| When the cattle car stops at Auschwitz, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski’s mother realises their best chance of survival is in Josef Mengele’s Zoo. As the other kids point out, to the twins shivering on their bunk that night alongside a girl on the brink of death, they get more food there (although “it’s not kosher and it eats your insides”) and keep their hair “until the lice come” and their clothes. Submitting their bodies to the doctor’s measurements and experiments, they hope the bond between them will save their humanity. But when, not long before the camp is liberated, Pearl disappears, Stasha embarks on a perilous journey through Poland’s devastation in search, not only of her sister, but of the man who has done them both such harm. |  |
Even if told from a novel perspective (I, for example, hadn’t come across a fictional version of Mengele’s perverted doctoring), you know this story. You know it’s likely to be a harrowing read. I want to persuade you that it’s worth your attention: for its literary merit; for its psychological insights; for its chilling parallels with our own turbulent times.
Although the author doesn’t flinch from the atrocities, the story is told with great compassion and, I think, an underlying belief in the survival of the human spirit. Narrating alternate chapters, the twins are quirky and engaging guides through this disturbing world. Initially I thought them quite young for twelve (although we can be forgiven at any age for hiding in the folds of a grown-up’s coat when there’s a fair chance you’re about to die), but they’ve aged a few decades before their next birthday comes around. It is to the author’s credit that their shifts from childishness to maturity and back again never seem contrived, not even when it requires moving from the here and now to a potentially wiser future, as when Stasha notices the kindly Dr Miri, forced to assist Mengele (p47):
Although the author doesn’t flinch from the atrocities, the story is told with great compassion and, I think, an underlying belief in the survival of the human spirit. Narrating alternate chapters, the twins are quirky and engaging guides through this disturbing world. Initially I thought them quite young for twelve (although we can be forgiven at any age for hiding in the folds of a grown-up’s coat when there’s a fair chance you’re about to die), but they’ve aged a few decades before their next birthday comes around. It is to the author’s credit that their shifts from childishness to maturity and back again never seem contrived, not even when it requires moving from the here and now to a potentially wiser future, as when Stasha notices the kindly Dr Miri, forced to assist Mengele (p47):
With such a wealth of exquisite writing I’ve had to ration my quotes, but I also admired the description of the transition from one kind of jeopardy to another as the Red Army draws nearer (p178-9):
Like Orphans of the Carnival, the novel asks what it means to be human when one’s experience is beyond what most people can bear to imagine, and what shapes you is the story that can’t be told. As with many types of abuse, Mengele’s victims find their identity is forged with that of their abuser (p145):
As Stasha discovers, if the person with the ultimate power makes you feel special, even if it’s based on a lie, it complicates the process of recovering one’s humanity even when the ordeal comes to an end. In the face of the world’s apparent indifference, first in the ghetto and then in the camp, reminiscent of the baby’s sense of abandonment when left to cry, hope is distorted (p177) and bitterness is rife (p188):
Now, in this age of fake news in which politicians lie without shame, and the US president tries to close that country’s borders to people of a particular religion, doesn’t the above quote make you tremble inside? With no Jewish heritage other than the Old Testament stories of my Catholic childhood, I nevertheless feel some affinity to the Holocaust story, returning to it in my reading (see reviews of In Paradise and Jakob’s Colours) and writing (for example, in my short story “Tattoos and Rubber Gloves” and in my forthcoming second novel, Underneath, the narrator’s girlfriend, Liesel, is named after, and her character is influenced by, a grandmother he came to Britain on the kindertransport). But even starting this novel on the evening before Holocaust Memorial Day, which this year also saw the release of the film of about the court case in which Deborah Lipstadt was proved not guilty of libel when she described David Irving as a Holocaust denier, did not exempt me from a smidgen of denial when I came across a scene in Mischling in which the Auschwitz women’s orchestra played to the camp. My initial reaction to their evident terror was disbelief, until I checked myself and realised I’d romanticised what I’d previously learnt about the orchestra, as if the music would magically exempt the members from the trauma of their captivity and somehow civilise the guards. So thanks to Atlantic books for providing my review copy enabling Affinity Konar to help me bear the sad reality.
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