Books
Six of six million
by Nicholas Reid
Why did Cain kill Abel?
Why did Ukranians kill Jews?
Why did Cain kill his brother Abel? If you like, you can go all anthropological, the way Jean-Jacques Rousseau did, and say the story encodes long racial memory. Cain tills the soil while Abel keeps sheep. So the story’s really about centuries of hostility between farmers and nomadic herdsmen. But such Enlightenment guessing really misses something more fundamental. God accepts Abel’s offering but rejects Cain’s. Cain, the elder brother, feels humiliated and hurt. He turns on his brother and kills him. People who have suffered are often spurred to make others suffer as well.
Now flash-forward some millennia. Why did many Ukrainians collaborate with the Nazis in the Ukraine and eastern Poland, helping to hunt down and kill Jews during the Holocaust?
In the 30s, Stalin’s regime visited terrible suffering on Ukrainians, whom the Georgian dictator particularly despised. In collectivisation, purges and organised starvation, the number of murdered Ukrainians at least equalled, and possibly exceeded, the number of Jews Hitler murdered.
True, this historical fact has been used by Holocaust-deniers and other nutters in mitigation of the Holo-caust. But it is a fact, nevertheless. When Nazi tanks rolled eastward in 1941, whole Ukrainian villages welcomed them as liberators.
When the time came, Cain murdered Abel a million times over. It’s not frivolous to think of a Holocaust book in these terms, because they are the terms of the author of The Lost, Daniel Mendelsohn.
Apparently Mendelsohn is a secular, non-observing US Jew for whom the Torah is no more a historical record than those Greek tragedies that he (as a professional classicist) has spent much of his life studying. Yet as he tells his own Holocaust story, Mendelsohn can find no better unifying structure than meditations on what Jews call Bereishit and Gentiles call the Book of Genesis.
Why did Cain kill Abel? Does God’s covenant with Abraham mean Jews are special? Do Noah’s Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah mean that God is indifferent to His Creation, or does He actually approve of mass murder? Whether readers are secular or religious, they will find that these meditations, underscored with remarks by rabbinical commentators, give this particular quest a wholeness and moral authority lacking in other accounts of equal horrors.
Mendelsohn’s quest is to find out how exactly his great-uncle and his daughters died in the Ukrainian town of Boleshaw under Nazi occupation. Over nearly 600 pages, The Lost (subtitled A Search for Six of Six Million) tells how he and his photo-grapher brother Matt travelled, interviewed and researched for five years. This makes The Lost as much a reflection on the fragility of historical memory as on the Holocaust.
So, often, old people in Boleshaw, Israel, Sydney, Stockholm and Copenhagen only half-remember things. Or what they remember turns out to be wrong. Or they confuse rumour with witness. Or they have reason to suppress information, like the old lady who clams up because, as Mendelsohn later discovers, her brother was in the “Jewish police” who thought they could save themselves by collaborating.
The story includes some heroism and some moral solace. The two Poles who hid Mendelsohn’s great-uncle and one of his daughters. The Ukrainian priest who provided baptismal certificates to give Jews cover identities. The Catholic boy who chose to be hanged rather than give up his pregnant Jewish girlfriend.
And of course, the story also includes the unspeakable. The crowds who watched impassively or jeered or even cheered when the round-ups and mass shootings were taking place.
It’s an extraordinary serenity that Mendel-sohn finally reaches. He befriends elderly Ukrainians. He understands what makes Cain tick and respects Cain’s viewpoint. Having lived a privileged life in the US, Mendelsohn knows he has no right to criticise other people’s lack of courage when the reward for helping or sheltering Jews was a public hanging.
Read with the most objective and rational spirit, there are still parts of this book that will choke you up. If they don’t, I assume you are a hardened cynic. Or maybe you have read too many books.
THE LOST, by Daniel Mendelsohn (Fourth Estate, $44.99).
