Village of a Million Spirits by Ian McMillan

Horror.  Ian Macmillan has revealed true horror.  In his 1999 novel Village of a Million Spirits he transports the reader into a primitive production line of death, Treblinka.  

 Set in eastern Poland in 1943 and 1944—during the year of the camp’s existence—the reader is introduced to the SS, their collaborators, local Poles, and “work Jews” whose detail includes stripping bodies of every conceivable valuable—teeth, hair, rings, stamps, and cash.   The "work Jews" are forced, under pain of death, to dispose of their own families and tens and thousands of bodies.  Some scholars argue a million people died in Treblinka's remote and subsequently destroyed cite, teams of workers reducing the evidence to “bones and gold.”

Simon Schama sent up a warning flare about excessive or at least indulgent use of graphic horror in his Financial Times review of the 2011 novel Emperor of Lies.  What Schama argued was at that "tedious" novel's core was an "emotional void."  And with the amazing histories and diaries from Lodz, Schama argues that the event was unnecessary to fictionalize.
Meanwhile, the traces of Treblinka are now all but rubbed out.  To date, only two of the death camp's inmates survive.  Nothing of the camp remains except a rock memorial.  Claud Lanzmann's Shoah excellently chronicled the camp, using interviews with survivors and guards.  Even recent documentaries ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xnAWWlf_RE) gives new insight and perspective. 

McMillan's novel is brutal, to be sure.  Little is spared but the author does not seem to relish the horror.  Instead, the work allows characters to respond to the horrors as a way of demonstrating the effects of the black world of the camp.  As the Russians approach after the collapse of the Eastern Front at Stalingrad the Germans busily prepare for the end.  Deep death pits are transformed into “grills” used to “roast” the traces of the enormity.   

McMillan offers an arc from the transport, the Himmelstrasse or "road to heaven," and to the pits; from inmates and guards; from survivors, sadists and cynics. It was a hell run by gangsters and populated with broken and terrified men.   

Kurt Franz, a real-life Nazi nicknamed “The Doll” because of his beautiful face, joyfully murders inmates with his dog and takes special pleasure in his “work.”  Other fictional characters, such as Voss, represent the conniving and completely selfish motives of fascist functionaries.  Voss, whose face is a “swollen mask of alcoholic poisoning,” is not a true believer in some Jedeo-Bolshevist plutocracy.  He’s an opportunist; a thief and a war profiteer, nothing more.  Most terrifying  is Schenck who reveals that inside Treblinka—a “wonderland of nightmares”—sadists enjoyed absolute freedom.  Considering the Taiping Rebellion—a civil war that consumed million—during his nightly boredom, Schenck muses:  “How many of us remember that?”

Treblinka became, writes McMillann, a place where “even shame is dead—it hardly even prickles the skin.”  Starved and half-delirious with fear and disease, the “work Jews” cheer after a slump in “transports,” even while their own families burn in the nightly pyres.  The Germans and their collaborators don’t just rob them of their families and goods they rip out the ability to feel.  After his family is murdered, one character realizes he is alone:  “…his attitude should be some kind of grief, but he does not feel grief.  He feels hunger, and thirst, and his skis is irritated with dirt and sour body oil.”

One of them, Janusz is slight and ignored, allowing him to steal in preparation of an armed rebellion.  McMillan mentions, though does not focus on, real characters like Rudolf Masarek, who planned and initiated the rebellion.  Meanwhile, characters like the Ukranian guard, Anatoly, whose Polish girlfriend is pregnant, smuggles the Jews guns.  He hates the Germans—though his presence represents the fact of widespread and brutal fascist collaboration. 

When Janusz enters the camp, Treblinka is not the efficient factory that Auschwitz became.  Bodies lie in the road and SS guards do not take great care to deceive Jews about their fate.  Instead of arbeit macht frei, horrified passengers are greeted by mauling dogs and the truncheon.  Before Janusz is separated from his family, his grandmother thinks, “The guards have apparently struck (the children) as they passed.  It occurs to her that such meanness could indicate that they never had any intention of killing them.  Mistreatment makes little sense.”   

Treblinka was not the efficient factory of death that Auschwitz became.  Its early leaders were inefficient and sloppy.  Bodies piled up and whole transports were left in gas chambers to suffocate—not because of purposeful brutality in this case—but because guards simply forgot about them.  With a change in leadership, Treblinka is “beautified” with paths and flowers and a new goal of orderly, efficient killing.  Even the death pits are sprinkled with flower seeds.

Janusz cares for others in the camp, nicking gold and offering candy to his comrades.  Though, they don’t understand why he does it, considering his behavior irrational and almost inappropriate considering the circumstances.  And in collaboration with another inmate, Dr. Herzennberg, Janusz picks gold and goods from the bodies—even becoming a “dentist” removing the teeth from corpses—and prepares for escape. 

Hovering over each page is the real feeling of doubt that no revolt will occur, the miserable inertia of survival will roll out into death atop the pyres.  McMillan excellently transports you into the experience of those wedged in the vice of fear and those beyond its clutches.  

 Treblinka’s guards have only contempt for the Jews, a people with “fatalistic resignation.”  For the Ukranian Anatoly, the Jews “seem to him like pigs in a slaughterhouse yard, gazing at the fence and scheming while, one by one, they are butchered.”  Even the inmates doubt that their liberation will come, some choose suicide or a trip “to the hospital” a pit with a rude shack front and bogus Red Cross flag. 

But in the broiling hours of August, 1943, a few dozen starving prisoners fight back. 

David Nasaw's The Patriarch

The Patriarch:  The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw, The Penguin Press, Nov. 13 2012, $40.00, 834 pp. 

The Patriarch dispels the false “facts” that continue to orbit Joseph P. Kennedy’s story.  Nasaw argues that Kennedy really wasn’t a bootlegger, wasn’t his sons’ puppeteer, and didn’t steal any elections.  The truths about Kennedy—like how a New York Times columnist was ghostwriting for him while praising him unbeknownst to readers—are arresting.  Slow to politics, Kennedy supported Republican Hoover over Al Smith in 1928 (even though he was later indignant that fellow Catholics didn’t vote in large numbers for his son John in 1960!)  Interestingly, Kennedy only chose not to become a Republican because of somnolent Governor Calvin Coolidge’s decision to remove an Irish American from public office as a sop to the Protestant establishment. 

Joseph made his millions on Wall Street because “no one knew how to play the angles as well as he did.”  As he says himself in one of many letter excerpts, “I knew all the angles of trading…I had studied pools and participated in them and was aware of all the intricacies and trickeries of market manipulation….I had engaged in many a furious financial fight and knew the formulas—when to duck and when to hit.” 

In fact, he knew the scams of the so-called “free market” we hear so much about—the pools, corners, wash sales, match orders—and was brought into the Roosevelt administration as the SEC chairman to help institute the regulatory state conservative business-types like he now dismantle! In effect, Kennedy regulated himself out of the stock market.  Roosevelt handled more than collaborated with Kennedy even dismissed the patriarch as a “temperamental Irish boy.”

Later he made Kennedy ambassador to England, a regrettable choice given Kennedy’s tendency for isolationism, his suspicion of the English, his hope that the British would just lie down and accept defeat, and his false belief that Hitler was a rational actor.  His notorious interview—“democracy is all done”—is given special attention and while Nasaw doesn’t dwell on the “hundreds of affairs” in which Kennedy indulged, he does highlight Kennedy’s tendency to raise the Jewish question where it didn’t belong.   As everyone knows, this engaging and enormous book cannot end well:  Kennedy outlived four of his nine children.  Three were killed (two on television), his daughter Rosemary was lobotomized, and young Edward fell into scandal. 

Joyce E. Chaplin's Round About the Earth

Chaplin, Joyce E. Round About the Earth:  Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit.  Simon & Schuster, $35.00.  560 pp.  Publication Date:  Nov. 13, 2012.

Even the feel-good cliché “Think globally, act locally” reveals the modern tendency to interact with the Earth in a totalizing way:  You can and do make a difference, goes the belief.  From Magellan to John Glenn humans have attempted to see, exploit, conquer, experience, and now protect our “globalizing” world with the terrifying result called Modern History. 

Joyce Chaplin has written a heavily-researched and alluring book detailing five centuries of “globestruck” humanity.  She begins with the “ruthless thug” Magellan who brutally subjugated and converted indigenous peoples from East Africa to India and she later discusses what one later circumnavigator called his subsequent “honorable imitators.”  But the point of travelling is not only commerce or experience it is regaling the world with new stories:  “Survivors shared misadventures, crisscrossers of each other’s paths, the men created one final traffic jam at London’s printing presses, where each was determined to get his story out first,” Chaplin writes. 

Her pages are packed with dozens of wild globe-trotting stories—even the marooned basis for Robinson Crusoe who survived on a desert island according to one traveler, “cloth’d in Goat-Skins, who look’d wilder than the first Owners of them.”  Despite the yawns elicited by the later Apollo mission and recent Mars landing, like a hungry Alexander the bright and eager forever seek new worlds to conquer:  scientists plumb the pits for extremophiles and larger telescopes peer across the universe at distant quasars.  Enlightenment rationalism has produced a hunger.  “The overall sense was that mastery of the planet had been achieved, and that humanity had always been meant to achieve it,” Chaplin writes.  “The new impulse—which still exists—is to fulfill an us-too ambition, to join the club of nations able to go round about the Earth, as if humanity might be united in planetary dominion.” 

Yet humanity has now achieved dominion but finds itself boiling in its own bathtub.  Instead of stories of heroism our travelling contemporaries produce cautionary tales of falling ice, disappearing forests, and a heating world.  Chaplin quotes one, regretful of the transformed world:  “So much of what had fascinated me on my first voyage through the world was disappearing—cultures, customs, animals, whole ecologies, all diluted, muddied or driven to extinction.”