A moral dilemma is at the heart of the story of how one Dutch Jewish family survived Theresienstadt, the so-called model Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, in Montreal writer Monique Polak’s affecting new historical novel What World Is Left (Orca).
The narrator, teenaged Anneke, is angry and confused when she learns that her adored father, Joseph Van Raalte, a well-known newspaper cartoonist, is making illustrations that feed the Nazi propaganda machine.
She wonders if this is why the family, which includes her parents and younger brother, and later her paternal grandfather, are allowed to live in their own apartment, rather than in barracks as most of the tens of thousands of other prisoners do.
It also dawns on her that her father’s co-operation may also be keeping the family from being deported to the death camps as so many others have been, and, worst of all, lulling the world.
Anneke is a happy-go-lucky 14-year-old when the family is deported from Broek, the town outside Amsterdam, where they live.
The Van Raaltes are assimilated, and Anneke is barely aware that she is Jewish, and therefore extremely perplexed by their treatment. Her innocent faith that people are basically good will soon be shattered.
Although the book is intended for teenage readers, Polak spares little of the horror that the family must endure for the next 2-1/2 years of their internment, until the Russian army liberates the camp in 1945.
Theresienstadt is an 18th-century town intended for 7,000 residents, where up 10 times that number of prisoners were crammed in, as more and more trainloads of Jews were brought in. Many were artists or musicians.
Initially, the Van Raalte family lives in the overcrowded barracks, with its tiers of bunks, before they move into their own place.
Life does not improve that much otherwise. All must do hard physical labour, in Anneke’s case scrubbing huge cauldrons in the kitchen, while subsisting on very little food. The most substantial meal of the day is a thin soup.
Living conditions were unsanitary, and bedbugs and lice are a daily foe. Baths are limited to once every three weeks because of the water shortage.
The Nazi overlords delight in humiliating the inmates, when not physically brutalizing them.
Disease is soon rampant, and deaths epidemic and the crematoria work overtime. Anneke has chronic tonsillitis, until the infected glands are removed without anesthetic. To not be able to work would have meant certain deportation.
The inmates are in constant fear and despair. Anneke herself becomes strangely numbed.
Yet, some normal emotions survive in this nightmare. Anneke falls in love with a young man, who is doomed.
In the midst of this deprivation, the Nazis have the audacity to launch the “Embellishment,” a campaign to pretty up the camp in preparation for a visit in 1943 by the Danish Red Cross, which basically falls for the ruse. Emboldened, the Nazis the following year order the making of a documentary intended to show the world how benevolently they are treating the interned Jews, putting a famous German Jewish director, Kurt
Gerron, in charge. The film was titled The Führer Gives a City to the Jews.
Anneke’s doubts about her father reach their most intense when she discovers he is helping with the film’s artwork.
Her father, of course, contends he had no choice and would do what he had to save his family. But there is more to it than this, Anneke eventually discovers, which redeems her father in her eyes.
What World Is Left is written with a clarity and freshness that makes it enjoyable reading despite the grim subject matter. Unlike Theresienstadt, Polak has seen that no ‘embellishment’ is needed when the story is told with the frankness of youth.
The book is inspired by and dedicated to Polak’s Dutch-born mother, Celien, who was imprisoned as a teen in Theresienstadt. Her father, Jo Spier, a noted artist, drew propaganda drawings for the Nazis, and a sense of guilt lingered in the family over their survival.
Celien Spier, now 79, wife of former judge and MNA Maximilien Polak, also Dutch born, has lived quietly in Côte St. Luc for more than 40 years raising her family. She spoke very little about what happened to her during the Holocaust.
Polak, an English and humanities teacher at Marianopolis College and author of seven other novels for young adults, finally persuaded her mother that what happened to her must finally be told.
Although the book is fiction and the thoughts of its characters the product of imagination, Polak said she has done her best to ensure that What World Is Left is historically accurate. She travelled to Holland and the Czech Republic in 2007 to further her research, and lists a selected bibliography in the back of the novel.