KEY POINTS:
This is the hardest review I've ever written. Why? Because despite a lengthy foreword and afterword and a lot of padding, really it's just the diary of a 14-year-old Jewish boy living in German-occupied Prague in 1942. I kept a diary when I was 14, and the idea of anybody dissecting its strengths and weaknesses on the page of a national newspaper makes me feel sick. How can a reviewer critique such a work? Who wants their adolescent obsessions and puerility held up for the world to see? The age of 14 is not a high point for many lives.
Except for Peter Ginz, being 14 doubtless was the high point of his life, as any of you will know if you have paused to reflect on what you get if you add Jew to German occupation and multiply to 1942. Peter was "transported" to Theresienstadt concentration camp before being moved to Auschwitz, where his story ends in the ovens. It's hard not to read his diaries in this light, and this makes the whole thing resemble a macabre Punch and Judy show - the audience is prompted to yell warnings of their impending comeuppance to the painfully oblivious actors. I never found Punch and Judy that funny, come to that.
Peter is a fine young man you'd be glad to have as a friend no matter what your age. At times he is almost painfully innocent. He shows no malice towards the German occupiers, and his writing about the assassination of Reichsprotector Rheinhardt, even as the Wehrmacht are conducting brutal retributory killings, is a model of detachment from which some journalists and historians could learn quite a lot today.
There's no doubt in my mind he truly did believe that his friends, his family and eventually he himself, when facing "transportation", were simply going to be locked up for a year or two. I wince every time I read that word.
If this book has a flaw, it's that it's a bit oversold. The foreword is, as I mentioned, lengthy, and Peter's diary entry on the day of his transportation is presented before the rest of his writing. Such theatre isn't necessary in my view. The truth is as simple as it is grim. Someone was killed for no reason. Multiply that by six million or so and you've got the Final Solution. Add another three million or so and you've also got the number of German women and children and other civilians killed after the war by outraged or self-righteous Allies. A quarter of a million hapless German folk were slaughtered by Czechs, for example, not far from Theresienstadt. As many as six million children and other German civilians were then systematically starved to death in the heart of postwar Europe as a result of conscious policy by the Allies. I found coming to know a single one of all those victims sad enough. Who can grasp emotionally the truth of it happening three or six or nine million times over?
* Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a Wellington novelist and historian.
