Helga’s Diary by Helga Weiss, W.W. Norton & Co. (c) 2013, ISBN 978-0-393-07797-1; 248 pages including glossary, post-diary interview and color plates of her drawings; $24.95.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — This is a hybrid book, part diary, part reconstruction, part editor’s explanations. When the author was about 12 years old she was transported with her family from Prague to Terezin, the model ghetto in Czechoslovakia that the Nazis utilized to fool the Red Cross into believing that imprisoned Jews were being decently treated. We know, now, that the model camp was a facade, but back then neither the Weiss family or other residents understood their comparatively privileged status. They assumed transports took people to other ghettos, elsewhere, certainly not to gas chambers and death. Some people readily volunteered to be transported to the east.
After living a normal life in Prague, Terezin took some getting used to. It may have seemed a vacation spa to someone who had lived through the death camps, but to anyone who had a normal pre-war life, it was a dirty prison–one in which people were deprived of their liberty, modesty, personal space, open religious observance and more often than not sufficient food.
The diary starts off in the words of a young girl. Now and again author Weiss added some lines to it, up to the point that she was deported to Auschwitz. An uncle, who worked in Terezin’s records department, hid Helga’s diary away for retrieval after the war.
In itself, the girlish diary would not have been a full record of young Helga’s experiences. However, when Helga still was in her teens, shortly after the war, she began the process of filling in the diary, writing about episodes that for one reason or another had been omitted. Not that much older than she was when she started the diary, her writing style was fairly consistent.
Had she used the diary as source material, and written a retrospective narrative about her experiences during the Holocaust, Helga’s diary might not have seemed very different than the stories of other victims. In that her diary appeared as if she were writing it as it happened — in what might be called an immediate past tense: “Today, such and such occurred…” — it had the appeal of something novel.
Even though Helga began filling in the diary within a year or so of liberation, there still were historical problems with this approach. Her memory wasn’t perfect. Some dates were wrong, some sequences telescoped, some facts mis-remembered. With the benefit of hindsight, she was able to dwell on other facts as being important, that perhaps she might not have understood at the time — thereby giving the impression of extraordinary prescience. Translator Neil Bemel and no doubt various assistants did their best to sort out what had been original narrative, what was remembered narrative, and where errors had occurred. Footnotes throughout the book added yet another layer of narrative.
One may argue about this approach to history. Perhaps it would have been better if the entire narrative were written in the past tense, utilizing occasional quotes from the diary. Perhaps it might have read something like, “The Germans distributed clothing to us and put up signs to indicate new functions for buildings. One was supposedly a school, although it never had a student. To fool the Red Cross, another sign indicated the students were now on vacation. This I noted in my diary at the time, writing “….”
By telling the story in the present tense, the author and her translator (from the Czech language) presented the same facts, but with a greater sense of immediacy. Is this still history writing, or does this cross over into dramatization?
For this reviewer, the value in the book — however one might answer the previous question — came from the realization that bravado can be a real survival tool.
A few examples will illustrate. While waiting at the Trade Fair in Prague to be transported to Terezin, Helga goes to the lady’s room with her mother to wash up. Rather than a bathroom with running water she finds “a cauldron with hot water.” Well, ‘it’s not exactly ideal, but we’re completely content, even ecstatic. What about the poor men? They have to wash in the courtyard. Brr, stripping half naked under the open sky and washing in icy water from the troughs, where your hands freeze to the taps.”
Later, they are sitting and sitting on the train, not moving. “Perhaps so we can feast our eyes on Prague, what a lovely thought.”
Then at Terezin, she and a boy are sent to collect turnips to distribute in the children’s barracks. “Yesterday they were putting them in the former mortuary for storage, but so what? Who would think about such things; hunger is unpleasant and turnip fills the stomach.”
And so it goes. Whatever the travail, the indignity, the hardship, Helga tries to dismiss it, to say that it doesn’t matter anyway.
Perhaps, this mantra of ‘who cares? it doesn’t matter anyway!” was a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the scheme of things, such things didn’t matter. Survival, loyalty to family, maintaining one’s humanity — those were the things that mattered.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com