In the Maelstrom of History. A Conversation with Miriam

The coming years will witness the passing of the last generation of Holocaust survivors, the youngest victims, and with them will fade their war-scarred memories and direct experience of the brutality of the Nazi regime and its collaborators. While the prominent voices of survivors such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and many lesser-known authors continue to speak to us through their bestselling books, many voices still remain unheard and are in danger of fading into the mists of history. One recent effort to amplify these voices is the poignant and riveting memoir of the Holocaust experience of Miriam Frankel, who grew up in Trieste, a city with an important Jewish community about which relatively little has been written in English.Frankel's is a story of brutal persecution of a family, punctuated by a history of displacement and cruel indifference. The sole member of her family to survive, Miriam Frankel perseveres and eventually rebuilds her life and community in a new land. In Canada, Frankel's torturous path now intersects with those of other immigrant families, uniting her with a wider community of exiles and immigrants represented in groups such as the Friuli Venezia Giulia Regional Institute for Hebrew Culture and the Club Giuliano Dalmato di Toronto, the latter of which is this book's publisher.Born in Tyachiv (at that time part of Slovakia), Miriam was raised from infancy until age thirteen in the northern Italian city of Trieste and grew up, very much, as a young Italian. After the promulgation of Mussolini's Racial Laws in 1938, her family was deported from Italy back to Tyachiv, which by now had become part of Hungary. As the war progressed, the Hungarian authorities rounded up the town's entire Jewish community, including Miriam and her family, and delivered them to the Nazis, who then took them to Auschwitz. Having survived, though permanently physically injured, the now orphaned Miriam emigrated to Canada, where she forged a new life and became the beloved matriarch of a family and a community.The book is based on a series of interviews—primarily with Frankel, but also with other survivors—and complemented by archival research in Trieste and by the author's reflections on her own community of displaced people, the Giuliano-Dalmati. Tracing the story of just one young victim, the book gives testament to the existence of a variety of disparate yet, at times, similar experiences. Like a single thread running through a large and variegated tapestry, this story contributes to the genealogy of persecuted European Jewish populations that is still being traced and mapped.Frankel's story illuminates our understanding of persecution in so many ways—and so I will provide just one observation from a single episode of her story. In October of 1937, seeking to escape from a Trieste that was increasingly threatening and closing in upon them, Frankel's mother wrote to her stepbrother in America, hoping for his help in bringing the family to safety. The letter never arrived at its destination, but returned mysteriously to its sender in January of 1939, inside another envelope addressed to the family. Turcinovich Giuricin hypothesizes that a postal worker, in a minor act of rebellion, held back the letter, presumably attempting to shield the family from possible persecution by the Fascist government, while keeping the letter in limbo for a year and a half. This small act of obstruction only renders the family's ultimate capture all the more inevitable, as the unsent letter cuts off their only hope of escape.Such scenarios shed new light on the cruel and obtuse bureaucratic blindness outlined so famously by Hannah Arendt. For the anonymous worker who obstructed the mailing of the letter and then returned it a year and half later, there is no possibility of neutrality, for no small act, whatever its intention, can shield the worker from complicity. The worker's minor rebellion not only fails to stop the bureaucratic machinery set in motion, but in fact will only serve to lubricate its gears. The unsent, withheld letter in fact keeps the family in limbo. Waiting in vain for a response that will save them, the family finally re-sends the letter a year and half later, when it is too late. This one episode within the larger story of the capture of Miriam Frankel's family thus provides fresh a view onto the tragedy of bureaucratic evil and the dangers of institutional and individual passive acquiescence to injustice. The story of the obstructed, detained letter is a moral tale of individual responsibility that bears perennial repetition, especially in increasingly bureaucratic and conformist societies.As Arendt now famously stated, “The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.” The opportunities for a fuller understanding of the Holocaust are drawing to a close; In the Maelstrom of History provides an invaluable contribution by painting a unique portrait that opens our field of vision to a variegated genealogy of a persecuted people. The book also tells the story of ultimate resilience, strength, and unity—and so deserves a place within the canon of biographies and memoirs of Holocaust survivors.

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