A DAMAGED MIRROR: A story of memory and redemption By Ovadya ben Malka & Yael Shahar Kasva Press • $16.95 ISBN: 978-09910584-4-0 406 pages A window into the Jewish soul in the wake of trauma Chaya Rosen
Seventy years after the end of World War II, the Holocaust is still very much with us—an unanswered question, an unfinished business, an open wound. The fact that two of this year's contenders for the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film deal with the Nazi extermination camps and their aftermath demonstrates that we are still struggling to digest these horrors; and while László Nemes’s Son of Saul and Giulio Ricciarelli’s Labyrinth of Lies help to further the process, it will be a long time before the last word is said on the subject, if it ever is. The things I need to say can only be written furtively on scraps of smuggled paper, in moments of time stolen from the dead for the sake of their memory. They can only be hidden away in tins and jars, carefully sealed with scraps of cloth and hidden with great fear and greater longing amid fragmented bones—buried in the uncaring ground soaked with our blood. We bury them as we could not bury our loved ones. These things can never be told.” (Ovadya ben Malka, A Damaged Mirror) For some of us, this is no surprise. Those who grew up in the shadow of the Shoah often spend their lives reacting against their parents’ memories. I am a daughter of Holocaust survivors, and the Shoah colors me, frames me, defines me… and I am certain it has also affected my own children. I’ve read everything I could get my hands on about that time, to try to understand, to try to come to terms with who my parents are and where they’ve been. But nothing could bridge the gap. But as much as I wanted to know, the need of those who wanted to tell what they experienced was far greater. It is this need to defeat the oblivion decreed by the Nazis that drives A Damaged Mirror (Kasva Press, 2015). For decades, the stories of the Sonderkommando went untold. In the immediate aftermath of the war, it was believed that none of the SK members had survived—an error that the few who did survive were in no hurry to correct, as the Sonderkommando were seen as collaborators by other survivors. Ironically, those who had the greatest need to tell what they saw were those whose stories were least likely to be believed. The Sonderkommando, wrote Primo Levi, “had much to atone for and would naturally attempt to rehabilitate themselves at the expense of the truth.” Thus, their silence—already guarded by anguish—was sealed by suspicion. It was not until the publication of Gideon Greif’s groundbreaking work We Wept Without Tears that the voices of the Sonkerkommando began to be heard. For many, it was too late. Where does memory go when it cannot be told? That is the question asked by A Damaged Mirror. Like Son of Saul, A Damaged Mirror is not for the faint-hearted. The book takes us into the heart and soul of one who has lost everything, including himself. Step-by-step, we are led into desolation, as Ovadya ben Malka, a 17 year-old Greek Jew, fights to retain some vestige of selfhood in a world gone mad. Like the protagonist in Son of Saul, Ovadya’s struggle is not one of survival—that has already been pretty much ruled out—but of fighting, while life remains, to maintain some vestige of humanity in situation where all humanity has been stripped away. Six decades later, torn apart by shame and the longing for the innocent faith of his youth, Ovadya relives the horrors on a nightly basis, but is unable to speak of the past: “I remember, but nothing emerges into the light of day. It rattles around in the darkness of my soul, making a hollow sound. But outside, there is only silence. What is there to say?” We meet Ovadya long after his time in Auschwitz-Birkenau, when his need for justice has finally overcome his fear of speaking of what he did to survive. His story is bound up with that of Yael, born into a non-Jewish family in Texas—seemingly an unlikely candidate to bridge the gap between Ovadya and his dead. We know now where grief untold goes; it goes on to haunt future generations. It gets left behind on the grating; it passes unscathed through temperatures that can melt iron and reduce human bone to ash. And somewhere far removed in space and decades into the future, a stranger wakes out of a sound sleep with an inexplicable nightmare and a despair so deep as to negate life itself. (A Damaged Mirror) Eventually, with Yael as mediator, Ovadya takes his case to a rabbinic judge, Rav Ish-Shalom. “I just need to face this and have it over,” Ovadya tells the rabbi. “According to our laws, what should I have done, and what must I do now to be clean of this?” The answer to his questions form the backbone of the book, as Rav Ish-Shalom draws on the wisdom of Jewish tradition to help Ovadya reclaim what he can from the ashes. In confronting his past, Ovadya is forced to face some hard truths about the nature of human good and evil. “The fact that good people can be forced to do wrong doesn’t make them less good,” he says. “But it also doesn’t make the wrong less wrong.” Who are we when our identity is stripped away? How much responsibility do we have for what our hands do under extreme compulsion? And how do we reconcile what we’ve done with who we want to be? This is a book about choices, but even more about how we rebuild in the aftermath of wrong choices. It is a book about healing and forgiveness earned the hard way, through struggling to make amends; and it is a book about regaining faith in a silent God. But for me, it is also a glimpse into the events that formed me. I have never read a book that had a greater impact. Early on in the reading, I was tempted to reach for a highlighter, lest I lose this word or that revelation. It was a good thing that I did not, for my copy would have ended up bleeding yellow ink by the end! I found myself reading sentences over and over again, talking out loud to no one in the room. Why had I never read this kind of book before? And why had I never asked these questions? Shahar and ben Malka’s powerful writing echoes with the voices of Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl, and Primo Levi—but it reaches beyond them, giving us a book of resounding impact that will surely continue to affect us for years to come. Chaya Rosen is the author of In the Shadow of God: Poems of Memory & Healing. 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