‘Kapo’
This week, I read Alexander Tišma’s novel Kapo. This is the third in a trilogy of novels he wrote about three unrelated characters who survived the Holocaust in three different ways. This third and final work, the only one I have read, studies a kapo–one of the Jews given a privileged status in the concentration camps, allowed more access to food and shelter in exchange for participating in the camp regime and enacting violence against the prisoners.
Tišma’s protagonist, Lamian, has exactly the psychology one would expect for someone who has committed such monstrous crimes. The novel takes place in the 1980s but travels back in time to various moments. We learn that before the war, Lamian was also secluded, and distant from the world; he struggled to make any meaningful relationships with others. Once he was in the life-and-death struggle of the camps, first at Jasenovic` and then Auschwitz, he possessed the ruthless ability to read people for his own self interest and the foresight to know what
This book contains some of the most upsetting depictions of violence I have ever encountered–and I say this as a Jewish studies scholar who focuses specifically on literature and theology about pogroms and the Holocaust. I have read testimonies from Auschwitz in Yiddish, and even other works of historical fiction about kapos in Yiddish. Somehow, this one is different. While I will spare the details here, the most egregious parts of Kapo were the protagonists’s memories of enacting sexual violence against others. These memories are brought up frequently throughout the text and become the driving engine of its plot.
For Lamian, a survivor who must live with both memories of the crimes he committed and the crimes done against him, every experience. When he travels to the closest big city (Zagreb,) every scene he witnesses immediately transports him back to a memory of extreme violence which he either witnessed or perpetrated. Watching a man walk into a restaurant, sit down, and eat his meal, Lamian becomes dead certain that this man is also a Jew and a survivor, and weaves together a narrative about the kind of man he would have been in the camp, what he would have done to survive and how long he would have succeeded.
The whole world is revealed to be a deception, covering up the catastrophe of the Holocaust, which is revealed to have never ended.
In the moments of slippage between present and past, the novel reveals a great deal about the structure of time and memory. Freud, theorizing the death drive, spoke about repetition compulsion: we have a tendency to repeat the worst things that happen to us, either by unconsciously behaving in a way that causes those events to recur, or by psychically re-experiencing the feelings and emotions of the event over and over again. For Lamian, this is clearly true; every moment and every day is a repetition of his injury.
This is true also for survivors of individual traumas, smaller events that can happen in one’s life without being part of a collective catastrophe like the Holocaust. Another way of saying this is that the experience of the trauma lives on inside us, and our mind can return to that state at any time. Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, says that the unconscious is like the city of Rome: all of its manifestations and forms, from ancient times until today, remain present in layers. Sometimes, when one is transported back to a traumatic memory, it feels as if all subsequent layers have melted away.
The novel also offers fascinating theorizations of Jewishness in a few such places. For the narrator, Lamian, who was baptized and uncircumcised, Jewishness was never a religion or even a community but rather just an unfortunate marker of difference. It has no real content, other than the profound ways in which it has affected his life through the camps. The meaning of this identity changes, before and after the war. Some time after the 1967 war, or Israel’s first incursion into southern Lebanon in 1978, the meaning of Jewishness changes. Lamian is shocked to learn from his liaison that she was mostly interested in him just because he was Jewish. Something different. Prior to that moment, he had never considered that Jewishness was anything less than a stain.
Reprehensible as this character may be, and as difficult as the novel was to read, it lays bare some deep truths that might be inaccessible through other forms of writing about the Holocaust. It is Lamian’s great shame about his acts as a kapo that requires him, within the narrative, to revisit it constantly; he has never spoken to anyone about his life in the camps and he wants to, in his old age, to be seen and understood before he dies. With this tremendous burden of honesty propelling him across present and past, the character teaches us about the relationship between memory and the world.