Every detail counts
By Catrien Spijkerman
It takes Edgar Hilsenrath ten years to write about his experiences in the ghetto. ‘Victims aren’t necessarily better people.’
In 1947, Edgar Hilsenrath, 21 years old, enters a bistro in Lyon. He orders a glass of red wine and asks the waiter for a pen and paper. He bends over and starts to write. He writes and writes and can’t seem to stop anymore. The heavy sinking feeling he has been walking around with for days, slowly disappears. It becomes lighter with every letter. Hilsenrath has found his purpose, he is a writer from now on.
He writes about life in Mohyliv-Podilskyi and even more about death in Mohyliv-Podilskyi. About how not to die in Mohyliv-Podilskyi.
Mohyliv-Podilskyi is a ghetto in Transnistria that was gifted to the fascist Romanian regime by Nazi Germany in 1941. The regime uses it to imprison Romanian Jews, their goal being not to eliminate them through mass murder but to let them perish slowly in ghetto’s. Of the 50,000 people imprisoned there, 40,000 don’t survive.
Stealing food from a child
His early years Hilsenrath spends in Germany, but when Hitler gains power, his parents think it be better to leave. In 1938 they move to the Romanian town of Seret, where his grandparents live. At fifteen, Hilsenrath is deported from there to Mohyliv-Podilskyi, together with his mother and brother.
Dead bodies are on the streets of the ghetto. There is no food, no place to sleep, not even a hole in the ground to be buried in. Even though almost all the houses and buildings are destroyed, they are still packed with people. Typhus is rampant, along with a maddening, all-consuming hunger.
At his writing desk, Hilsenrath invents another name for Mohyliv-Podilskyi. He names the ghetto Propow. The main character of his story is called Ranek. Like basically everyone else in the ghetto, Ranek spends his days merely trying to survive. And that is far from easy. Ranek finds himself stealing food from a child. He even goes so far as to smash the face of his recently deceased brother with a hammer, just to get hold of his gold tooth which he then trades for food.
Next to the toilets
Prokow and all characters are made up. But everything Hilsenrath describes is real. All events are burned into his memory. He describes everything with great precision, because every single detail matters. For more than a decade, Hilsenrath struggles to put his story into words. ‘It was crucial that it didn’t become an ordinary lament’, he would later remark in an interview.
He emigrates to New York where he tries to keep his head above water. ‘In the beginning I was a survivor trying to survive all over again. How to pay the rent this month?’ He finds himself a job as a waiter. ‘After the lunch shift, I would sit down at a table in the corner of the restaurant, right by the toilets. No one wanted to sit there anyway. I wrote about starvation, in a restaurant. It made reliving all of it somewhat tolerable. All I had to do was look up for a second. They couldn’t touch me anymore. I was lost in my characters.’
It takes another six years and some American contacts for Hilsenrath to find a German publisher willing to publish his debut novel Night in 1964. But even before publication, his book is controversial. The publisher himself is enthusiastic, but his wife and a Jewish editor-in-chief want to stop the book. In the end, the book is published, but without any form of advertising and only in an edition of 1,800 copies. Though the book sells out fast, there is no second edition. Critics claim the book would fuel antisemitism. The characters in Night commit horrendous acts, but it is the fact that they are Jews which makes the matter so delicate so soon after the war.
The harsh truth
It is true that the real culprits, the Romanian and German fascists, hardly play a role in Night, Hilsenrath would later say in an interview. ‘The inferno is their creation. The fascists created the conditions for this perverse experiment, but over the course of time, life in the ghetto seemed to function practically without the participation of the perpetrators.’
Victims are not by definition better people according to Hilsenrath. ‘One must always write without compromise. (…) There was no Jewish solidarity in that ghetto. Everyone was busy staying alive. The thin veneer we call civilization wore off very quickly. (…) At the time, it was considered normal, that in a novel about the Holocaust, the victims should evoke pity. I described the harsh truth.’
The American version of the book Night published two years later, sells 500,000 copies. Hilsenrath’s second novel, a satire called The Nazi and the Barber, becomes an international bestseller. Other books follow, as well as numerous awards both in his home country and abroad. Night remains the book closest to his heart though. ‘Writing it was a deliverance, a therapy.’ He calls it a novel of a lifetime. ‘Writing means life to me.’ Hilsenrath passes away at the age of 92 in 2018.
