Double Identity

In recent years, there has been a notable florescence in writing about the Holocaust. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” argued, to considerable controversy, that anti-Semitism ran wide and deep in German society and culture, where generational hatred of the Jews facilitated Hitler’s genocide. Viktor Klemperer’s diaries, “I Will Bear Witness,” conveyed daily life under the Third Reich with special attention to the relationship between German Jews and non-Jews, while Wladyslaw Szpilman’s “The Pianist,” an autobiographical account of the Holocaust written in the immediate aftermath of the experience itself and only recently translated into English, depicted one man’s unlikely survival in Poland during the war. And Peter Novick’s “The Holocaust in American Life” explored and criticized the prominent--and, to him, problematic--place the Holocaust has come to assume in American Jewish thinking and identity.

Among the many widespread assumptions about the Holocaust that Novick challenges is the one that holds that the experience is, as he puts it, “singularly incomprehensible or unrepresentable,” a position that, like its claim to uniqueness, he finds deeply offensive. As if in response to the matter of unrepresentability--with, however, a much broader human and historical agenda in mind--Mark Roseman’s “A Past in Hiding” shows how all too representable and comprehensible many aspects of the Holocaust can indeed be. In this painstaking narrative, Roseman combines history, biography, psychology and detective work to tell the story of one woman’s life in Germany up to, during and (briefly) after the war; the book stands out, in its genre, in any genre, as an act of great generosity, unbridled curiosity, relentless research and abiding respect for the persistent individuality of a human life, mind and memory. In places painfully raw, “A Past in Hiding” often vibrates with the kind of visceral feeling and textured observation encountered more often in a novel than in the careful work of historical inquiry, which this book remains, fiercely, until its final pages.

The memory, the feeling and the intricately substantiated interiority largely belong to Marianne Strauss, the most unusual woman whose life Roseman reconstructs. Strauss was born in Essen in 1923, to a prosperous bourgeois family who became the last Jews to remain free in the city during the war. Her parents and brother were arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, deported to Theresienstadt and later gassed in Auschwitz. Marianne, who slipped out the front door when the Gestapo came to collect them, eluded the Nazis by going underground for the remainder of the war, but in her own fashion, which often meant living openly and boldly, with no papers and hair dyed red to help her pass for Aryan.

She also had spectacular luck and unflagging assistance from members of Essen’s Bund. (Not to be confused with the Socialist Jewish Bund in Poland and Russia, the Bund in Essen--the word means “league” or “federation”--emerged from a group of people who attended lectures given by Artur Jacobs, a radical schoolteacher who, as Roseman explains, combined “a belief in the historical mission of the proletariat with an intense concern for the moral choices that face individuals in their daily lives.”) In 1945, Marianne fell in love with Basil Ellenbogen, a British soldier and an Orthodox Jew; she moved to England in 1946, married and raised a son and daughter, and died in Liverpool 50 years later, having through most of her life concealed her story, even from her own children, while at the same time keeping an extraordinary (if wholly unorganized and unexamined) archive of letters, diaries and official records that documented her past.

Roseman first met Strauss in Liverpool in 1989. He knew something about her, because he had read an article that, despite her need for privacy, she had published in a small German journal five years earlier; in it she had told the story of her escape and her life underground. He found her account remarkable, perhaps implausible in some aspects, and was eager to meet its author. A striking woman still--she had been a great beauty in her youth--Marianne served him biscuits and coffee in a house full of antiques and good furniture. Her hair was pulled back into a “Continental” bun; her voice was “cultured and slightly husky,” her demeanor “charming with a hint of steel.” But she proved to be strangely reluctant to talk about the past, and the meeting was a disappointment to Roseman.

Five years later he again got in touch with Marianne. Now widowed and ill, she was more open; in fact she wondered if he could come and look at some of her papers. Roseman agreed. He again called on her in Liverpool. Again he found there a formidable, if diminished, woman. Marianne presented him with a letter from her one-time fiance, Ernst Krombach, that he had sent to her when she and her family were still free in Essen and Ernst and his family had been deported to Izbica, a little-known Polish transit point for German, Austrian, Polish and Czech Jews. The letter, “a mixture of normality and horror,” was “vivid, it was there in my hands, but it was also beyond imagining”--that is, its existence was beyond Roseman’s imagining, the fact that it had been smuggled out of Izbica by a young SS man who was a friend of the Strauss family and, as Roseman later learned, was part of an extended correspondence, similarly smuggled out, as goods had been smuggled in, by the same improbable route.

Roseman, Marianne and her son, Vivian, went to lunch. Vivian proposed the idea of recording his mother’s story, taking Roseman aside at one point to tell him that he had learned from her doctor just that morning that his mother was dying. In this way Roseman came to interview Marianne in three long “moving and enthralling,” though “anything but easy,” conversations in 1996. Throughout, Marianne remained ambivalent about the process and was sometimes contentious. She would not speak about her life in Britain, which included the highly painful death in 1969, from anorexia, of her 18-year-old daughter Elaine. Yet she produced more letters, she dug for other memories and generally spoke with great candor. Then, in December 1996, she died, leaving--as Roseman and Vivian Ellenbogen gradually discovered--a house packed with an astonishing quantity of material. “For almost fifty years this knowledge, this documentation, lay dormant,” Roseman reports. “No questions were asked; no discussion was allowed. In 1945, it seemed, Marianne had come out into the open, but her past had gone into hiding.”

It is Roseman’s quest to bring Marianne Strauss’ past out into the open. He builds his narrative out of his conversations with her, the documents she gave him, those he found after she died, and interviews with her surviving friends, distant relatives and other contemporary witnesses. He details his journey for the reader: his actual journey, across continents, to find these last aged observers of a lost time and place; his intellectual journey through the mass of material that so miraculously falls into his hands, and, inevitably, his journey across time, as he comes to know the earlier vibrant version of the Marianne he met at the far end of her life. The portrait that emerges has a cubistic quality infused with a piercing sense of aching and loss--loss first, of course, of Marianne’s entire family and childhood world, and then of the young, vanished Marianne, whom her own son, as Roseman points out, can only meet through the mediation of a stranger and in writing.

*

Roseman’s prose is plain. His Everyman’s authorial reactions or insertions can lack variety or nuance (he too often uses the phrase “almost unbearable” in connection with the latest deprivation or degradation in Marianne’s life). His speculations as to the motivation of people he does not know occasionally feel problematic and overly personal (“What on earth was Siegfried thinking?” he wonders, for example, of Marianne’s father’s disinclination to send Marianne and her brother to England, when he has very carefully anatomized Siegfried’s thinking, however mistaken it was.) And his eventual conclusions about the way memory--Strauss’ memory, at least--shapes and shifts the past, though well reasoned, do not seem as important as his prevailing sensibility, which the reader comes to know more intimately than is customary in works of history (or biography for that matter). It is intelligent, objective, discerning and justifiably dramatic.

In an elaborate mosaic of a book like this, it is not easy to pick out the most representative interludes or portraits. Hardly a page goes by without some insight into the way these lives unfolded against the Holocaust and how this young, at first sheltered, woman came to develop a powerful sense of purpose, strength and self that enabled her to separate herself from her family at a key juncture and survive the Nazi regime.

Roseman’s depiction of an evolving Marianne naturally remains at the center of “A Past in Hiding.” In possession of a rebellious spirit, Marianne withdrew from her stifling parents and learned to think independently. She was courageous, curious and willful. As a young girl--in fact, all along--she had a strong German identity that may have carried her through her years of defiant hiding. As we learn from her correspondence with Ernst, she was at a very young age capable of a very mature love. She deeply absorbed her education, first at a school for kindergarten teachers in Berlin, later from ideas advanced by Jacobs. She was introspective and wrote (in diaries and letters) with honesty, integrity and insight. She had a big, radiant, sometimes difficult personality. She seems to have been born a survivor.

Then there is Ernst Krombach, Marianne’s fiance; their relationship shines out of this book with a clarity and an urgency that, in view of Ernst’s fate (blinded at Izbica and, most likely, gassed at Sobibor), is not almost but truly unbearable to read. It also, as Roseman explains in one of his many judicious interpretations of the material he presents, changes our view of the camps (or transit points, which Izbica more accurately was) as places closed off to outside contact. Surely very few outsiders or inmates had access to a daredevil SS truck driver who was willing to smuggle letters and packages, but Marianne and Ernst were fortunate to be able to communicate by this means, as indeed we are to have their communication.

A small sample: Early on, before she grasped quite what was happening to her world Marianne writes to Ernst, “I often have the feeling that life is offering me as much as it can before a door is slammed shut.” Soon she is declaring, “Our imagination cannot keep up with reality, try hard as it might,” and not long after that she pleads with him to send her an honest account of what he is going through (to help she sends him a questionnaire with 18 points she wants explained, covering everything from food to hygiene to the passage of information; the fearlessness is typical of her, as were the dozens of care packages she sent to Izbica). Ernst obliges. His formerly gentle, affectionate, but heretofore guarded tone is replaced with nearly 20 pages of uncensored details: “You have to suppress every human feeling and, under supervision of the SS, drive the people out with a whip, just as they are--barefoot, with infants in their arms.” “90% of conversations are about food.” “Recently on one morning alone more than 20 Polish Jews were shot for baking bread. . . . I yearn for books. . . . Hard as life is for us at the moment, something grand will emerge from it. . . . God will protect and help us as He has done so far.”

And how very far Roseman’s tendrils of inquiry reach: In the course of retracing Marianne’s life he travels to Argentina to see Ernst’s surviving brother, who is renamed Enrique. He does not even have a photograph of Ernst. He asks Roseman to tell Marianne that “she must know that she does not carry those years alone,” but she dies before she can receive this message. For the first time, as an old man, Enrique reads his brother’s letters from the camp and finds in them a human being he never knew.

The power of the letter and diary to raise the dead, to document the past, to make evil specific and palpable, to dissolve time: This is one of the great themes of Roseman’s book. Another is the power of ideas to take or spare lives. There are the perverse ideas, well known to us by now, that seized Germany in the middle of the last century and eviscerated Marianne’s family and world, and there are the less familiar ones advanced by Artur Jacobs and the Bund that were responsible for saving Marianne. Jacobs, too, is a diarist, and Roseman adds his voice to the tapestry: “Strange the way the girl is, with her apparent calm. . . . How much more natural one would find any kind of wild cry. But perhaps this is the best part of conventional behavior. Otherwise, such a young person would fall apart.” Jacobs was also politically savvy and widely influential with members of Essen’s Bund, where “the rigor of its emphasis on the ethics of the everyday act and a strong internal hierarchy” made Marianne’s years in hiding possible, because she was protected by the very people who attended Jacob’s lectures.

Along with the significant events--the Strauss family’s deportation and Marianne’s escape, the relationship with Ernst, Marianne’s protection by the Bund--there are myriad small moments that vivify and make further graspable this now receding installment in our human record. There is Marianne’s grandmother’s lovingly bottled fruit, smashed on Kristallnacht. There is the irony of the regime in 1939 issuing Jews gas masks. There are Marianne’s parents typing out a list of details about life in the United States, one of the many countries in which they eventually sought, and failed to find, refuge (the furniture was light and simple; the men’s ties narrow and brightly colored). There is an early false deportation, with Marianne’s packing list (Thermos, butter dish, needle and thread). There are the felt flowers Marianne made when she was in hiding, in order to earn money (she saved the patterns), and there is the first loaf of bread she saw after the war: She ate so much of it that she made herself sick.

*

There is the curtain of privacy Marianne drew around her later life. She was of course entitled. “She found meaning not in the public sphere or work, as one might have predicted for so formidable a woman,” Roseman says of her postwar life, “but in raising her children; this is where she found ‘the sort of life that means something to me.’ ” It is hard, though, not to feel, with Roseman, that Marianne Strauss’ later years contained experiences, especially with regard to her daughter’s sad fate, that might have taught us as much about the legacy of the Holocaust as her early life has. But this is to strike a minor note, when the much larger sentiment--for Mark Roseman and Marianne Strauss--is one of profound admiration and gratitude for this powerful story. Remarkable though it is, it is even more remarkable to think how many more from this dark period remain untold, and always will.