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A promise kept

By Amia Lieblich

"Hashvu'a" ("The Oath") by Ram Oren (Hebrew), Keshet, 310 pages, NIS 94

The cover of Ram Oren's new book identifies it as the fourth in his series of historical best-sellers. The previous three were "Latrun," "Hamatara: Tel Aviv" (Target: Tel Aviv) and "Yamim Adumim" (Red Days). This, I believe, is the first time that Oren has written about the Holocaust years and the lives of European Jews, and he did well to turn his talents in this direction as well.

The book tells the true story of Michael "Mike" Stolowitzky, who lives in New York today and is credited on the title page as an "advisor" to the author. The precise nature of the advisor's role is not explained, but I imagine that he sat with Oren for many hours, told him his story, provided the photographs that illustrate it, and led him to the other central figures in the plot. This way, Oren could call the book "A True Story" and note on the back cover that "This is a story that no one could have told better than reality itself." However, it is clear that he enhanced the biographical materials with descriptions and historical detail from his own background research, and that he freely added imaginary dialogue between the characters.

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Alongside the boy Michael, who was born in 1936 to a family of Jewish millionaires in their Warsaw palace, appears the character of his Catholic governess, Gertruda Bablinska, who cared for him from the time he was a small child, kept him in hiding during the war, and saved his life. It was Gertruda who brought Michael to Palestine aboard the refugee ship Exodus 1947.

Other characters in the plot include SS officer Karl Rink, who was once married to a Jewish woman; his daughter Helga-Elisheva, who was smuggled to Israel, where she was a member of Kibbutz Kfar Giladi until her recent death; and the Jewish physician Dr. Berman, who died in the Holocaust. The title refers to the promise that Gertruda made to Lidia, Michael's mother, when the latter lay on her deathbed in Vilna, the city to which the family fled after being separated from Michael's father in the chaos of the war. The mother made the governess swear that she would protect her only son, teach him to hide his Judaism and bring him to Palestine when the war was over.

When the intelligent orphan boy asks Gertruda whether he should call her "mother" from now on, she prefers that he remember Lidia, and he himself chooses to call her by the name "Mamusha." From this point on, however, they regard each other as mother and son. Gertruda remembers her oath to Lidia all through the long and arduous road she travels, including the moment when the commanders of the immigrant ship want to remove her from the list of passengers because she is a gentile, feeling that her place would better be given to another Jewish refugee. Despite everything, she indeed remained true to her promise, lived in Israel and died in Nahariya in 1995. Oren weaves the plot masterfully, and it unfolds toward the catastrophe along several paths in the heroes' lives, until they meet at important junctures in those lives. One can agree with the impression of several readers, who wrote in online responses that the book was impossible to put down even for a moment.

A Uris for Tibet?

If a culture or nation is obligated to pass on its history, for its own people and for foreigners, then any means of teaching that history and shaping its collective memory are legitimate ones. It turns out that the road to the hearts of the masses runs through readable fiction, movies and television series.

When the Dalai Lama visited Israel for the first time some 15 years ago, he said that he wished there were a Leon Uris to write the history of the Tibetan people and their calamity in the 20th century in the same way that Uris had written "Exodus," so that the world would know what happened to his people in their own remote corner of the world. Oren's book is selling by the thousands, in high-end bookstores and in supermarket bins, at train stations and in airports. If after reading the book a few more readers will know what happened on Kristallnacht, in Germany in 1938, and remember for a moment the refugees who were shipped back to Europe aboard the "Exodus," that is enough; just as we should be grateful that Barbra Streisand once produced a TV movie about Gertruda and Michael's story, called "Mamusha" (one of two segments of a 1997 film called "Rescuers: Stories of Courage, Two Women"). All of these are ways of constructing a national identity, preserving memory and honoring the heroes of history.

Oren chooses to write fascinating plots rather than explore the souls of his characters. He removes any dimension of depth that might have added inner voices to the story being woven on the surface. It is almost impossible to tell what his characters' personalities are like, what they think or feel, beyond what can be deduced from their actions and words to each other. Thus, it is clear that Gertruda's deep devotion to Michael and willingness to risk her life for him are not the result of her oath to his mother, but of her profound love for the boy; but Oren leaves the emotional side of the plot to the reader's imagination. His book is almost entirely devoid of multifaceted characters, with the exception of Karl Rink, "the Good Nazi," whose actions are not always consistent with the kindness of his heart.

As in American cowboy movies, there are good guys and bad guys, black and white. The readers do not learn anything about the internal consequences of Michael and Gertruda's ordeals or about how the horrific crisis they endured in their private and public lives affected the development of their personalities. Nor is any answer given to the question of how they found the personal strength that led to their miraculous survival, or whether this survival was a matter of mere chance and luck.

It was only when I looked at the few photographs in the book - for example, the wonderful joint portrait of Gertruda and Michael taken at the displaced persons camp in 1947 - that I could imagine the tremendous richness and depth of the characters, which was not explicitly provided in the text itself. I am thinking, in this context, of great books published in Hebrew - W.G. Sebald's "Austerlitz," Anne Michaels' "Fugitive Pieces" or the many novels of Aharon Appelfeld.

In their fiction, these authors have contributed no less than Oren to preserving the historical awareness of the 20th century among readers. But in these books, the plot is secondary to deep character development, so that the pain, empathy and wonder they arouse is very great. While these authors depict the past as a stain that cannot be erased from their heroes' identities, Oren stresses the story of physical survival; while Sebald, Michaels and Appelfeld portray the survivor as a person permanently shadowed by the identity of the dead and by the life he or she might have otherwise led, Oren points to the concrete moment, now poignantly relevant, when strenuous efforts were made to restore the murdered families' assets left behind in Poland and in Swiss banks. This difference captures the gap between masterpieces intended for a small audience of refined taste, and popular novels, important as they might be.

Ultimately, the area devoted to the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem is full of human stories that a talented author could bring to public awareness. And indeed, as the years go by, it would be a shame if these stories were to disappear from the world and from our cultural awareness.

Professor Amia Lieblich's most recent book, "Yaldey kfar etzion" (The Children of Kfar Etzion), was published by Keter and Haifa University.

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