is that death in Auschwitz – and almost all died, the majority on arrival – becomes, by compare, a sort of moral failure: a lack of imagination, resource and luck. For those who don’t understand Birkenau – and you wouldn’t read this book if you did, and if this is all you read you wouldn’t – it brings un-magic Jews and Nazi psychopaths no closer.
The prose style is a minor crime. “Her eyes dance before him”. “His heart skips a beat”. “His mind [is] a whirlpool”. He works “around the clock”. (Too many transports, you see: it’s exhausting.) “Flowers. He learned from a young age, from his mother, that women love them”.
Or, Lale says, “always dress to impress”. Lale is quite keen on fashion. On meeting the SS for the first time he thinks: “Under different circumstances he might appreciate the tailoring”. Would he? “I’m just a number,” Gisela tells him. “You should know that. You gave it to me.” As I read this junk, I write a parallel musical in my head and I think: if that doesn’t close Act 2, what can? There is a rogue, too: Josef Mengele, who is a sort of pantomime villain like Captain Hook. He stalks around with a soul “colder than his scalpel”, smirks and steals people’s testicles. It never happened….
If you want to read about the Shoah read histories and memoir. Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and Elie Wiesel’s Night are partial, but they don’t pretend to be anything else. Levi himself said: “We who survived the camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless”. But that is Levi, not Morris, who has the gumption to write Mills & Boon in hell. It fulfils the criteria of the Shoah novel for idiots, at least. It makes the reader feel better, know less, and care less, about the people who are fictionalised. That is, they die twice.
Still, there’s laughter in the trying. I would have called it Under a Birkenau Moon. Or Love Macht Frei.
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