Got to appreciate stereotypes!

Have you ever come across the little book series called Xenophobe's guides? I have, and have two editions - guess which ones? ;-)

The Israeli version I have read through twice, first time last summer. The Finn version I read yesterday for the first time and actually laughed out loud. People on the same airplane turned around to see why I was so noisy (like typical Finns would do).

Usually I am not a big fan of stereotypes, probably because I like to consider myself as a non-typical Finn: I don't like the sauna or summer cottages. I don't go silent in all five languages, I do master smalltalk and use body language and facial expressions when communicating. Even though the Xenophobe's guide to the Finns touches upon these features I don't recognize in myself, the book offered me moments where I had to be honest to myself: alas, this is so true, this is how I am. How spot on.

What about the Israeli one? The great thing about the book is that it actually talks about Israelis - not necessarily pin-pointing Jews. It manages to go where I have not been able to go yet: define what is Israel, who is an Israeli and who is a Jew. Because an Israeli doesn't always equal Jew or Jew an Israeli.

These books are highly recommended reading if you're interested to know about the people in a country. Not where to get good lunch or what are the most important sights, but who make up the country to what is is!

Treblinka: Chil Rajchman's story

After recently rediscovering the Finnish libraries' vast book collections, I used particular search words to find books to read. Chil Rajchman's name came up, the title of the book liberally translated is ”The last Jew of Treblinka”.

I have to admit, I didn't know where Treblinka is. A lot of Ukrainian guards are mentioned, so I would have guessed somewhere there. But according to Google Maps, it is located somewhat East of Warsaw, Poland. A remote, forgotten piece of unfruitful land that Himmler decided to turn into a factory of death. The earth there was literally spitting up blood, as it could not absorb all the bodies buried in mass graves.

This map screenshot is courtesy of Google Maps.

Chil Rajchman's memoirs from this extermination camp is another book written in blunt, honest, straight-to-the-point way. Chil was born in 1914 in Poland. His mother died just before the war, and the only one of his family, in addition to himself, to survive the war was his brother, who managed to escape to the Soviet side of Poland. What happened to his father or youngest sister will never be known. Another sister was dead after 24 hours of her arriving together with Chil at Treblinka in 1942.

Like Shlomo Venezia (whom I wrote about previously), Chil was chosen out of thousands of men arriving at the camp and put to work. Again, to strip and dispose of the bodies. First, he sorted out the luggage and clothes left behind by those who were gassed to immediate death. He found among the mountains of clothes his sister's dress, and cut off a piece of it to keep with him until it all was over. Then he was a barber, cutting off women's hair before they entered the chambers. Then he was moved to carrying bodies once the doors of a gas chamber were opened and a mass of human corpses melted together rolled out. Afterwards, he worked as a dentist, pulling out golden teeth out of the corpses' mouths. Bodies needed to be burnt in open bonfires, so no evidence would be left behind.

This was the routine at the Treblinka camp. It was purely for the purpose of killing. No one transported there came there to stay, but were marched off to death immediately. The guards were called murderers, and at its worst, the trains carried 15 000 Jews there daily. Estimates between killed people at this site range from 700 000 to 900 000. An incomprehensible number. It is like sweeping out the whole capital region of Finland in a matter of a couple of years.

How did Chil manage to escape? Inspired by the riots in Warsaw, the men at Treblinka arranged their own riot. Most were killed during this brave attempt, but a handful survived – Chil among them.

After the war, Chil moved to Uruguay, married and had three sons. Until his death his memoirs were not published but only read by family members. His wish was to let the world know what was done to Jews during those horrendous, dark years in European history. That's why I wanted to write about the book here, too.

Sonderkommando

Moving on to a totally different "book review", compared to my last post. Yet again, I was sucked in by a book by a Shoah survivor. I already earlier wrote about Ladislaus Löb, so this time it was Shlomo Venezia's story that mesmerized me. I actually finished the book in 4 hours or so.

The book Sonderkommando is Shlomo's story from Auschwitz and how he was made to work in a group with some other Jews held in the same camp. Sonderkommando, meaning special unit, consisted of these "selected" people who were handling the disposal of the numerous bodies and maintaining the gas chambers and crematories at the camp. Basically, cleaning up the mess the Nazis created when executing these mass murders.

Shlomo Venezia was a Greek-Jew, living in Thessaloniki (also known as the Jerusalem of the Balkan). His family had fled Spain in the 1400s and settled in Italy (hence the family name Venezia) until ending up in Greece. His mother for instance didn't speak any Greek, only Ladino, and his father died when he was a little boy. Due to his background though, he had Italian citizenship and avoided the persecutions in Greece for a little while, until the transportations also from Greece to the death camps began. He was 21 years old when ending up in Poland.

What makes Shlomo's story special is, that not only did the Nazis want to exterminate him for being a Jew, there was an additional cause why he was wanted dead: they did not want any witnesses alive from the sonderkommando. It is by a miracle, you could say, that he was saved – a young man that didn't expect to live and didn't even think of the future, but still fought for his life every day and survived.

The book is actually an interview, so the story is immortalized almost word-to-word in the book. He talks about the happenings with great honesty and detail. How he felt in a way he was helping the Nazis but had no choice. How you had to be selfish and fight for your survival under those conditions. How a 2-month-old baby girl is the only known survivor from a gas chamber – only to be shot dead by SS officer minutes later. How the hair of the bodies was cut and sent off to factories for making fabric, or gold teeth pulled out and sent to Berlin for melting. How the chimneys of the crematories were all shiny from the burnt fat of the dead bodies.

Gruelling, disgusting, sends shivers down your spine. Stories like this leaves you get again wondering how on Earth the human kind could allow a genocide so brutally efficient, organized, planned and targeted to happen. Quoting Shlomo himself though, stories like this need to be told and printed, so nothing like it would ever happen again. I had wanted to read this book for a while now, and I am glad I finally did - to never forget. Sometimes it is good to know and be aware about things, even if one is not able to fully process or comprehend them or the big picture.

The horrifying truth, packed inside these covers.

Stories from Israel, or, way beyond

Last summer I got as a present a book written by Etgar Keret. The book is titled ”The Nimrod flipout” and it is a collection of Keret's short stories. He is an Israeli writer, also called the voice of the new generation in his native country.

My very first acquitance with this author was in some late spring night on Skype when some of his stories were read to me. Yes, like a child listening to bedtime stories. I wouldn't have been able to make any sense of that book in Hebrew anyway, so that's why I guess I received my very own English version.

I haven't read fiction for a while but must admit Keret's imagination sure is something else. He goes straight to the point – but I guess that is of the essence when writing short stories. No ifs, no buts. The plots of his stories are something out of this world that I don't know how or where anyone gets that kind of ideas. This is not meant in a bad way, though. I'm actually jealous that someone has such a big pool of imagination and unheard ideas to write about. In fact, some of the stories are so original that I'm not sure if they were written by an author – or by someone who temporarily lost their marbles.

The stories aren't directly about Israel or Jews; some of them you could take, change names and put in any other country too. Some, however, do have references to the modern Israel and Israelites. E.g. flip outs/suicides in the army and someone getting killed by a suicide bomber are things that probably (unfortunately) happen there more likely than in Finland for instance. Or recognizing a body without a head to be a foreigner, as the man is not circumcised.

Don't get me wrong here, though. Dead bodies and suicides might make you think it is a sinister book that will push you on the verge of depression. Not at all! The stories won't make you reach for the tissues. They are just written in Keret's own humorous way.

The works of Etgar Keret have not been translated into Finnish but our local bookstores can provide you with a copy in English or Swedish. His publications are not limited to ”The Nimrod flipout”, so feel free to venture your favorite title. I look forward to reading them more in between my mission to read biographies. 

And let's see if Keret mentions Finland in any other stories than ”Bottle” (how surprising for Finland and bottles to be mentioned in the same context...:).

Amusing and edgy, and definitely takes you by surprise!

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Dealing with Satan

In July, I wandered to Stockmann's bookstore together with my significant other to find my friend a birthday present. On my way to the cashier I noticed a pile of books on sale and glanced through the selection. My eye was caught by a striking title in Finnish: sopimus saatanan kanssa, original title being Dealing with Satan. The cover featured a jerked black and white picture of a wooden shack surrounded by barbwire and Magen David in the back.

Even a mediocre blonde like myself could put two and two together and figure what the book is about but, as they say never judge a book by its cover, I picked up a copy and read the back cover. And then I purchased the book for myself (my friend got something lighter to read). And then I started reading it immidiately, pushing aside that damn boring JFK bio I had been stuck with for months.

The book is written by Hungarian-Jew Ladislaus Löb who is a WWII survivor. This is his way of paying respects to the man, Rezso Kasztner, who saved him (and 1699 other Hungarian Jews) from mass destruction and certain death. In normal circumstances, acts like this would be considered heroic but Kasztner's story didn't quite have that ending in the newly independent Israel in 1950s. He was a Jew, who saved hundreds of other Jews, but was condemned by Jewish judges as a Nazi affiliator and finally was killed by the bullets of Jewish assassins.

Lately, his name seems to be somewhat cleared but why I found the book so well-written and touching is that it is a true story from the author directly to the reader. Books are something so much more personal than movies or TVs. What should I read next?

 Six million stories from the WWII will never be heard.
But here is one that survived.