Review
07.08.2013

A BOOK AS A MEMENTO

Juraj Špitzer: I Did Not Want to Be a Jew

Juraj Špitzer

I Did Not Want to Be a Jew / Nem akartam zsidó lenni

Bábel Kiadó, Budapest 2007

Translated by Oľga L. Gály

           

The publication of Oľga L.Gály’s Hungarian translation of Juraj Špitzer’s I Did Not Want to Be a Jew (Kalligram, Bratislava 1994) is a noteworthy and significant editorial act. The author felt the need, even duty to share his memories of the events he had witnessed, with his posterity. His testimony astonishes and horrifies because it is authentic. He tells the stories of people forcefully taken from their homes, families and friends. In the concentration camps, where they were taken, they directly experienced cruelty, humiliation, restrictions, aggression and sadism. The uncertain future ahead of them brought them fear and sorrow. Anger and helplessness did not allow them to think freely. There was no help for them. It was a life spent on the border between despair and moments of hope. These people’s only “mistake” was that they were born Jewish.

            The younger generations do not remember the horrors of this not-so-distant past, perhaps they do not even believe it. The story of these events is written by a person who personally experienced them together with millions of other innocent victims. This young man of nearly 20 years spent two-and-a-half years in a labor camp in Nováky, separated from his family. It was not until later that he learned that his parents had died in Poland. In the absurd environment of the camp, he searched for the meaning of life and the relation in the inhuman acts of the guards, whom he characterized very accurately. He tried to peek into the minds of people facing extreme situations, while trying to remain a human being under all circumstances. He gives a very interesting account of camp inhabitants’ night talks on the topics of homeland, assimilation, otherness, collective guilt, the feeling of helplessness and danger, and the indifference of others. These people’s unhappiness sprang from their feeling like outsiders, even though they lived in their place of birth. The others considered them to be outcasts, doomed to extermination.

            The author believes that complexes and feelings of inferiority of Central Europeans – Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, the Polish and Russians – rooted in history, result from the differences in their development and their relationships with one another.  But the Jews are scattered all over the world, their home being the entire globe. This idea must have seemed absurd in a camp encircled in barbed wire.

            The significance and contribution of the Hungarian translation of this book is in its availability for Hungarian readers because the same events took place in Hungary, only a little later. Many Jews who tried to save themselves by fleeing to Hungary encountered the same fate. The author’s testimony – a mosaic of events in a camp where lives were eliminated on a mass scale, proves that one can remain a human being even in the most absurd and dangerous situations. It is also a documentary about Bratislava, and about Židovská (translator’s note: Jewish) street, an enclave of poverty and pogroms.

            Juraj Špitzer’s I Did Not Want to Be a Jew is meant to be a memento with an exclamation point so that the horrors of the past never repeat, and people, despite their differences, are tolerant towards each other. That is the message for the civilized world of today, for Central Europe and Slovakia as well.

                                                                                          Translated by Saskia Hudecová