Extraordinary stories from ordinary people who survived the Holocaust

By CHERYL PEARL SUCHER*

THE AMERICAN PIMPERNEL:The Man who Saved the Artists on Hitler's Death List

By Andy Marino

Random House $27.95


THE AVENGERS: A JEWISH WAR STORY

By Rich Cohen

Jonathan Cape $66.95


More than 50 years after the Allies liberated Europe from the tentacles of the Nazi Reich, miraculous stories of ordinary people made extraordinary by the horror of the Holocaust are still being told, many for the first time. The sun is setting on the lives of the remaining survivors, soldiers and witnesses, many of whom chose silence as a way of moving out of a tortured, vanished past into the hope of any future.

But the chilling fear that the world will lose the stories it never knew of selfless heroism, proud resistance and remarkable bravery has propelled many of the silent to come forward to give their final testimonies.

Two new books of non-fiction recount in vivid, captivating prose the drama and importance of the lives of a few of these ordinary, extraordinary individuals.

The American Pimpernel, by Andy Marino, tells the epic tale of Varian Fry, a slight, bespectacled academic and magazine editor transformed by the war into the fearless rescuer of thousands of artists, musicians, scientists, thinkers and writers. Immortalised as one of the Righteous Gentiles enshrined in Israel's Yad Vashem, Fry was "America's Oskar Schindler," yet he died in 1967 in virtual obscurity even though his autobiography, Surrender on Demand, was published in 1945 and he proudly received France's Legion d'Honneur only months before his death.

Rich Cohen's The Avengers reconstructs a parallel heroic saga, scripting a history previously captured in Aviva Kempner's Academy Award winning documentary, The Partisans of Vilna. Focusing on the unconventional love affair between Abba Kovner, Vitka Kempner and Ruzka Korczak (who was the author's grandmother's only surviving European relation), Cohen passionately relates the trio's Herculean odyssey as a fast-paced, gripping, heartbreaking thriller. His story begins in the cramped streets of Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, in the days preceding the Nazi invasion. Abba, Vitka and Ruzka meet as compatriots in the Hashomer Ha'Tzair, a secular Zionist cadre, and become beloved and sacred to one another as they are shuttled into the ghetto, starved and forced into hard labour, watching helplessly as their families are deported to distant "work" sites. Realising that virtually no one returns from such deportations, they meet a lone survivor who tells them that the deportees were slaughtered in the death pits of Ponar.

Determined not to be killed without a fight, their united strength and vision catapults them to the forefront of the first armed Jewish resistance during the Second World War. Leading the Vilna ghetto rebellion, they escaped by fleeing through narrow sewer tunnels to dugouts in the Rudnicki forests, surviving as daring officers of the Jewish Brigade, executing secret bombing missions against Nazi soldier and ammunition transports.

After the liberation, they watched in horror as many Jewish survivors returned to violent and often murderous homecomings. This only fired their incendiary vision that the only future for the Jewish people rested in a self-determining Zionist homeland. As a result, they joined with the Palestinian Jewish Brigade of the liberating British Army and secret minions of the Haganah, the fledgling Israeli Armed Forces, to shepherd in the Brihchah, the illegal immigration of Jewish refugees into Palestine.

And if that was not enough, they masterminded a poisonous revenge against numerous Nazi criminals awaiting trial in the barracks of Nuremberg, earning them the author's accolade as "the avengers." Unlike Fry, however, Abba, Vitka and Ruzka found prominence and purpose in their postwar lives as builders of the State of Israel. Abba, a lean, strong man with an artist's wild mane and a warrior's fierce countenance became a soldier/poet as well as a symbol of Jewish defiance. He was also the designer of Tel Aviv's Diaspora Museum, "built to tell the story not just of the slaughter of the Holocaust, but of the years of Jewish life that had come before the slaughter." He died in 1987, Ruzka a year later, and Vitka remains alone, a practising psychiatrist who has done revolutionary work in helping troubled children to communicate.

Both authors seem compelled to tell stories that counter the collective image of Jews as passively accepting the brutal fate of historical determinism. Even though Fry is a Gentile, Marino portrays him as an anguished pariah enduring a Diaspora of his own creation, almost an Old Testament prophetic figure.

Marino tells Fry's story as a quest narrative, beginning in 1965 with the discovery by Donald Carroll, a London book editor, of a minor footnote to a book on Marc Chagall which stated that Chagall had been one of many artists who escaped to New York City through the good offices of the "Fry Committee." The organisation was actually called the Emergency Rescue Committee and Carroll soon learned that Fry had been responsible for saving the lives of Andre Breton, Franz and Alma Werfel, Heinrich Mann, Hannah Arendt, Wanda Landowska and Claude Levi-Strauss among others.

Iconoclastic, self-reverential and uncompromisable, Fry repels as much as he attracts yet this combativeness fires his purpose and inspires those he commands. Ultimately his fierce nature will lead to his own postwar isolation and disintegration. but his flawed character, Marino insists, should not underscore the magnitude of his achievement.

Both authors begin their texts by proclaiming that they are living on the historical cusp where recent past is flowing into recorded history.

They write as if in a frenzy. The reader can sense the clock of time ticking at their backs as they work to track down the last remaining witnesses and survivors.

What is left to know about the Shoah, the Holocaust, already so fervently documented in innumerable histories, memoirs, biographies, films and testimonies, one might ask. If these two books are but a sampling, probably more than we can ever know. Each account of that cataclysmic era brings new atrocities as well as acts of transcendent courage to light. To live without these stories is to face the darkness. To paraphrase Abba Kovner, how can one prevent future atrocities without knowing and understanding what came before?

* Cheryl Sucher is a Dunedin writer.