Gotz and Meyer [Hardcover]

Gotz and Meyer. To the narrator who has lost all his family to the Holocaust, these non-commissioned SS officers are nondescript, almost featureless, blonde-haired, blue-eyed. Without doubt, they are loyal to the Reich and the Fuhrer. Their truck, a Sauer, is specially made, hermetically sealed and can hold up to a hundred people at a time. The occupants think they are leaving a terrible camp, the Fairgrounds, near Belgrade, in Serbia, climbing cooperatively into the vehicle. After a trip that ends with the death of the passengers, their corpses are unloaded by seven Serbians, who drag them unceremoniously to a ready mass grave. Most of the occupants are women and children, the Serbian Jewish men long since murdered, save a few to keep order in the camps.

The Nazi's have a systematic design for deceiving Jews, setting up the Jewish Administration, convincing them the camps are really reception centers before transportation to an undesignated country. None of the incarcerated Jews ever try to run away, so thoroughly entrenched in the deception, participants in a cogent and orderly world to the end. Gassing is cost-effective, considering the price of ammunition, not to mention easier psychologically on all concerned, but it is the very efficiency that begins to eat at the narrator, as he sifts through facts about Gotz and Meyer's particular assignment, the amount of food and milk allotted to each prisoner, the harvesting of false hope to assure compliance, the stoic resolve of the commanders, the willing Jewish Administration trying to alleviate the suffering in the camp.

His imagination at times paralyzed by conjured images, the bland, dutiful Gotz and Meyer become the stuff of nightmare, the narrator's family members climbing obediently into the truck, their innocence irrelevant. In his mind, the narrator holds conversations with Gotz and Meyer, positing questions about their smoothly consummated work, until finally, the Fairgrounds is silent, empty of life. The author's construct is all the more powerful when told from the perspective of the two faceless men, their surgical precision a contrast to the humanity they deliver to death day after day. The banality of evil achieves a curious balance, the horrors more chilling for their impersonal exactitude. But all of these voices, these imagined personalities have vanished into the past, buried by Serbians in mass graves, their youthful hopes extinguished by the carbon monoxide of a death vehicle, the harbinger of their redemption, "In the tangible world you have no choice".

In a most ingenious manner, the narrator rejoins his lost relatives, finding a measure of peace after a harrowing but necessary journey. At a time when historical revisionists seek to deny the existence of the Holocaust, such books are a reminder that "memory is the only way to conquer death". Luan Gaines/ 2005.

The speaker of this long monologue by Serbian author David Albahari is a teacher of Serbo-Croatian language and literature, a 50-year-old Jewish man who has been trying to fill in the spaces in his family tree after World War II in Yugoslavia. The extermination of Jews started early in Yugoslavia, with most of the Jewish men of Serbia shot to death by the fall of 1941, and "the Jewish Question in Serbia almost completely solved" by April, 1942, when virtually all Jewish men, women, and children were dead.

Imagining the lives of Gotz and Meyer, two SS guards who were responsible for over 5000 Jewish deaths, the speaker examines the events for which Gotz and Meyer were responsible between November, 1941, and April, 1942--the executions of one thousand Jews per month in the Belgrade Saurer truck they drove daily. The truck, with its hermetically sealed rear compartment, had a hole in the floor into which the exhaust was pumped as prisoners were being taken from the Belgrade Fairgrounds camp, where they were housed, to "better" accommodations elsewhere, "a concern of the German government for the good of the prisoners" that the speaker finds "touching."

Albahari exhibits a mordant humor as his speaker imagines the inner lives of Gotz and Meyer. Often juxtaposing horrifying atrocity against simple, folksy observation, the speaker fantasizes about "Gotz, or was it Meyer," a phrase which echoes throughout the narrative. As he puts himself into their minds, he wonders if they had nicknames, if their wives had pet names for them, and if they ever regretted what they were doing, since they were so good at their jobs. "Killing, too, is an art," the speaker says, "and it has its own rules."

As Albahari includes the terrible statistics, he also exhibits the dark ironies of the circumstances, setting the facts into sharp relief and increasing the shock. He imagines reports on the load distribution of the bodies in the truck and how they might have contributed to a broken rear axle, contemplates the comforting effects of a lightbulb in the truck as the bodies start to fall, and "worries" about the red tape of co-ordination.

Gradually, Gotz and Meyer become more human for the reader, and when the speaker takes his class on a field trip to the site of the Fairgrounds camp, he asks each to imagine himself/herself as one of his relatives. As the horror of the events gradually register with the students, the teacher comments: "Memory is the only way to conquer death," he says, "even when the body merely goes the way of all matter and spins in an endless circle of transformations." A strange novel of the Holocaust, all the more shocking because of the contrasts between the facts and the dark humor, Gotz and Meyer is a memorable short novel and worthy addition to Holocaust literature. n Mary Whipple

This addition to the lengthy bibliography of Holocaust-related fiction centers on the Final Solution's application in Nazi-occupied Serbia from November 1941 to April 1942. Specifically, the camp established at the fairgrounds outside Belgrade, where approximately 5,000 Jews were interred. The narrator is a middle-aged literature professor whose ancestors mostly perished either at the camp or in a truck repurposed as a mobile gas chamber. This truck was operated by the titular SS men, who, over the course of a few months, drove the 5,000 away -- ostensibly to a newer, better facility, but in reality to a mass grave. The book is the professor's reimagining of the two men's duties, of the final weeks of their victims, and of the city's non-Jewish bystanders. Over the course of the book, he delves deeper and deeper into archives, records, and history itself, in an attempt to understand it all -- gradually driving himself somewhat mad in the process. In attempting to put a face on the two Germans, he starts to have conversations with them, and then even visions. Along the way, themes familiar to the Holocaust are touched upon: innocence is meaningless, evil can be faceless, mechanistic, and impersonal, and above all is the question of what we would do confronted with the situation. As the professor grows more and more unstable, the author seems to be warning us that to try and understand any of this is a path to madness. It's all moderately interesting, but not 160 pages interesting. And though Albahari's decision to write the story as a single paragraph with no breaks does add to the sense of claustrophobic mania, it's not exactly reader-friendly. Probably unlikely to be of interest to anyone not already deeply interested in the Holocaust or Serbia.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 7 reviews  4.0 out of 5 stars