The Cap, or The Price of a Life. By Roman Frister. Translated by Hillel Halkin. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 385 pp. £18.99 in UK
To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942-1945. Translated by Martin Chalmers. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 554 pp. £20 in UK
In Tel Aviv, there may be an editor who tried to tell Roman Frister to keep it simple, to tell his story chronologically, to leave out a few of the wives and girlfriends. Frister, a Polish Jew who survived six concentration camps, worked as a journalist and apparatchik in postwar Poland, and then moved to Israel where he made his name covering the Six-Day War. He returned briefly to Poland to buy up newspapers for Robert Maxwell after the fall of communism.
Frister does not owe his survival or success to the cautious advice of others. In this case, though, that editor would have been right. The Cap is a maddening work of autobiography, an example of how the drama and human interest of a remarkable life can be diminished by banal prose. At times, it reads like the memoirs of an aged politician or movie star, boasting lazily about rivals bested and starlets bagged. At other times it reads like a bad crime novel. Human beings are constantly being offered for sale, in suspiciously uniform scenarios ("400 zlotys and she's yours").
Frister insists on re-creating these decades-old transactions word for word and, although he occasionally registers an awareness of the unreliability of memory, he apparently doesn't realise that all of the characters in his book speak in the same hard-boiled voice.
He seems determined to write not a Holocaust memoir, but rather a memoir in which the Holocaust figures as simply one of many experiences in a multifarious life. It is a noble, but doomed, conceit. He saves for last the core narrative of his concentration-camp odyssey - and this is by far the most effective part of the book, both because the events described are extraordinary in themselves and because, realising this, Frister in these pages is no longer so neurotically keen to entertain.
The title refers to an episode in which, having had his own Auschwitz cap stolen, Frister stole someone else's cap, knowing that this would cause the man to be shot. He says he feels no guilt. "Today," he writes, "I am one of the lucky survivors who isn't haunted by nightmares of the Holocaust."
His translator has done him no favours here, but the point is clear, and one could hardly begrudge Frister his peace of mind. He concludes with a rhetorical question: "How can the acts of a time of blackness be judged by the values of a time of light?" How indeed - but Frister is unwilling, or unable, to take the moral analysis any further.
Primo Levi, who had so much more to say about the impossible ethics of Auschwitz, eventually succumbed to his own nightmares; and it may be that the price of Frister's life is that capacity for deeper reflection whose absence weakens this intermittently fascinating book.
In 1939 Walter Benjamin copied into his notebook a report from Vienna, where the gas company had cut off service to Jews; it seemed the Jews were using the gas to commit suicide, and thus failing to pay their bills. This is the sort of sickening detail - "bagatelles for future students", he called them in a mordant moment - that Victor Klemperer recorded almost daily in diaries kept in Dresden throughout the Nazi period, of which To the Bitter End is the second volume to be published in English.
Like Benjamin, Klemperer was a German-Jewish literary scholar; unlike Benjamin and almost every other member of the German-Jewish intelligentsia, he was neither done to death nor driven into exile by the Nazis. By virtue of his marriage to an "Aryan", Klemperer was "privileged" - which didn't save his job, his house or his rights, but which did keep him out of Auschwitz. And, due to his wife's weak constitution, his own fatalism, and a genuine belief in Germany - as late as 1942 he could still write that he was "waiting for the Germans to come back" - Klemperer never seriously considered emigrating.
Klemperer's reference to "future students" was not ironic. As the years passed, he increasingly recognised that his diaries were of historical value in their own right, and not simply as notes towards his study of the language of the Third Reich (soon to be published in English).
These notes, kept in real time, are perhaps more telling than any systematic study could be. With a sense of fascinated horror, Klemperer noted the crudeness of Nazi propaganda - how, as with the deceptions of a child, the lie invariably pointed to the truth. His amazement, recorded in the first volume, at how so many Germans could have been taken in, gives way in the present volume to a measure of relief at how many were not taken in. Again and again, as he scurried fearfully through the back streets of Dresden, a passer-by would notice his yellow star and make an encouraging remark, or cross the street to shake his hand.
OF COURSE, these moments couldn't make up for the vicious taunts he had to endure (mainly from children), or for the terror of Gestapo raids on the Jews' houses in which he lived, or for the loss of his job, or for the dozens of other official indignities (he kept a list) to which Jews were subjected. Nor could they erase the terrible knowledge that, if the diaries were discovered, he, his wife, the Aryan friend who hid the accumulating pages for him, and numerous other people named in the diaries would be killed. More than once he wondered if bearing witness in this way was an act of "criminal vanity".
Miraculously, Victor Klemperer and his diaries survived the Nazis - and the catastrophic Allied bombing of Dresden. For his vanity we can only be grateful.
Walter Benjamin, who took his own life in 1940 in the belief that he was about to fall into the hands of the Gestapo, famously wrote that "there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism". These diaries - kept by a man who often remarked that he lacked the courage to commit suicide - transcend the logic of Benjamin's maxim.
For here is a great document of civilisation that owes its status as such not to its confirmation of what history tells us about the Third Reich, but to its scrupulous, dogged, intelligent, lonely witness to barbarism at a time when that history had yet to be written.
Brendan Barrington is a critic and editor
Fifty years after he was released from Dachau concentration camp, Bill Basch returned with his son. A Jewish citizen of Hungary, he was arrested in November 1944 and sent to Buchenwald. Of the journey to that camp in a cattle truck, he wrote: "people had died, children were screaming, and there were women giving birth and having to kill their babies because they knew that annihilation awaited most of them." From The Last Days: Steven Speilberg and Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20 in UK. The book chronicles the devastation of Hungarian Jewry in World War II, in which hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were murdered in the final months of the war. Basch writes of his survival: "We couldn't remain moral because survival was everything, and those that survived were those who were prepared to break the moral code."