3 Stars
This
Holocaust novel focuses on Jewish twin girls, Stasha and Pearl Zamorski, who
arrive in Auschwitz and become inhabitants of Josef Mengele’s zoo, a special
section of the concentration camp where he performed brutal experiments on
those with genetic anomalies. The novel
has two parts: the first deals with the
time the girls spend in Auschwitz and the second focuses on what happens to
them following the liberation of the camp.
Of course, the focus throughout is on survival. With some exceptions, chapters are narrated
alternately by the two.
Stasha and
Pearl are 12 years old when they are sent to Auschwitz. They are defined by their oneness; they have
a special psychic connection such that they know each other’s thoughts and “pain
never belonged to just one of us.” They
are fiercely devoted to each other and more than anything fear being
separated. Stasha screams when different
numbers are tattooed on their arms because “they pointed out that we were
separate people, and when you are separate people, you can be parted.” Later she finds that one of the worst things
about the experiments performed on her is that Mengele “imposed divisions on
the matter I shared with Pearl.”
The book
does not dwell too much on the specifics of the experiments. Most of the details of the experimentation
are kept in the sidelines. What is
described is horrific enough. The girls
notice the others who have been at the camp for a while: “In nearly every pair, one twin had a spine
gone awry, a bad leg, a patched eye, a wound, a scar, a crutch.” Not much more needs to be said. Those few who do survive Auschwitz become “an
experiment for the war-torn countries, the disassembled, the displaced.”
It is not
the physical torture but the emotional and mental suffering that most struck
me. Pearl and Stasha suffer when they
are separated from their family and each other; their physical pain is given
much less emphasis. A Jewish doctor, Dr.
Miri, suffers unimaginable emotional trauma.
She is forced to be Mengele’s assistant, compelled “to do things she did
not want to do.” Stasha speaks of Miri’s
sorrow arising from “taking care of the children that Uncle [Mengele] claimed
for his own. It must have been like
stringing a harp for someone who played his harp with a knife, or binding a
book for someone whose idea of reading was feeding pages to a fire.” In the end, Miri is “folded in a corner . . .
She was awake, but absent.”
I feel
guilty for having to admit that I found the book tedious. Reading about their efforts to survive in
such horrific circumstances was painful and I certainly hoped for their
survival, but otherwise I felt emotionally distanced. Perhaps the lyrical prose caused some of this
disconnect. The beautiful figurative language
just does not seem appropriate to the subject matter and does not suit the age
of the narrators. The number of
metaphors is sometimes overwhelming; at the beginning, Stasha describes their
lives in utero: “For eight months we
were afloat in amniotic snowfall, two rosy mittens resting on the lining of our
mother. I couldn’t imagine anything
grander than the womb we shared, but after the scaffolds of our brains were
ivoried and our spleens were complete, Pearl wanted to see the world beyond us.” The girls’ thoughts and dialogue suggest they
should be much older; for example, Pearl says she will never look away from the
horrors “because in looking away . . . we would lose ourselves so thoroughly
that our loss would require another name.”
There are coincidences
that jar. Pearl ends up in the same bed
near the wall of which Stasha had scratched the words “Dear Pearl”. The second part of the novel feels disjointed
and the ending is just too simplistic.
The resolution is dependent on more coincidence, and the use of a zoo at
the beginning and end is just too neat a structure.
There are
certainly messages for the reader, one of the most important being that we not
forget; one character makes a comment that really struck me: “’The whole world will never look back. And if they do, they’ll probably say that it
never really happened.’” The
dehumanizing effects of the holocaust are emphasized; Stasha speaks of the Zoo’s
most severe alteration being “the very damage it did to our notions of what it
meant to be close to another living being” and she tries to tell her sister
that “we had to treat ourselves as objects in order to get by.” Knowing the degree of evil that exists in the
world, an evil “in all its lowdown fullness, its beastly disrespect for all
living creatures and their great variety,” is it possible to “learn to love the
world once more”?
I’m not
sure whether to recommend this book to others.
Its subject matter is difficult and what happens to the characters is heart
wrenching. Those who enjoy lyrical
writing will find much to like, but those looking for an action-filled plot
will not.
