![]() ![]() This is contrasted with such chilling scenes as this: "We were standing with a group of naked women under the warm shower, and the older woman and the man with the trim mustache were waiting at the door. On the sofa was an open book, a ball of wool, knitting needles." ![]() There are those normal moments in which "we sat in the warm, homey room. Fink's stories - the actions of the Nazis split the world. The false solidarity of the group of city girls dissolves. Some will offer their bodies in exchange for possible safety. Schmidt, the man in charge of the factory, behaves as if primed for the stock role of camp commandant. Promise not to escape without me, they urge one another. Betrayal of the city girls offers the juiciest rewards.Įveryone in the factory accepts the primacy of personal survival, yet traces of old codes of behavior remain. Katarzyna divides the group into the "city" girls (those who are secretly Jews) and the others. These workers betray one another for the smallest of favors - a new sweater or a job in the office. Indeed, so easily do we believe the concept of the sisters' disguise that we accept them as adolescents quarreling over food and clothes, envious of each other, while they are in the factory. The volunteer workers, Polish and German, are called "girls" by the narrator it is with difficulty that the reader realizes they are women, some of them married, for adult sovereignty is reduced to nonexistence. The German factory is a closed society within a closed society. How much German should they be able to speak? What is the best disguise - cheerful stupidity or belligerent demands? The nightmare becomes more real the more it is pinned by reality. The stories they tell must convince, because it is easy to be caught by a half-remembered lie. THE sisters voluntarily join a transport of workers going from Poland to Germany and find themselves employed in a factory in the Ruhr Valley. How mindless is the society they must join? Well, one set of forged identification papers is useless because the photograph of Elzbieta does not show her left ear, as the regulations require. The sophisticated sisters dress like peasants and wrap themselves in colorful shawls. Each sister has three names and three different lives - and none of them is the real one. Elzbieta Stefanska, the younger sister, becomes Jadwiga Kotula and, finally, Barbara Falenska. Katarzyna Majewska, the narrator, turns into Joanna Pilecka, then into Maria Walkowska. ![]() Identity in "The Journey" fractures and fractures. In a life bounded by fear and betrayal, each time the sisters flee to another place a different past must be invented, a new personality pasted on and real memories denied - the lover left behind in the Lacki Street prison, the father who can be contacted only through coded letters, the vanished relatives. Part of the deprivation of their lives is the theft of identity - to acquire an alias and become someone else, or to be called by a number in a concentration camp. THE narrator (whom for a time I took to be a child) is the older sister both are young women. Two sisters, daughters of a Jewish physician, prepare to leave their home - and where better to go than into Germany, with forged papers that identify them as Polish volunteer workers? In 1941 in rural Poland, where casual anti-Semitism is part of daily life, the German actions are becoming more thorough, as soldiers sweep the countryside looking for Jews as if they were contraband. With a depth and completeness only suggested in the stories, "The Journey" extends the author's witness into the lives of ghetto Jews trying to survive. Fink did not mythologize the Holocaust in her stories but presented an ominous world in ways more vivid and compelling than historical record. Perhaps it is only time that has permitted the esthetics of language to re-create how ordinary people thought and felt in a society on the edge of extinction. The literature of the Holocaust is replete with detailed and horrific accounts of events for which the word "unimaginable" is inadequate. Fink's first book to be translated from Polish into English since the publication in 1987 of her short-story collection "A Scrap of Time." Those spare, often elegiac stories gave disturbing glimpses of the corrosive effect of German actions on the life of Polish Jews. IDA FINK'S first novel, "The Journey," is a splendidly constructed and effective account of survival during the Holocaust. Translated by Joanna Weschler and Francine Prose. ![]()
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