Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die: A Novel Read online

  Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die

  Daniel Stern

  Contents

  Foreword by Elie Wiezel

  Book One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Book Two

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Book Three

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Book Four

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Book Five

  1

  2

  Book Six

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  On this day it is sealed:

  How many shall pass away

  and how many shall be born;

  Who shall live and who shall die;

  Who in the fullness of his days

  and who before his time …

  PRAYER ON THE DAY OF ATONEMENT

  in memory of my mother

  DORA STERN

  1903–1960

  … a Kaddish to be said by the stones, by the bare trees, the skies—

  and, somewhere, by the sun …

  Foreword

  IN THE EARLY SIXTIES in New York, a young Jewish writer telephoned, asking for an appointment—just to talk, to get acquainted. Specifically, he wanted my advice about a manuscript. I must admit, this appeal left me perplexed. And flattered. It was the first time such a thing had happened. As a foreign correspondent for an Israeli daily at the United Nations, my world was diplomacy, journalism; the huge and enviable literary establishment was foreign to me. I knew virtually no one in it, and the others didn’t even know they didn’t know me.

  The next day I received a visit from Daniel Stern and read the manuscript of Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die.

  We became friends. And our friendship, through the years, has deepened.

  A talented novelist, a learned and inspired teacher, a passionate lover of music as well as of literature, a brilliant raconteur overflowing with imagination and humor: to listen to Daniel is to discover a companion, an ally.

  He is interested in everything, his curiosity remains insatiable. He has tried most things in his life, and remembers them all. Manhattan and Los Angeles, Venice and Paris, Jerusalem and the Bronx: fascinated, the reader follows him, asking question after question. Haunted by the last half-century’s great dramas and hence by those of the present, Stern’s fictional universe is so familiar to us that it frequently echoes our own anxieties, our own nostalgias.

  As for the novel which has just been republished, I loved it when it first appeared, I love it still. I believe it stands among the best of the genre. Yet it raises a problem. More exactly: it is not the novel, but the subject or the genre itself which becomes a pitfall. Explicitly: is this a work of fiction about what for lack of a better name we so inadequately call the tragedy of the Holocaust? And if it is, doesn’t such a book contradict everything some of us believe about the death-camp experience and its possibilities of transmission other than by memory?

  These are not new questions. They trouble all of us who, without denying the novel’s intrinsic worth, seek to protect our loyalty to memory. If it is difficult to describe a night, a selection at Auschwitz, to imagine such things is impossible. A novel about Birkenau is either a novel or it is about Birkenau, but not both at once. Indeed I must repeat here what I have been saying for years: the more a novel on this subject is a “good novel,” the less it is the truth. By definition, Auschwitz denies art and places itself beyond language. To put it simply: it was less difficult for a prisoner there to imagine himself free than for a free man anywhere to imagine himself there. Hence the challenge no novelist can avoid if he takes the Holocaust as his theme: his endeavor is doomed to failure from the start.

  And yet there is Daniel Stern.

  His novel has been misunderstood, misinterpreted. It does not take place there, but here. Its problematics are not those of Belsen, but of the theater. In other words, the author is not telling an Auschwitz story; he knows that such a story remains beyond words. Just as Andre Schwartz-Bart’s powerful novel The Last of the Just deals in the main with the life leading up to the Holocaust, Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die tells a story which unfolds afterwards.

  Having survived, how do you live, how do you love, how do you make a home and a career, reinvent reasons to believe in art, in the necessity and the very possibility of recreating a vanished world in what seems to you no more than a stage-set? Here, too, people decide “who will live, who will die,” except that in these corridors and offices, it is a different life and different deaths that are involved.

  What is the concern of this tale? An impossible romantic love? Ambitions too commonplace to last? Power, perhaps? Or how the past weighs on consciousness?

  In such a novel, a great deal of history and the dramatic arts, politics and theology is discussed; there is a constant oscillation between entertainment and remorse; people meet, separate, drink and despair. The minor characters are numerous: wives, friends, employers. The author knows Chekhov to his fingertips: no part is supernumerary, no role is uncalled-for.

  But the two central characters are Judah Kramer and Carl Walkowitz. They are living in a tale all their own, in a time which isolates them from the rest of society. Whether they argue or merely observe, whether they seek to do each other harm or simply to leap back into the abyss that had spewed them forth, they manage to make of their encounter a moving human dialogue in which all the tensions setting the survivors at odds with others, and with themselves, find a dark and decisive literary expression. As soon as they appear on the page, we realize they are there, alone or together, to remind us that the truth is elsewhere, always elsewhere.

  I should say, then, that it is because this novel is not strictly speaking about the Holocaust that it is successful. And just as Jud cannot forget Walkowitz, you will not forget Jud.

  And this is so because Daniel Stern carries within himself the burning memories of others.

  ELIE WIESEL

  translated from the French

  by Richard Howard

  Preface

  REVISING AND REPUBLISHING LITERARY WORK of a previous generation is a journey into complexity. One’s personal past mixes with the general condition. A decade, say, the fifties, encapsulated not only the time when the world was young, after the Second World War, but the personal confusions and ambitions of my own youth. The sixties, when a generation rebelled against all prologues and all pasts, combined a sense of political hopelessness, paradoxically, with an excess of personal hope. Example: in that charged decade the Vietnam War seemed an endless nightmare and an American president was assassinated—while I found a measure of professional success, met and married the woman I was in love with and adopted my son. And, in the course of that decade of despair and hope, I wrote and published three books which I felt claimed a larger reach in theme and treatment than any of my previous books. These novels were Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die, After the War and The Suicide Academy.

  I began to write Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die in 1959 and completed and published it in 1
963. It was a novel with the Holocaust as its background and impulse, and the theater as its mise-en-scène. The term “Holocaust” had not yet been applied to Hitler’s Final Solution: (Holocaust means “burnt offering” but has by now become synonymous with the massacre of six million innocents, including one million Jewish children).

  It is difficult to believe but in 1959, when I began the book, there were not a half dozen works available to anyone interested in the still recent fate of the Jews of Europe. Raul Hilberg and Lucy Davidowicz had yet to publish their major research tasks; Holocaust studies had not yet been born. For the most part, silence reigned: a fact so hard to accommodate in today’s world in which television, motion pictures and museums devoted to commemoration proliferate.

  In need of details, I found what I could. I recall using as research a book by H. Trevor Roper, the British historian, The Black Book of Polish Jewry, a terrifyingly specific record, complete with unbearable photographs and the novel The Last of the Just, a masterpiece by the French writer Andre Schwartz-Bart. And there was, strongest of all, Night by Elie Wiesel. Published in English as late as 1958, Night is a memoir which takes us into Auschwitz through the eyes of a young Hungarian Jewish boy—a book which remains perhaps the most astonishing and authentic act of bearing witness to the Holocaust.

  But such statements were the exception. For the most part, the survivors were silent, wandering or rooted: in Jerusalem, New York, Cleveland, New Delhi, Buenes Aires … This silence was a kind of scandal: one senses that they felt no one cared, that no one wished to hear their stories and, even worse, that there was no way to tell those stories to anyone who had not actually been inside what Wiesel has called “the kingdom of night.” Into this vacuum, like an innocent, I stepped, nervily daring to speak for the silent. Where I got the notion of what is now conventionally called “survivor guilt” I have no idea. There are certain universals that do not require personal experience, only a fortunate openness to the imagination and experience of others.

  So much for the public background of the book at hand. As to the private: who knows what pushes a writer to engage a particular theme? In my case, a mysterious, unreasonable mixture of motives: strangely, the arrest and then the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and the too-young death of my mother and her funeral in a blizzard on Long Island, all melting in my imagination to produce the snowy New York landscape against which Jud Kramer, my protagonist, and Carl Walkowitz, his antagonist, would struggle. In addition, I had met a theatrical director, a young Hungarian Jew who had been in the camps, survived, and married a beautiful young, blonde actress. As a gift, I’d come upon a background, a situation if you will, attractively vulgar—a useful contrast to tragedy.

  As to Walkowitz, nemesis incarnate, he came, in spirit, full-blown from the imagination. His physical presence, however, I owe directly to an encounter with the composer Nicholas Nabokov, a relative of the great novelist Vladimir, at a party. Tall and imposing, Nabokov, with his shock of gray hair, his outstretched leg injured in an automobile accident and one half-closed eye (a stroke, pthosis of the eyelid?), came to me with the greatest impact, a kind of “ruined hero”—a man burned by the history of the twentieth century. All with absolutely no justification except the possible implications of appearance. At such moments I think of Oscar Wilde’s remark that the real mystery of this world lies in the visible, not the invisible. In any case, I took this image and buried it for a number of years, in that place in a writer’s mind where images wait for their moment of opportunity. In 1959 the “ruined hero” became Carl Walkowitz, a wrecked survivor bent on an impossible justice and revenge.

  So much for the difficulties of putting together the materials for a tragicomedy dealing with the survivors of one of the worst nightmares in human history. But what of the difficulties of looking back at one’s earlier work? To analyze a book written some decades ago with the eyes of the present, to listen to the sounds of personal and public history with today’s sensibility is a delicate matter. Should I set myself the probably hopeless task of completely revising the language so as to recreate precisely the kind of novel I would write today? Or should I allow the past its own authority? I chose the latter course, with a few exceptions.

  These days, I am most involved with the comic and emotional pressures of language itself on fictional characters. But I was, at that stage in my development, most ready to explore the structure of plot and its inevitabilities. Graham Greene was my hero, a writer in whose hands character, style and theme wove a seamless spell—to whom the development of the story itself seemed utterly central and easy as breath. And whether or not this is the kind of book I would write today, all I can ask is that it would be the kind of book I would enjoy reading today.

  Of course, the hope of any author is that there will be, in each book, enough enduring stuff amid the clatter and decay of time to continue to be both historical and contemporary. Of this clatter and decay, a word. There are attitudes and linguistic patterns appropriate to the past which are no longer part of our common language. One such obvious example is the use of the word “Negro” for what became first “Black,” then “Afro-American” and even more lately, “African-American.” I have kept the original term because in the fifties the term “black” would have been thought offensive and the later terms had not yet been coined. A more subtle matter, which I have tried to correct, is the presentation of a homosexual character in a somewhat more insinuating manner than I would do today. Either the times have grown up, or I have—or both. In general, though, one should try not to preach to one’s youthful self. One will probably be ignored. A book stands dressed in the language and attitudes of its time. On those terms it must make its claim.

  Every novel takes place in at least three kinds of time: at the time of its composition, at the time its action takes place and at the particular moment when it is being read. Naturally, I hope that readers of this particular moment will find pleasure in encountering this fiction of another time, which is here raising its voice, once again, hoping to speak to our own.

  DANIEL STERN

  SAG HARBOR, L.I.

  June 1994

  … to learn to live and to die,

  and, in order to be a man,

  to refuse to be a God.

  —CAMUS

  ALL NIGHT LONG the October rain fell steadily as it had for days. It splashed on the leaves of the birch trees, dripping into puddles on the unpaved sections of the camp, filling the troughs and cisterns that stood by the side of each barrack.

  At ten minutes to six in the half-gray light of morning, the street in the eastern compound was empty except for two S.S. guards, one dozing against the wooden wall of a barrack, the other kneeling beside a leashed mastiff, stroking its wet, muscled flank and cooing to it in unintelligible murmurs. A few hundred yards away, above a low hill, a chimney gave a breath of black smoke to the sky and in the distance a bird sang some insistent, repetitive call.

  At five minutes to six a loudspeaker began blaring brisk orders; at the same time groups of four and five S.S. officers and noncommissioned officers began appearing in the streets. The two guards came to attention and saluted as the first of the groups passed. Then, from the long, low barracks, people began to emerge, in a variety of sizes, shapes, colorations, and, conditions of being that could be found only here.

  There were men who seemed, at first glance, to be enormously tall, but who were actually so thin they appeared to be elongated, bony apparitions. Others were bloated, grotesque. Everyone was dressed in remnants of uniforms, suits, striped clothing, or underwear, much of it torn to rags. One man shivered in the dawn chill with no clothing of any description to cover his body. They trickled into the rainy morning, some slipping and falling, helped by others to rise, some left lying on the ground until they raised themselves of their own will or were forced up by the booted feet of the S.S. noncoms.

  The last parade was the slowest. One by one, limp, motionless bodies, robed in assorted rags, were
carried into the compound street. These were the night’s dead, who must also be present at the morning roll call.

  The roll call went on for over an hour as the rain lessened and the cold increased. The numbers were shouted with a rhythmic monotony. Then the roll call stopped.

  One of the barracks Kapos chose Judah Kramer, a fourteen-year-old boy, to go with him and search the area. They found Kunferman, a swarthy Romanian Jew, hanging by his belt from a high wooden beam in the latrine. A tiny cigarette butt was still stuck to his bluish lips.

  After the calling of numbers ended, a lengthy report was read, telling of the triumphs of the Third Reich on the various fronts of the war. When roll call was over, a Blockführer named Kris supervised a detail that dragged the dead bodies in the direction of the hill behind the eastern compound. They reached the hill and the prisoners were sent back. The Sonderkommandos took the bodies the rest of the way.

  The rain had thinned to a drizzle. When Kris returned to the compound street he saw the one man who had no clothing at all cooling his feverish face by bathing it in the rain-filled cistern at the side of the barracks. The fourteen-year-old boy, Judah Kramer, was helping the kneeling man, splashing the cool rain water on his temples. The boy looked up and stepped away, out of the path of the oncoming Blockführer. The man continued to bathe his face and neck, in a frenzy of pleasure at the cool moisture on his skin. The sallow skin of his back and buttocks was covered with gooseflesh.

  Blockführer Kris was a big man. He raised a booted foot and brought it down on the man’s neck, forcing his entire head beneath the water. After a minute or two the man’s skinny body stopped thrashing and jumping about. The few people left in front of the barracks said nothing.

  Kris removed his foot and the man’s body tumbled down among the stones and gravel near the young boy, who was still standing stiffly, as if at attention. He was staring at the skin of the man’s knees, bleeding from the stones that had cut into him as he struggled to throw off the massive weight.