Icy cold days
Lovely mixed sky, frequent reveal of blue, but chill wind that will supposedly blow us snow over night. A night for leftovers and the book group chat, which is usually enjoyable.
White's novel Riders in the Chariot just negotiated what is one of the most heart-rending and intense depictions of the transport of Jewish people out of Germany that I have ever encountered. White didn't dwell on one horrific detail after another, or beat one over the head with the camp guards' brutality; more effectively, he initiated the chain of events from people crammed into trucks, then put on trains as the Germans in charge lied to them about sending them to Istanbul and eventually Palestine. Hope would rekindle in some, and persisted even into the "dressing rooms" of the gas chambers. Some remained unconvinced. People wondered aloud about why they had been put on the train, if it were not to a new life: "Until the father in the stiff hat could bear it no longer, and had to shout, 'The train - don't you see? - was all they had. The trucks were bombed. And so many Jews on their hands. There was no alternative.'
But solutions do not always console. Ah, if they could have opened something, and found the truth inside.
Like the two lovers, at least, whose faces were cupboards containing antidotes, but only efficacious on each other."
White's novel Riders in the Chariot just negotiated what is one of the most heart-rending and intense depictions of the transport of Jewish people out of Germany that I have ever encountered. White didn't dwell on one horrific detail after another, or beat one over the head with the camp guards' brutality; more effectively, he initiated the chain of events from people crammed into trucks, then put on trains as the Germans in charge lied to them about sending them to Istanbul and eventually Palestine. Hope would rekindle in some, and persisted even into the "dressing rooms" of the gas chambers. Some remained unconvinced. People wondered aloud about why they had been put on the train, if it were not to a new life: "Until the father in the stiff hat could bear it no longer, and had to shout, 'The train - don't you see? - was all they had. The trucks were bombed. And so many Jews on their hands. There was no alternative.'
But solutions do not always console. Ah, if they could have opened something, and found the truth inside.
Like the two lovers, at least, whose faces were cupboards containing antidotes, but only efficacious on each other."
posted by isabelita at 3:45 PM
3 Comments:
The passage you quoted was enough to make a person choke with rage and pain. I'd not wanted to recognize man's inhumanity to man tonight, but now there's no choice.
Members of my family were probably crammed onto those trains. My grandmother who came to the US in 1920 received letters in the 1930s asking for assistance in getting out of Germany. By then it was too late. They could do nothing. Many knew what was coming.
John, that was one of my dad's classic references,"Man's inhumanity to man." He compared humans to rodents, overbreeding, crowding, then turning on one another when resources grew scarce.
Kind of simplified, but the old man was basically correct. He used to tell me one day I might just say that: "One day, you might not think the old man had feet of clay, that he actually was right about a few things," he'd say, with a kind of rueful smile.
Robin andrea, I am very sad for anyone whose family was persecuted bt this horror.
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