WITH a sense of acid irony, Fritz Rosenblatt, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, changed his name to Fred Wander in 1947. His enforced passage through 20 concentration camps, including Auschwitz, interrupted by futile escapes and culminating in Buchenwald, lasted for seven years. In his autobiography, Wander wrote: "It's not possible to say anything about so many millions of dead. But three or four individuals, it might be possible to tell a story about."
The Seventh Well is that story, of death camps and the terrible convoys of transportation between them. Told as a series of non-chronological episodes, the result is writing that could only be shaped by an intense but objective understanding of the suffering Wander shared. His great ability is to take the individuals whose distinctive personalities were not extinguished but strengthened by deprivation and intolerable pain and relate how they contributed to his, and others', survival.
Nearly all of them died, including Teichmann - a wise man, who inspired the young narrator to use his imagination to tell stories. The others, devoid of nearly all material possessions, turned to invention to create a sort of bearable existence. Some of these individuals would be extraordinary in any setting, including a cynical doctor who cares for the sick with an energy and detachment that seems inhuman, and a brilliant young linguist whose fearless rebelliousness causes him to be hanged. The daily scrap of bread is at first devoured in seconds, until its pitiful value is recognised and transformed into a lengthy seven-course meal.
It is the simple ordinariness of the others who speak of their memories that hammers home their deprivation of freedom. The rich tailor from Amsterdam, who brags of former luxury and the poor Jew from a Paris ghetto which was Jerusalem to him, had nothing in common except their religion but they share the others' past in the camp, a microcosm of the world they are denied.
If The Seventh Well contained only tales from within the camp it would be a powerful novel, but Wander has reserved his finest writing for an account of a march to a camp. Ordered to drag heavy vehicles up and down freezing mountain passes, thousand of prisoners struggle beyond human effort, in a carnage revealed in a tableau of images which matches both Brueghel and Bosch for vivid horror. "The road wound its way amongst precipitous drops smothered in snow. Clinging onto the carts were men who no longer had any sensation in their feet, and were merely hoping to extend their life by an hour or so. But they kept dropping to their knees the jackboots would grab them like so many sacks of potatoes a bang and an echo not even a scream "
Nowhere is there any self-pity, but poignancy is evoked, unbearably at times, when the inmates in their depth of misery, are allowed an occasional "glimpse of Paradise". An exquisite performance of a Puccini aria is given by a man who is found dead the following day, his "grotesquely swollen head on a neck like the stem of a flower".
On his release in April 1945, the narrator, suffering from typhus, watched a tiny boy roasting potatoes and feeding them to his younger brother. "Some might say the camp and its bestial conditions had destroyed their human substance," writes Wander, "but I knew right then: everything will start over, nothing has been lost."
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