Book: Ninas resa ('Nina's journey')
May. 19th, 2009 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Lena Einhorn
Details: (c) 2005 Lena Einhorn; Pub Prisma 2005; ISBN 91-518-4445-1
Verdict: Ninas resa is an effective and stark Holocaust memoir.
Reasons for reading it: Although I don't read a lot of Holocaust memoirs by choice, these are stories that ought to be heard. Also, I know the author (the daughter of the protagonist) slightly, as she's a very vocal LGB activist within the Jewish community here.
How it came into my hands: SA gave it to me for my birthday. Although it's a bit daunting to read an entire novel in Swedish, my Swedish is as good now as it's ever going to be, and this is relatively short and written in a very straightforward, journalistic language.
Ninas resa manages to avoid being sentimental or sensationalist, although like all survivor stories, both the horror it depicts and the fact that Nina managed to survive against all odds are close to being unbelievable. Basically it recounts the life of Nina Rajmic from a couple of years before the start of WW2, when she was a young teenager in Łódź, until the liberation of Poland and the immediate aftermath of the war. Although she was in the US with her mother's family in 1938, she insisted on returning to Poland because she was so homesick. The family moved to Warsaw in 1940 because life seemed less unbearable there than in the provinces. That meant she ended up in the Warsaw ghetto, but managed to avoid the major deportation in 1942 by taking a "job" in one of the slave factories. By 1943, she was aware that deportation meant gas chambers, and perhaps the most incredible part is the fact that she and her mother managed to escape when they were seized by SS soldiers to make up a deportation quota. Almost equally miraculously, they were smuggled out of the ghetto during the liquidation in 1943, and Nina and her brother managed to survive in hiding in Warsaw for the two years until the liberation, thanks to some Righteous Gentiles and some amazingly good luck.
Reading Survivor biographies like this is a really strange experience; for one thing, you start out knowing the ending: the protagonist will miraculously survive, but by the end of the war everybody she ever knew will have been murdered. For a second thing, it's absolutely impossible to empathize with the characters, you can't be in the head of someone who's in imminent danger of death for three years solid, and living in a situation with absolutely no normality. Not all that many of the general historical facts in this were new to me, but the account does a good job of personalizing the situation without being voyeuristic. Some amazing images of people trying to live some kind of human life in a totally inhuman situation (Nina taking her school leaving exam a week before the major deportation, in a school that was pretending to be a technical college to avoid Nazi reguations; or Nina's mother, living in hiding in a tiny space behind a false wall in Warsaw during the Russian invasion, giving Nina permission to start wearing makeup and gifting her with a powder compact.) It's also a very powerful portrayal of the fact that survival depended on making the right choices over and over again in multiple situations where one had no information to go on.
The narrative is very scrupulous about not demonizing everybody involved in carrying out the Holocaust and allowing it to happen. Hatred is reserved for Himmler, and Jürgen Stroop, the general in charge of the liquidization of the ghetto. Everybody else, from SS soldiers to the ordinary Polish citizens who either did nothing at all or only took risks up to a point, to even the Jews who tried to save themselves by collaborating, is portrayed as humanly as possible. The book simply recounts factual information about the decisions people made without trying to analyze how a person could come to behave like that. And it is very clear just how much danger was involved in doing anything at all to oppose the Nazis or help the Jews. There is some discussion of why there wasn't a more widespread Jewish resistance, and the explanation given is that the Nazis kept the Jews in a constant state of hope that they might have a chance if they cooperated, even up to the infamous point of pretending that the gas chambers were showers.
Generally the strength of this is that the characters are so clearly drawn, and it does the exact job that this sort of memoir is supposed to do, of giving a face and a personal frame to the unimaginable history of the Nazi period.
Details: (c) 2005 Lena Einhorn; Pub Prisma 2005; ISBN 91-518-4445-1
Verdict: Ninas resa is an effective and stark Holocaust memoir.
Reasons for reading it: Although I don't read a lot of Holocaust memoirs by choice, these are stories that ought to be heard. Also, I know the author (the daughter of the protagonist) slightly, as she's a very vocal LGB activist within the Jewish community here.
How it came into my hands: SA gave it to me for my birthday. Although it's a bit daunting to read an entire novel in Swedish, my Swedish is as good now as it's ever going to be, and this is relatively short and written in a very straightforward, journalistic language.
Ninas resa manages to avoid being sentimental or sensationalist, although like all survivor stories, both the horror it depicts and the fact that Nina managed to survive against all odds are close to being unbelievable. Basically it recounts the life of Nina Rajmic from a couple of years before the start of WW2, when she was a young teenager in Łódź, until the liberation of Poland and the immediate aftermath of the war. Although she was in the US with her mother's family in 1938, she insisted on returning to Poland because she was so homesick. The family moved to Warsaw in 1940 because life seemed less unbearable there than in the provinces. That meant she ended up in the Warsaw ghetto, but managed to avoid the major deportation in 1942 by taking a "job" in one of the slave factories. By 1943, she was aware that deportation meant gas chambers, and perhaps the most incredible part is the fact that she and her mother managed to escape when they were seized by SS soldiers to make up a deportation quota. Almost equally miraculously, they were smuggled out of the ghetto during the liquidation in 1943, and Nina and her brother managed to survive in hiding in Warsaw for the two years until the liberation, thanks to some Righteous Gentiles and some amazingly good luck.
Reading Survivor biographies like this is a really strange experience; for one thing, you start out knowing the ending: the protagonist will miraculously survive, but by the end of the war everybody she ever knew will have been murdered. For a second thing, it's absolutely impossible to empathize with the characters, you can't be in the head of someone who's in imminent danger of death for three years solid, and living in a situation with absolutely no normality. Not all that many of the general historical facts in this were new to me, but the account does a good job of personalizing the situation without being voyeuristic. Some amazing images of people trying to live some kind of human life in a totally inhuman situation (Nina taking her school leaving exam a week before the major deportation, in a school that was pretending to be a technical college to avoid Nazi reguations; or Nina's mother, living in hiding in a tiny space behind a false wall in Warsaw during the Russian invasion, giving Nina permission to start wearing makeup and gifting her with a powder compact.) It's also a very powerful portrayal of the fact that survival depended on making the right choices over and over again in multiple situations where one had no information to go on.
The narrative is very scrupulous about not demonizing everybody involved in carrying out the Holocaust and allowing it to happen. Hatred is reserved for Himmler, and Jürgen Stroop, the general in charge of the liquidization of the ghetto. Everybody else, from SS soldiers to the ordinary Polish citizens who either did nothing at all or only took risks up to a point, to even the Jews who tried to save themselves by collaborating, is portrayed as humanly as possible. The book simply recounts factual information about the decisions people made without trying to analyze how a person could come to behave like that. And it is very clear just how much danger was involved in doing anything at all to oppose the Nazis or help the Jews. There is some discussion of why there wasn't a more widespread Jewish resistance, and the explanation given is that the Nazis kept the Jews in a constant state of hope that they might have a chance if they cooperated, even up to the infamous point of pretending that the gas chambers were showers.
Generally the strength of this is that the characters are so clearly drawn, and it does the exact job that this sort of memoir is supposed to do, of giving a face and a personal frame to the unimaginable history of the Nazi period.
