THE HOLOCAUST KINGDOM

Memoir by Alexander Donat, 1965

Written with the insight of a skilled journalist, Alexander Donat's memoir The Holocaust Kingdom (1965) describes several incidents that have become well known in Holocaust studies. Commenting, for example, on the transport of children from the orphanage of Janusz Korczak in the Warsaw Ghetto, he recalls Korczak leading the little ones in an orderly procession to the trains and then joining them for their journey to Treblinka. Perhaps because Donat was himself a father, he was especially sensitive to the plight of the children. He saw his two-year-old boy go from a playful toddler to a child paralyzed with fear. Whenever Donat left the room, he relates, his son would "tighten his grip on me, uttering only the single word: 'Daddy."' Here the memoir reveals a definitive dimension of the assault that characterized the Holocaust, an assault on the father as a father by rendering him powerless to respond to his little one's cry of "Daddy."

Donat recalls another commonly related incident, included, for example, in Emmanuel Ringelblum 's Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto. According to the story, a German who came into the ghetto was about to take away a mother's child when he turned and answered her pleas by saying, "If you can guess which of my eyes is a glass eye, I shall spare your child." When she correctly identified the artificial eye, he asked her how she could tell it was the one. She answered, "It looks more human than the other one." Here and elsewhere in his memoir, Donat shows that in their assault on the human image the Nazis lost their humanity.

Much of Donat's memoir is a remembrance of the unraveling of his world and of his identity. He writes, "The very bases of our faith had crumbled: the Polish fatherland whose children we had always considered ourselves; two thousand years of Christianity, silent in the face of Nazism; our own lie-ridden civilization. We were despairingly alone, stripped of all we had held sacred." What he laments is a situation in which, in order to remain a human being, one could not live as a human being but was forced to die as a human being. One of the few to survive the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Donat points out that, unlike any other uprising, this one was not carried out with the aim of victory. Rather, he says, "it was undertaken solely for death with dignity." Pursuing further the question of what it means to be a human being, Donat recalls the moment when he was inducted into Majdanek: "I looked at my number: 7,115. From that moment I ceased to be a man." Hence the advice he received from another inmate to "forget who and what you were." That forgetting, however, is precisely what Donat seeks to overcome in the writing of his memoir.

Donat overcomes the loss of his humanity by remembering how other people dealt with the assault. He recalls, for example, the importance of washing one's face, even with snow or dirty water, just to affirm the value of the face and therefore of the person. "Those who failed to wash every day," he observes, "soon died." He also recalls the profoundly lifesaving significance of the smallest act of kindness in that realm where kindness was all but unknown. Recalling a family he met in Radom, for instance, he writes, "What brought me back to life, pulled me up out of the depths of despair was warmth, compassion, kind words the Melcers gave me." Thus, Donat's human identity was awakened by the humanity of others.

And yet for Donat, as for many other survivors, the return to the world of humanity at the end of the war posed immense difficulties. "I was afraid of my new freedom," he explains. "I was afraid of returning to normal life and its activities because they seemed like desecration of the memory of those who had perished … But most of all I feared going home." Why did he fear home? He did so because the foundations of the home—the idea of the home—had been reduced to ashes, along with the mothers, fathers, and children who constituted the home. With this memory Donat reveals a difficulty confronted not only by him but by all humanity. Both emerged from the Holocaust in a state of exile.

—David Patterson