finally could `conquer’ the ghetto only by leveling it with artillery fire.
Eisner himself is no “usual” man. His courage did not depend on comrades. At Budzyn, the second of four concentration camps he endured, he escaped alone, then faced punishment alone after his recapture. The commandant beat him with a whip: “he wanted me on the ground at his feet.” Eisner refused to fall. Eventually, the commandant exhausted himself, but Eisner “straightened back to attention.” “I felt the world was crushing me. The sky was falling like a shattered mirror on my face. But I stood.” Survival, both as a Jews among Jews and as an individual, obsessed Eisner, but survival finally served not only the will to live, the desire for revenge, and the need to bear witness to the struggle of those who died; it was a matter of dignity, of affirming the humanity the Nazis–and all the Jews-haters of the day, whether malevolent persecutors or icy bystanders–tried to deny.
Yet survival, as Wiesel insists, can also cost dignity, expend what it tries to save. Eisner knows this. Courage needs thought to complement it, and thought that serves survival often recommends indignity. Eisner watched an SS officer whip Eisner’s mother: “I wanted to leap at the sadist’s throat. But I didn’t budge. Survival was what counted.” He watched a Nazi commandant herd Jews into a synagogue, put a gasoline can on the porch, then explode the can with machine gun bullets. “Sick to my stomach, I watched the inferno from a distance. All my fears, anguish, and self-pity vanished. I wanted to jump on [the commandant’s] neck. To squeeze it. To wrench the last breath from his body. But my mind told me I was helpless. All I could do was turn my eyes to the forest.” In Flossenburg, his last concentration camp, Eisner became `friendly’ with a German criminal who worked at the disinfection chambers. “I soon became part of the elite, an inmate with connections”–so much so that he achieved re-designation as “an Aryan Christian.” Wiesel would devote many pages to such incidents, weighing the moral problems they pose (in fact he did watch his father beaten and writes extensively about it). Eisner, the survivor who acts, moves on.
Eisner has no immunity to guilt. Early in the war, after escaping the ghetto to live in “Aryan Warsaw,” he returned; “my conscience was bothering me.” When a young friend was killed during a smuggling expedition, Eisner felt responsibility. Forced to carry starving inmates to the crematorium in Flossenburg, madness nearly claimed him: “That night, I couldn’t sleep at all. Those big brown eyes. those big blue eyes. Those big wide-open green eyes. Millions of eyes stared at me all night long. I hated those eyes…. I hated the world.” Guilt, yes: disabling guilt, never. In his monologue with the dead–with these dead, the ones he carried–Eisner may accuse himself, but he can accuse the world with more vehemence, and more justification. In his book he restrains himself, except when he writes of the Nazis.
This world, not quite rid of Nazis, reads memoirs of the Holocaust, watches new holocausts in Mao’s China and in Cambodia. Perhaps the world’s continued ignorance, indifference and criminality goads Eisner not only to present Hell but also to explain it. (For example, he tells of a sign on Flossenburg’s gate that said, “Work liberates,” adding “The message was totally ironic.” He does this sort of thing more than once.) At times he tells us more than we should know, as when he describes a couple of his early sexual adventures in prose worthy of Penthouse. There are pages that read all too much `like a novel’–or worse, a cheap and trivial screenplay. He embarrasses his reader when he dips into what can only be described as Holocaust kitsch. What he has lived needs no such (melo)dramatization. Eisner, who writes with terse forcefulness at his best, should not be blamed for literary misjudgment; he runs an import-export business (the world of acts, as always), not a literary journal. Blame his editors.
Wiesel’s more refined and powerful intellect takes us places Eisner cannot. Eisner’s activeness also takes us places, giving us five memories for each Wiesel presents. Here is one that only Wiesel could elaborate upon properly: at one camp, a Nazi general on a white horse stopped in front of the inmates. At his side, on a white pony, road a 10-year-old Jewish boy dressed in a white uniform, black boots, and carrying a small whip. The boy ordered his fellow Jews into the showers, Days later, he saved Eisner from execution, ordered him to be whipped, smiled, complimented Eisner’s courage and handed him a chocolate bar. Shining like ebony, this brilliant evil mesmerizes as it repels. If he had survived, what would be this child’s monologue with the dead? If memoirs of the Holocaust teach us to learn the right silence, they also teach us to try to find the right speech and the right acts by showing us what happens if we fail.
2016 NOTE: Jack Eisner died in 2003, having dedicated much of his life’s considerable earnings to educating people about the Holocaust, especially through memorials he caused to be built in several countries. His memoir does indeed read at times like a screenplay for a melodrama and was produced as both a stage play and a film. The jarring disjunction between his experiences and some of his descriptions of them show a tough, blunt sensibility somewhat warped by the vulgar forms of entertainment he escaped to live in the midst of, for the rest of his life. His book’s many fine and striking passages in this way represent his triumph not only over the death camps but over the trivializing coarseness of what Malraux calls “the arts of satiation.”
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