Customer Reviews

The Journey: A Novel

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This long lost novel is totally unique in the annals of Holocaust literature. It, in veiled and novelistically transformed manner, tells the author's own tale of descent into the madness of WW II, various concentration and labor camps, and ultimate survival and re-emergence into the world of the living. His poetic style enables one to experience the disorientation and near-madness resulting from total dehumanization by a group of others. I cannot recommend it more highly.

Written in 1950, published in Germany in 1962 (overcoming orchestrated opposition from the German publishing establishment), but appearing in English only in 2008, THE JOURNEY occupies an important and unique place in Holocaust literature. According to the translator, Peter Filkins, it is one of only four books of fiction written in German by Jewish survivors of the camps. And among the hundreds of Holocaust novels published since, it must be the only one with its particular point of view, located neither in time nor place (the word "Auschwitz," for instance, never appears), but in a kind of bird's eye view from above, as a continuous journey of the soul unmarked by obvious way-stages, even that of ultimate extinction. In his brilliant introduction, which is essential reading before attempting the book, Filkins cites Hölderlin speaking of a "synoptic view across the barrier of death," a slow-motion Totentanz that defies time.

At one point, Adler evokes the image of a line of prisoners, hands on the shoulders of the one in front, shuffling along day and night, a "mute ghost train in no need of tracks to run on." Were this to be taken to its conclusion, he says, "time would be erased. The journey would have only a direction, but no destination. It would continue and yet lead nowhere. Senseless would be the question about where you were born, for the day of your death could come long before the day of your conception." Where other Holocaust writers portray Hell, Adler concentrates on Limbo. Such story as there is in the book is a thin fictionalization of his own family history, spending much of the war in Theresienstadt,* the so-called "safe community" for Jews, in which they were kept in suspended animation for several years before the inevitable transportation to Auschwitz. Adler's father, an elderly physician, died of starvation, as does his alter ego in the book, Dr. Leopold Lustig. His mother, sister, and aunt went to the gas chamber; their fictional equivalents merely disappear in a cloud of metaphor. Paul Lustig (Adler himself) is the sole survivor.

The writing ranges from the abstrusely philosophical to the a Kafkaesque surrealism or Orwellian doublespeak: "The forbidden is at last behind you for good, and now eternal freedom is waving you on. [...] We wish we had the chance to share your lot, but unfortunately that has been denied us. With us lies the responsibility to worry about your well-being, and then to worry about your brothers who are also awaiting the journey." The voice here is presumably that of the despatching railroad officials in Prague, but Adler jumps around so freely that you soon no longer know whether this is the language of the oppressors, or the oppressed buying into it. This is not a normal novel by any standards, an intensely difficult book to read** (hence only 4 stars), but its difficulty is necessary to the subject.

The camp gates open almost unnoticed, and there are still 100 pages to go. Paul drags himself along the road to another Limbo: this time, one of rubble, where Aryans and Jews alike are victims. Adler calls it Unkenburg -- literally Toad City, but with overtones of deception or unknowing. It is a place where nobody recognizes anybody or anything, nobody knows the future, nobody fully acknowledges the past. A housewife, enclosed in her still-intact apartment, asks him: "Was it really so horrible? There have been so many lies. Indeed, no offense, but at the very least it doesn't appear that respectable people were taken away." Captain Dudley, the American officer in charge of refugees, is too busy trading cigarettes for old medals to give Paul the time of day. But Paul does meet at least one Good Samaritan, a Herr Brantel, who asks him "to just remember that in the country whose people had robbed him of everything precious and dear there were still decent people." And Paul/Adler does remember, as a ray of light even in this nightmare record of the death of the soul.

* Here called deceptively "Ruhenthal" or "Vale of Rest."
**Try deciphering a few sentences like this: "For indeed, we are our own creation; whether we are denied or accepted at our final end, when one must answer for oneself, much more depends, namely the flourishing of a world that, out of its deepest despair and highest aspirations, is called upon to form its own, in a certain sense, eternal countenance amid the destruction of our only meaningful yet impalpable achievement, one accomplished in and for itself without the participation and help of the world at large."

Art is not dead after Auschwitz; Adler proves it in an intellectually compelling way. The style of narration is as challenging as the subject-matter. Journey is a work for those who can read.