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Job-Kafka-Kulka: The Road to Auschwitz
Sunday Times, 03 February 2013
In the cattle truck from the Theresienstadt ghetto to Auschwitz, Otto Dov Kulka and his mother managed to push their way to a window. It was covered with barbed wire. His mother scribbled messages in a notebook and scattered the pages onto the passing fields of Bohemia. On each note was scribbled the address of Kulka’s aunt and these words: “We are travelling to the east. We do not know to where. Please, anyone who finds this note, send it to the address above.” After the war, Kulka learnt that his aunt had received the messages and, probably wisely, destroyed them. His mother did not survive, dying of typhoid fever in a German village in 1945, after escaping from Stutthof camp.
Kulka, a talkative, smiling man, falls silent; his face deadens. “I thought I would never be able to tell this story, and then I decided to do it. That was the most painful memory. I kept it to myself and never talked about it.”
The awful poetry of those desperate notes flung to the Bohemian winds is just one of the many beautiful, startling moments in Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination. This is a great book: read it. And be grateful — its publication is, in every possible sense, a miracle.
“I thought I would never be able to tell this story, and then I decided to do it. That was the most painful memory. I kept it to myself and never talked about it.”
The first miracle is that it is in print at all. “It took me 20 years to decide to publish it. I have avoided opening myself to this work that I call my private mythologies. I came to this, not from Auschwitz, but from history.” Kulka’s English is idiosyncratic, but it is so much part of the man, I am not cleaning it up. “I started studying philosophy and ancient history, and only gradually later I brought myself to modern history, and then my research into Nazi Germany and the fate of the Jews. But I regarded it as illegitimate to include my private mythologies, my biography, my personal past.”
Kulka, who moved to an Israeli kibbutz after the war and now lives in Jerusalem, has kept diaries since the 1960s; they run to 3,000 pages. In the 1990s, encouraged by a friend and unknown to his wife and daughter, he started recording his memories. In 1997, he contracted cancer and thought he did not have long to live. He opened up for the first time, revealing the recordings, at a lecture delivered at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Surgery and chemotherapy cleared the cancer; and, finally, the historian Ian Kershaw suggested he send this book to Penguin — Kulka calls it “Penguins” — who bought it the day it received it. He announces with pride and amazement: “It is translated into 15 languages.
“I never thought,” he adds, “it would speak to any other person than me.”
I first see Kulka as he appears in the lobby of the Royal Horseguards hotel to be greeted by the publicist from Penguin. She is young and pretty; he is tiny, old and somewhat stooped. It is like seeing the 21st century, still youthful and optimistic, meet the 20th, bent beneath its burden of suffering. He is wearing a grey suit and shirt and comfortable black shoes. Around his bald head is a thickish rim of dyed-brown hair. He exudes a sharp intensity. The eyes dance and glitter. He is 80 this year, but somehow the intellectual energy makes him seem much younger. He looks exactly like what he is: a cosmopolitan Jewish intellectual.
Seated at a corner table, I discover he talks very quietly. I have to get the stupid lobby music turned off and am forced to sit closer and closer. By the end, we are almost touching, and I am in bad emotional shape. “I will never forget this,” he says as we clasp hands. Neither will I.
Kulka was born in 1933 in what was then Czechoslovakia, just as Hitler was coming to power. When he was six years old, he was bullied by Czech and German boys. “I experienced a change in them. They persecuted me violently, and I found refuge in the garden and library of our house.” He didn’t know why he was being bullied and had to ask his parents. It was because he was a Jew, and the Nazis were in control. The family was moved to the ghetto, which, perversely, was good news for Otto — “Theresienstadt was a rescue for me.” He was no longer bullied as a Jew.
He was happy in the ghetto, and then, at times, he was happy in Auschwitz. “Well, in the children’s block I was. I had my first lessons in history and we played these sarcastic cabarets.”
In the book, he writes: “I did not feel the acute, murderous, destructive discord and torment felt by every adult inmate… because this was the first world and the first order I had ever known.”
This points to a second miracle. He was given, by Auschwitz standards, a pretty nice place to live. When he arrived with his mother, they, along with 5,000 others, were put into the Familienlager — family camp — where they were allowed to live a surprisingly ordinary life: their heads were not shaved and they wore normal clothes. It was a Goebbels scam to fool the Red Cross. Family-camp inmates wrote postcards home, and, if inspected, the place could look pretty harmless. But six months later, after they had written a last set of postdated postcards, all 5,000 were “liquidated”, and another 5,000 were brought in. Purely by chance, Otto survived two liquidations and then the Death March of the prisoners leaving the camp in 1945 as the Russians advanced.
“I did not feel the acute, murderous, destructive discord and torment felt by every adult inmate… because this was the first world and the first order I had ever known.”
And so, only yards from the gas chambers and the crematoria, this 11-year-old boy found a strange kind of place in the world, a certain peace, even though he knew what he calls the Great Death would arrive every six months.
“I knew that we would die. Sometimes I had a fantasy of being free, but it was quite clear this didn’t happen.”
It is precisely this strange and shocking paradox, this child’s world constructed in such proximity to death, that makes the book so startling and so beautiful. Every incident is, in effect, seen twice: through the eyes of the historian and the eyes of a boy. The boy, for example, plays harmonica in a camp rendition of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, even as the crowds are herded to their deaths; the historian wonders what this apparently absurd performance meant. “Perhaps it was sarcastic, that was one possible explanation. Or the other possibility was that it was a declaration of deep humanistic values. At the time, I did not understand.”
Then there was his “little death”. Daily, he would deliver soup to his uncle through the electrified wire fence surrounding the family camp. If the power was on, children died when they touched the wire. One day, unknown to Otto, there was an uprising and the SS turned on the electricity. He passed the soup and his hand made contact with the wire. His seared skin glued him to the fence. He knew what had happened and assumed he must be dead.
“What was amazing was that I found the answer to a question that had tormented me since my childhood — what happens after death? It was a curiosity. I saw the sky and the cloud and I realised that after death nothing changes. It answered my childhood question.” His survival was, of course, another miracle on the way to this book.
In the camp, he also discovers a certain justice. It is mad, evil justice, but it is unarguable. They are locked away in this place to be punished, to die. It is the way of things. There is some kind of logic, even if, to the persecuted, it is incomprehensible. This points to the true nature of this book. It is not history, it is something else.
“I am also aware,” Kulka writes in the introduction, “that these texts, though anchored in concrete historical events, transcend the sphere of history.”
His words enter the wider sphere of literature, specifically that of his homeland. This book would not even be possible without the presence of the anguished, staring-eyed ghost of Kulka’s greatest compatriot, Franz Kafka.
“I avoided reading books about the Holocaust because, when I tried, I could not find within them the world that was my private memory and private understanding. I felt alienation. I avoided those books so as not to spoil this private world. I started to wonder what was wrong with me — and then I came to this wonderful story of Kafka.”
In Kafka’s novel The Trial, the hero, Josef K, is sitting outside the Gate of the Law. The gate is open to everyone, yet nobody enters. Josef asks the gatekeeper why this is so. “This gate is only open for you,” says the gatekeeper. “It exists only for you, and now I am going to close it.”
His words enter the wider sphere of literature, specifically that of his homeland. This book would not even be possible without the presence of the anguished, staring-eyed ghost of Kulka’s greatest compatriot, Franz Kafka.
“That was my way out. I understood that the gate is only open to me and will be closed with my death. That was my rescue from this dilemma, this puzzle.”
There is one other literary predecessor: the Book of Job. Because of his deal with Satan, God cannot intervene to stop the sufferings inflicted upon his most righteous servant, Job. Job survives the carnage left by Satan, and thus Otto is a child of Job. In this, he is like all the survivors of Auschwitz, a place where God was also barred from intervening. “And I,” he writes, “am I part of the remnants of the atoms of the eternal Job, one whose life was not taken?” But what was the deal this time? Where was God? Another story is of Kulka’s father, Erich — another survivor of the Gestapo and the SS, another distinguished historian — asking that question of a rabbi. “That question is one that it is forbidden to ask.”
This recurs to Kulka in a dream when one of the Sonderkommando — the work units of Jews who co-operated in the management of the camps — is asked where God is. He gives the same answer as the rabbi, adding that that question is forbidden “unto eternity”.
In 1978, Kulka returned to Auschwitz, taking pictures with his old Leica. Something went wrong with the film, so he lost 36 shots, but a few from the second film were fine. As he left, he handed the camera to his taxi driver to take a picture of him before the main gate. The driver could not operate the camera, and his shot cuts Kulka in half at the edge of the frame. He and I burst out laughing at the sheer meaningfulness of this: a man split in two, one half the mythologies of childhood, the other the “science” of history.
I have two last questions. “Do you feel better for publishing the book?”
He pauses for a long time. “Yes.”
“Did you ever cry?”
“Once in 1946, when we were waiting for the return of my mother, and I learnt about her death. I cried, but I turned to the window so nobody saw me.”
We are by now about a foot apart, and our hands are clasped. His eyes are dry, but I am thinking of those scraps of paper fluttering from the train, and mine aren’t.
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