Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"I am a protagonist from books that have not been written.", 2 Jan 2006
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 them to imagine themselves 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. Mary Whipple
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Banality of evil" intelligently explored, 19 May 2004
A meditative 160-page, 1-paragraph exploration of the lives of two men who drove one of the genocidal gas-trucks for the Nazis in WWII Serbia. This exploration drives the schoolteacher narrator, a Holocaust survivor himself, into a convincing depiction of madness. The ending is a chaotic let-down, but then this study of evil both extreme and banal is too clear-sighted to be able to wrap up its ideas in any easy way.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Final Solution in Serbia, 4 Feb 2006
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.
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