The books that survived Auschwitz

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Sixty-one years after the end of World War Two, it seems almost presumptuous to read another book about it. Few human conflicts have had such unforgettable narrators, from Gunter Grass to Anne Frank to Joseph Heller.

Even so, every time we ask, "What more could there be to say?", one writer or another answers. This month, the answer came from two writers, one speaking from the past, one rooted in the present.

In 1941, Irene Nemirovsky wrote in her journal, "My God! what is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life. And the other countries? What are they to me? Empires are dying. Nothing matters... Let us keep a cool head. Let us harden our heart. Let us wait."

Over the next year, as France trembled, Nemirovsky continued to write in her journal. She was a well-known novelist, the author of nine previous works, and her husband, Michel Epstein, was highly respected, but they were also Jews. Nemirovsky could no longer be published in France because of the ban on non-Aryan authors. This didn't stop her from beginning work on an ambitious novel. Most of her journal entries were what she called "Notes on the State of France"""observations that found their way into the first two parts of Suite Francaise, "Storm in June" and "Dolce".

Nemirovsky planned Suite Francaise on an epic scale. It was to be in four parts, like a symphony: "Lord! That makes 1,600 typed pages! Well, well, if I live in it!" she wrote on 30 June, 1941. By June 1942, she had finished two parts. "Storm in June" followed the travails of Parisians as they fled after the Nazi invasion, pitilessly chronicling the greed and pettiness along with the heroism. Nemirovsky wrote "Storm" as Paris emptied, and "Dolce", set in a small village under occupation, from personal experience. By July 11, 1942, she had roughed out her notes on the third section, "Captivity".

Two days later, Nemirovsky was arrested. She died at Auschwitz on August 17, 1942; her husband, Michel, was gassed at Auschwitz in November the same year. Nemirovsky's two daughters survived, in terrible conditions, and Denise managed to save what she thought was her mother's diary. The girls preserved the book, but couldn't bring themselves to read it""the memories were too painful. Denise finally read the journal in the late 1990s; Suite Francaise was finally translated this year, and published sixty-five years after it was written.

To read it today is an astonishing, moving experience. "Storm in June" and "Dolce" are complete in themselves. Those who know Nemirovsky's story will bring complex emotions to Suite Francaise""compassion, horror, pity""and yet if you knew nothing about her, this novel would still stand as one of the great works of World War Two. "What interests me is the history of the world," Nemirovsky wrote; in her view, the book portrayed nothing less than a struggle between individual and collective destiny.

Markus Zusak could not have read Suite Francaise before he wrote The Book Thief, and his novel is far more stylised than Nemirovsky's, but she would not have disapproved of him. The narrator of The Book Thief is Death, who knows that we know how every story set in WWII ends:

"...It would all have come to nothing had the Germans not loved one particular activity.

To burn.
The Germans loved to burn things. Shops, synagogues, Reichstags, houses, personal items, slain people, and of course, books."

Death does his job to the best of his ability, especially in such a time of hectic employment, but his attention is snagged by a young girl called Liesel who begins to steal books from the ritual book burnings. She becomes a reader, and as street after street burns, as her friends and family became part of different bonfires, she becomes a writer. In the hands of a less talented writer, The Book Thief might have been gimmicky; in the hands of Zusak, who made his reputation as a children's writer, this is a compelling, darkly funny novel.

The story of Liesel's manuscript is as dark as the story of Nemirovsky's manuscript. Zusak is free to create the most unusual agent of all times for Liesel, though; as her manuscript is tossed onto a garbage truck, Death manages to rescue it. "It's lucky I was there," he writes. "Then again, who am I kidding? I'm in most places at least once, and in 1943, I was just about everywhere." To read both these books, Suite Francaise and The Book Thief, side by side, is to be reminded of the terrible truth of that casual aside.

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