Another Holocaust book? Yes, and that’s good because humanity will never have finished thinking about this unfathomable crime and the abyssal stupidity of anti-Semitism. When this book, moreover, is addressed to adolescent readers, often totally ignorant of this darkest period of world history, its importance is all the greater.
A 14-year-old Dutch girl, Celien Polak, born Spier, was deported with her parents and two brothers to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in April 1943. She was released two years later. , when the camp was liberated by the Russians.
She would remain silent about her experience for sixty years, until her daughter, Montreal writer Monique Polak, undertook to write a book about her story in 2007. Published in English in 2008, See all you have left (Septentrion, 2022, 260 pages) finally appears in French in a translation by Rachel Martinez. “A work of fiction inspired by real events”, in the words of the writer, this novel-truth tells the horror with astonishing sweetness, from the point of view of a teenager.
Less well known than Poland’s infamous Auschwitz camp, Theresienstadt was a detention camp for Jewish artists and intellectuals — psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, writer Ivan Klíma and many renowned musicians were deported there — including Hitler’s Germany used it as a propaganda tool to make people believe that it treated Jews well.
In 1943, during an inspection visit by the Danish Red Cross, the leaders of the camp devised a staging – false facades, concerts, good meals – intended to give the place the appearance of a model ghetto. Visitors see nothing but fire. Excited, the Nazis add to it the following year by forcing the prisoners to produce a propaganda film presenting the camp in a beautiful light.
In fact, 144,000 people will be detained in the city, designed to accommodate 7,000, 33,000 of them will die on the spot, mainly of malnutrition, 88,000 will be deported to death camps and 23,000 will survive. The Dutch illustrator Jo Spier, grandfather of Monique Polak, will come out alive, with his family, putting his artistic talents, under duress, at the service of Nazi propaganda.
In his novel, Polak puts this hell into a narrative with simplicity and subtlety. Her young heroine, Anneke, inspired by her mother, wonders what she is doing there since, she explains, “Judaism means nothing to [elle] “. Coming from a non-practicing family, she rejoices, in her misfortune, not to be a believer since, she says, a God who allows such abominations does not deserve to be believed in him.
Later, however, when her lover is deported, she begins to pray, without speaking to her father, who considers religion a superstition. “I invented my method, she confides, because I never went to the synagogue and I don’t know how to do it. »
When the name of her younger brother, Theo, finds itself on the list of deportees pending, Anneke, who now knows the fate reserved for those who leave, turns again to God. Seeing her like this, her grandfather and her mother kneel beside her, hands joined, in one of the most heartbreaking scenes of the novel. “If God exists — and I’ve never wanted him so desperately as now,” Anneke said — and if he can understand what’s going on in people’s hearts, then he must hear our prayers. »
Life in the camp is inhuman. Tortured by hunger, devoured by lice and bed bugs, badly cared for when sick – Anneke suffers from tonsillitis – the prisoners, including children, are sentenced to forced labor, can be hanged or killed a bullet in the head for the slightest deviation from the regulations and live in terror in fear of deportation from which there is no return. Surviving in these conditions is a miracle.
Forced into the Nazi propaganda enterprise, Anneke’s father is frowned upon by other prisoners, who consider him an accomplice. The young girl herself deplores the behavior of her father who, she thinks, “helps the Nazis to carry out their diabolical plan”, he who was however previously imprisoned for anti-Hitler drawings.
At the Liberation, when a Dutch officer suspected the artist of having acted badly to save his family, Anneke, now aware that he had no choice, came to the defense of her father. Despite everything, thanks to him, “the world is still there”.
And thanks to Monique Polak’s novel, the fragile voice of the survivors — Celien Polak died in Montreal in 2017 — remains alive.