Uncertainties

Left to my own devices I would never have considered reading Antonio Iturbe's The Librarian of Auschwitz. I did so since a copy of the paperback suddenly appeared on my desk at work earlier this year, presumably a gift from a colleague. In the event I found it a readable enough text, but even after completing it I'm still not quite sure how to place the work. I suppose it's a novel, but there's a strong element of a memoir about it, based as it on the experiences of one of the survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, one Dita Kraus. The problem is that it isn't at all clear how far the Spanish novelist (the translation into English is by Lilit Zekulin) has taken liberties with the real life events in his fictionalising of the horror undergone by Ms Kraus - and the other real-life inmates of the camp who appear in the narrative. It doesn't help that the shifting of point of view is extremely clunky. As soon as I finished reading I did a bit of googling around the text to get some background and wasn't surprised to find the novel classed as being written for Young Adults. That helped account for the clunkiness of the narrative and the odd feeling that the text seemed haunted by rather ham-fisted attempts at the inspirational.

I suppose I feel quite guilty about reading the book. As if I'm unable to manage a response involving the kind of deep human sympathy the victims of the camp deserve. And particularly so for Dita Kraus herself. Maybe it's just this book, but I have a feeling that I'm just not the right kind of reader for any kind of fiction related to the Holocaust. Somehow the very notion of story-telling seems suspect in the face of the enormity of what took place. Though as a way of introducing young people to the horrors of it all perhaps there's some virtue in this work and others in the field.