Customer Reviews

Pilgrim Among the Shadows/a Memoir (A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book)

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This is a unique Holocaust memoir -- a highly literary, poetic, deeply emotional look back at this Slovene medic's experiences in Natweiler and later Dachau, with stops at the tunnels where the V-1 and V-2s were built, and numerous other horrifying anecdotes along the way.

The language of this novel is very personal, and as a medic it is true Mr. Pahor was treated mildly better than some of the patients, and yet, because his view was often as an observer, he suffered greatly by what he saw and did, and by the horrific deaths of those he sought to help and comfort.

An unforgettable memoir that is hard to read, and yet hard to stop reading.

Natzweiler/ KLNa to the Nazis, one of the least discussed of the concentration camps, with its population of almost entirely non-Jewish inmates, and Jewish resistors not identified as Jewish, makes an important case study of revolt. For 25 years I have studied this camp and created a website as a guide to the resources that will open up a rich avenue of scholarship. In particular, the memoirs of Natzweiler-Struthof provide primary material for a serious exploration of the history of repression and resistance in the second World War.
All the writers known to have written about Natzweiler belonged to a category which deserves to be studied far more extensively than it has been in the U.S.: they were resistors condemned under the NN -- "Nacht und Nebel" decree. From 1942 on, the KLNa was mostly dedicated to the incarceration and death of resistors. By 1943, Himmler decided to group all those arrested under this decree at Natzweiler.

The phenomenon of opposition to the Nazis under many forms and guises is represented in these memoirs of Jews and non-Jews who actively participated in the destruction of the Third Reich, for the enduring honor of mankind. Boris Pahor, a non-Jew, has written the most "literary" of the existing more than two-dozen memoirs of NAtzweiler/Struthof /KLNA. Pahor, the author of some 15 books, deals with the guilt of the survivor, also a theme in his 1958 book, recently translated from the Slovene into French as Printemps Difficile (Difficult Spring)." He told an interviewer recently:
"I only know how to describe the dying and the dead...After our return, thousands committed suicide....It was difficult to return. With the guilt of knowing that, if they are still living, it is because they ate dead men's bread....I write as if I was in the morgue." (Le Monde)

This self-assessment undervalues the glittering attraction of his writing as he shifts the reader's attention between the living tourists and the dead victims (both the "Shadows" of the title), whom he sees and reaches out to during his days' and night's return to Natzweiler. Boris Pahor, born in Trieste, fought for national Slovene liberation in 1943 and was arrested and sent to Natzweiler as anti-German, anti-fascist. Pahor begins Pilgrim Among the Shadows, his account of his return to Natzweiler in 1966, by sharing his conflicted emotions. He at first resents the motorized procession of tourists "distorting the dreamlike images that have lived in the shadows of my mind ever since the war."
"Their eyes will never see the abyss of desolation that was our punishment for believing in man's dignity and freedom." "At the same time I feel an unbidden and gently persistent satisfaction that this mountain in the Vosges is no longer the site of a distant, self-consuming fury of destruction; that it has become, instead, the destination of endless crowds which, naïve and guileless though they may be, are sincere in their wish to experience just a hint of the inconceivable fate of their lost brothers. Maybe in the ascent here there is something of the fervor of religious pilgrimages ... They come to tread on holy ground, to pay homage to the ashes of fellow creatures who by their mute presence have raised, in our hearts, an immovable landmark of human history."

Pahor is the most introspective, personal and candid of the memorists, and also the only one who questions and dissects all of his motives and efforts to make sense of the memories. This affects not only what he chooses to record but also how it is done. He says that he speaks to us from the privacy of the page more candidly that he would ever address a fellow survivor. "I myself would never speak to a fellow visitor, even one who had been with me in the place of crematoria. I would be afraid of slipping into cliché at every word. It's impossible, anyway, to talk about death, or love, with anyone but yourself. Death and love allow no witnesses."
His description of the midnight inspection for lice, each naked man standing on a stool so that "a man holding a caged light can examine his crotch," is unique in its literary allusions and psychological analysis of a nightly event which is mentioned in some, and left out of other of the memoirs.
`There is no pubic hair- the barber's razor has seen to that- but on the ends of the emerging new hairs there might be a few nits. It's a though each penis is illuminated for some new rite of adoration...But in this pathetic illumination of crotches there is nothing of the reverence that once chiseled fertility symbols over the doors of Pompeii. It is simply a ritual by which those in power confront their fear of lice and typhus. So the light overtakes the sparrow in its nest, dead from starvation before it could fledge, dangling lifelessly in the inspectors hand."
Like several of the memorists, Pahor sees the mass rituals of camp life in terms of visual spectacle. Held in all the Nazi camps, similar spectacular beatings, hangings and other public humiliation, torture and execution sessions are part of the memory of all the survivors of Natzweiler too.

But only Pahor speculates how camera angles might be used: "A movie camera could capture such sequences faithfully- dwelling on the long electric cord, moving down it toward the lightbulb and the shriveled crotch, catching along the way the shaved heads of men jostling for position so they can be first to run off to their chilly crypt for the night. Maybe it's just as well there was no camera; for who knows what people today might think..." ( 11) Pahor shifts back and forth between his sense of feeling "superior" in the world of the living, "satisfied with the special privilege that comes from my former status as an outcast," and his feelings towards the dead whom he sees everywhere, but cannot rouse or touch- the shadows that come out during his solitary, nocturnal visit to the deserted camp. Between the two worlds, he tries to find meaning, much as, at the time he was in camp, he found it in the cycle of the daily routines: "For while our clockwork comings and goings were only the languid shifting of a dead sea, their rythmic motion gave some dim sense of purpose." How did Pahor survive? How did anyone survive? He was an infirmary aide. Pahor was befriended and taught French by Jean Larebeyrette, a doctor who bandaged his wound at first, then took him in.
"The Slovene talent for learning foreign languages also helped me. I can't say whether that ability of ours is a sign of psychological wealth, of an active and multifaceted mind, or whether it simply is an elasticity that we've acquired over the centuries through incessant bowing, scraping and accomodating. In this respect we ressemble the Jews and Gypsies."
Pahor gives no importance to the system of hierarchies in the camp. "In these neropolises it did not matter what department you worked in. Barbers shaved death, quartermasters dressed it, medics undressed it, registrars entered the dates of death after the serial numbers, and in the end, they all, each of them, were sucked up the huge chimney."

However, he also acknowledges how being in the infirmary, writing case histories and diagnoses for the prison head physician "meant escape from chaos into peace and order. At Leif's side I could help people and be useful." (135) "We weren't constantly, unremittingly hungry any more....Like the tiles on the floor, we had been installed in the system." Not working outdoors at the camp was one way to have a better chance at outliving the war. Pahor worked at the weberei (weaving workshop) as did Scheinmann and Linet when they finally acceded to this inside function which was forbiddent to the French NN until late into their stay. All the French authors remark on the upward mobility they experienced at Natzweiler as their national and political group achieved seniority.
It was probably helpful to Pahor that his red triangle badge carried "I" for Italian on it instead of being identified as a Slav.
Although Pahor was thrown a lifeline by the inmate doctors he worked with, he sees with clarity the nature of Doctor Leif Poulson (spelled different ways in different memoirs) who was a benefactor to some of the prisoners needing medical care and who shut out others.
"He was always indifferent when he wasn't dealing with his fellow Norwegians. Had it been a different patient [than Ivo], perhaps Leif would have found some sulfa somewhere. ...if Leif had wanted to, he could have found some sulfa. I should have pleaded with him then, stepped forth on Ivo's behalf. But sulfa was the last thing on my mind at the time, and Leif wasn't even sure what was wrong with Ivo. When Leif finally mentioned nephritis, Ivo was going. Sulfa might not have made any difference. It might have been a tubercular infection. I was too insignificant a player in camp politics for Leif to discuss this with me."
Beyond the physical conditions, there were psychological factors which probably assisted or prevented prisoners from staying alive. Here the reader notices discrepancies among this author's own perceived strategies and between strategies adopted by the different authors. For example, Pahor writes that "the first condition for even the slightest chance of survival is to eliminate from your mind any image that does not belong to the kingdom of evil. The result is that even those whom death ultimately pardons feel themselves so saturated with death that despite their new freedoms they are inextricably bound to it."
Outside the haven of the infirmary, Pahor writes about his emotional disassociation from both his co-sufferers and the torturers. He doesn't even seem to remember the names of "the corporals". "Corporals whose nastiness derives from stupidity or an inferiority complex." " Fear deadened me, but also protected me from the greater evil of accommodating myself to that reality. And so it never occurred to me to take an interest in the names of our superiors, or to join the circles of the influential, or to participate in camp politics. I learned about this only later, when I read the testimonies of others. Even as an interpreter, and later as a medic, I remained one of the herd, another cell in the body of mass fear." In recent correspondence, Pahor has written that he was too involved with his inner life to notice as much of the power struggles; in Pilgrim he acknowledges the other memoirs, which name the perpetrators by name, place and date.
"For a long time I've been aware that my own experiences were modest compared to what others described in their memoirs. Blaha, Levi, Rousset, Bruck, Ragot, Pappalettera. And that I wasn't observant enough. I was trapped in my dark world, a hollow world populated by shadows. I saw with my eyes, yes, but did not allow those images to reach my heart."

Despite this retreat to interiority, Pahor is constantly turning over in this book, as possibly he even did at the camp, the elements of his past as a Slovene under Italian domination, as an interpreter for Yugoslav prisoners for two years on Lake Garda, of film, children's literature, and other devices which helped him and could help others understand each other and communicate with others. His restless mind only comes to rest, ever so lovingly and regretfully, on the friends and companions he lost: Tolya, Gabriele, Franc, Lief, André, Tomas, Ivo. No last names are mentioned in his book, except of people on outside Natzweiler. By literally placing the reader on a first-name basis to both the good and evil he describes, he draws the reader closer to both.
In addition to the introspection and the lyricism of both his despair and his affection, Pahor's work is distinguished by stylistic consistency and other devices which make his memoir outstandingly literary in comparison to the other authors' more workmanlike uses of language. Beside the allusions noted earlier, he uses metaphors or parts of the body to represent the dislocation of minds and bodies:
"The bewildered herd hastily undresses...the light bulb shows a multitude of bare skulls and ladderlike ribs, while all hands are busy twisting rags into bundles. Emaciated limbs shiver, shift back and forth, and hop to fend off the winds....On this harp of a human chest the wind's cold finger's play a quiet requiem....The body loves the countless warm tongues that lick it....and we forget that beneath the shower room is an oven, and that night and day a stoker heaves human logs into it. Even if the bodies think they may soon be used to heat the water, the pleasure offered by this wet warmth is not lessened..."
Objects and body parts finally commingle and become confused in Dachau, where all 4,000 Natzweiler prisoners still alive were relocated in September 1944:
"...the Dachau parade grounds are an enormous garbage dump, with countless shovels heaving paper, wet rags, broken clogs, and filthy striped bundles onto it out of washroom windows. Among the mattresses that cover the large field are unwrapped paper bandages, worn wooden spoons, and a knife fashioned in prehistoric times. Mattresses with wet stains, empty, lacking the forms that made the indentations in them. Mattresses with naked bodies. Bodies with wounds. Female genitalia with hard, swollen labia. Decomposing labia eight inches wide. More rubbish. More clogs. More heaps of wet, filthy zebra skins laid low by typhus. Next to them, bodies still functioning, undressing on the mattresses. A bandage unraveling like the thread of the insatiable Fates. A bony hand refusing to let go of its wooden spoon..."
As Pahor puts the modern atrocities into a continuuum with the past, the subtext is clearly that of their continuum into the future. "Man is capable of anything. He has drunk wine from the skulls of the vanquished, he has shrunk heads. Twentieth-century Europeans used such heads as desk decorations, heads with grinning teeth. Flayed human skins hung in Dachau, Dr. Blaha writes, like laundry set out to dry...."
To conclude the analyzing and return to the departed, "The shadows of the dead are far away. But maybe they approach when darkness covers the mountain and the terraces are buried under snow, for there are no tourists then. When the shadows come, they do as they used to; they lay the dying down on their snowy biers, then stand in formation, not waiting for a man in boots to count them. In total silence they assess and weigh the messages that drift toward them from the noisy world of the living." ( Pilgrim Among the Shadows, by Boris Pahor, 41)

I am reading "Pilgrim Among the Shadows" by Boris Pahor (Orlando, FL, 1995, Harcourt Brace & Co.), a translation by Michael Biggins from the Slovenian of "Nekropola." It appears to be the only work by Pahor to have been translated into English.

Pahor's experience was in Natzweiler -- and later in Dachau. He tells the
grisly tale of how Italy persecuted the speakers of Slovenian and
Serbo-Croatian in the areas it annaxed after World War I and expanded into after the outbreak of World War II. For Pahor, a Triestino Jew barred from speaking his own language and whose main memories are of gravestones on which the names were italianized and of the main Slovenian library in Trieste being burned to the ground by blackshirted fascists, Natzweiler (he does not explain why he ended in that camp high in the Vosges mountains of France) proved that the ties among "Yugoslavs" were strong despite the signs of breakup after the death of Tito.

This is a literary memoir -- awfully hard to read with constant flashbacks
from present to past and back again -- that does flesh out some horrors.
For example, the hot water in the showers at Natzweiler came from boilers placed above the crematorium ovens (something I did not find in
Buchenwald).

Peculiarly, Pahor hardly mentions his own Jewishness.