Amid the Tragedy of the Holocaust, Fragile Embers of Happiness

“Did you ever see someone who was killed in the war but who is still alive?” says cheerful Zofia, in a story of the same name in Ida Fink’s story collection, “Traces.” Zofia, mercifully, has forgotten everything about her life before the war, before she went as a child to hide in a barn she did not emerge from for two years. For all of that time, she did not speak.

Several characters in these stories about the Holocaust, set in occupied Poland, are willful mutes, characters who do not want to even hear stories about friends and relatives, who cover their ears when fellow sufferers break with grief.

Other stories contain characters who actually do not remember what has happened to them.

Of course, there can be no judgment on any of these characters, the ones who choose to remember and speak or the ones who choose not to. Had the author revealed any such judgments, her stories might have sunk under their weight. It takes a light hand to allow the events of this period in history to speak for themselves, a light touch on the gas pedal, lest the reader go up in flames.

As some people say, these are stories that put Jesus en la boca (“Jesus’ name in your mouth”), and God reads over your shoulder.

The mutes in “Traces” serve only to remind us of how excruciating it must be for those, including Fink, who seek traces of the past.

“Now that I’ve found a trace,” says a woman who is looking for her sister in the title story, “I have the feeling that I’ll never find her . . . that she’s not looking for me . . . that she doesn’t want to find me.”

Many still carry embers of happiness, like Jozef in “A Closed Circle,” who describes how happiness must be treated very carefully by survivors, so that it does not turn the corner to despair.

When confronted with the pain of a fellow traveler, Jozef’s “kernel of euphoria, light as a soap bubble,” undergoes a “chemical change,” becoming a pebble that presses against his heart, “growing and expanding so that it was soon transformed from a pebble into a stone, which weighed more and more heavily on Jozef’s breast.”

When the young Adela, who is in love, goes to have a dress shortened by her friend Nisia in “In Front of the Mirror,” Nisia whispers to her, disbelieving, “Is it possible . . . that you’re happy?”

That fragile commodity, happiness, provides a different kind of punctuation in Fink’s stories than the more common instances of unspeakable brutality.

A reader, like Fink’s characters, comes to dread it when people such as Eugenia fall in love, only to be taken by the SS; or a man in “The Hand” has his youthful passion rekindled by hikes “through cool, dark valleys with roaring streams” with a young friend who later turns on him.

It is as if those characters who leave room in their hearts for happiness have not learned the animal survival lesson that the young girl in “Zygmunt” learns: “In those first days I discovered a new fear, the fear of bombs, but that soon seemed childish and silly compared with what came next: the fear of people.”

Better, thinks the animal in pain, to endure the fate of the cheerful Zofia, who lives alone and has forgotten everything.

Philip Boehm and Francine Prose’s translation is gentle and simple. Sentences such as “The gate, usually latched with such care, hung by one hinge, lopsided, like someone about to faint,” exhibit the restraint and the degree of creative interpretation that mark fine translations.

And Fink, whose heart must be broken in several places, reveals in these traces that it nonetheless still beats and listens.