Za Drutami Śmierci is a stark and powerful book, if in most respects a fairly standard Holocaust memoir. (Anyone who spends time with the genre will quickly apprehend the ancillary tragedy that it’s a genre: these mind-shatteringly horrific stories are common enough and familiar enough that they can feel ordinary, even banal, sometimes even clichéd.) Yet—treasure hunters aside—it is unknown and unread, one of thousands of similar books, a tiny unit of a very large body of work that is critical but in a collective, superliterary sense. Even if there are too many Holocaust memoirs to be read in one lifetime there is nonetheless great moral significance in that fact.
That said, in certain ways this is a very notable, strange book, and that’s even before we get to the treasure hunters and the esteem in which they hold it.
First, this is a very early Holocaust memoir—the Hebrew version was published (if totally ignored) in Israel in 1952, the Polish in 1962—and is one of the few accounts we have of the Gross-Rosen/Riese subcamps; much of what we know about these camps comes from this book. The Museum of Gross-Rosen’s main exhibition—a small maze in the gatehouse of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp—is more or less built around excerpts from it.
Second, the story behind the book—how it was written, how it was assembled, literally and editorially, how it was published—is a doozy. Here we must introduce Adam Ostoja, secretary of the Łodź Association of Polish Writers, and editor of Za Drutami Śmierci. His short preface begins: “In 1947, Abraham Kajzer came to me with a rather unusual proposal. He wrote, or sketched, rather, a camp diary and wanted me to develop it into a literary work.” Ostoja continues:
Abraham Kajzer was a simple man, a Łodź worker, a weaver by trade. He brought with him a large manuscript and a pile of gray, thick paper torn from the packaging of cement bags. These scraps were covered on both sides with lopsided and crudely written letters in the Jewish language [i.e., Yiddish].
“You see, sir,” he said. “This is my ‘diary.’ Every day, I hid in the latrine of the camp and feverishly recorded my experiences. I kept these notes in various places until I was notified that I would be transferred to another camp, when I gathered them together and nailed them to the bottom of a latrine board.”
“No one noticed?” I asked.
“No. I wouldn’t be alive.”
“How did you get them back?”
“After the war, I borrowed a bicycle from the woman who saved my life. I traveled to most of the camps where I’d stayed, and I retrieved these pages.”
It was amazing. I had before me a man who passed through several extermination camps, referred to by the Germans as “labor camps.” He was possibly the only survivor of a transport of eighteen thousand men and, still, he managed to keep a “diary.”
In the camps, he had no more than a striped uniform, a thread from which he tied a small mechanical pencil, with which he scribbled his notes. This was his greatest treasure.
Even within a genre whose origin stories are astonishing nearly by definition, this is an astonishing origin story. Abraham risks his life by jotting journal entries on stolen scraps of cement packaging. Whenever he’s set to be transferred to another camp, he hides his “diary” beneath the latrine. Against all odds he survives, and in the weeks after liberation, he borrows a bicycle from the woman who’d hidden him and rides from camp to camp, collecting his notes. (What an extraordinary image: Abraham riding a borrowed bicycle into the concentration camp, riding right up to the latrine, or the spot where the latrine used to be, dismounting, digging out his notes, getting back on the bicycle, riding to the next camp.) A couple of years later he schleps the thick gray proto-manuscript to Ostoja the editor, and together they labor to turn it into a “literary work.”
“It contains nothing but the truth,” Ostoja writes. “I kept everything, without revision, that Kajzer wrote, said, and what could be read of his remarkable ‘diary.’ These are his authentic words and thoughts, his views and feelings, and, in many cases, even his style. This book was written by Kajzer. I just organized it and, as far as I could, ‘polished’ it.”
The result is not quite a diary and not quite a memoir but something like a diary wrapped inside a memoir. The first half or so of the book, written in the years after the war from Abraham’s (excellent) memory, consists of long undated chapters. Then there is this passage—
For several days now, I’ve had a pencil I found in the Baustelle [worksite]. I would very much like to keep a diary, but there is nothing to write on and nowhere to write. If I was noticed in the block, everyone would think I was a madman, but I feel an unspoken need just to take notes. Perhaps the paper from which the cement bags are made would work for this purpose? I could hide the notes in the latrine. But where to write? Maybe also the latrine? I feel the need to share, even if it’s just for myself, my own thoughts and insights, so that, when I am a free man, I can re-create it all again, and, if I die, I might leave this faint mark behind.
—and immediately, in a kind of Nabokovian realization of a described text,
