This narrative reportage between the United States and Israel, Miami and Rehovot is therefore dedicated to the extraordinary figure of Aron “Al Capone” Szapiro, with interviews with survivors and a narrative cut even if based on true stories.
Bernard Mayer
Bernard Mayer was a little boy at the time even though he felt like a man in adversity and owes his salvation to the bunker built for him and other Jews by Szapiro. Surviving the Nazi genocide required an astral combination of resilience, luck and resources, not just economic: “You will never understand what it means when they hunt you like dogs. Indeed, not even to dogs. Because the Nazis let the dogs go free on the street and they hunted us like rats “says Bernard in his villa in Miami to the author after having told himself for a long time as if to mark a contrast between the need to say and the difficulty of do it on a deep level that goes beyond the uniqueness of the plot. The decisive factor for salvation in his case is the distance of the bunker from the ghetto that will be destroyed with grenades and the reckless choice to entrust himself to the custody of a goym, a non-Jew, Ivan Bur. The young Bur was in fact Ukrainian, former employee of the owner of the house under which the bunker was located, Hermann Schwartz, himself hidden inside. Bur was married to the sister of a Ukrainian militia agent. This connection with the collaborationist forces will be decisive in protecting the shelter during an inspection that will come very close to discovering it. It is difficult to talk about choices in such circumstances but the land of salvation in which the bunker is immersed is on the border between good and evil. Bernard Mayer and 45 other Jews will spend 17 months underground waiting for the Red Army, amidst yddish chants, lice, heat, stench, an epidemic of typhus and games of chess. After ringing the bell, Bur opened the concrete trap door and entered with “simian agility” through a narrow passageway. A gust of air cooled the frightened and heated souls of the Jews who passed their time as “buried alive” in an antimondo. They ate at night and slept during the day. Every so often Bur would go downstairs to retrieve one of the Jewish lovers he had made in the bunker. Other times to bring food. Among the food suppliers of the bunker was another character on the edge of reality. Son of a Jewish oilman – Galicia was at the time the “California of Europe” -, handsome, always elegant and bow tie engineer, Naftali Backenroth was a magician in dealing with the Nazis and had set up several camps of work to supply them with various goods and services while saving many people. For this they called him “the king of the Jews”. His counterpart was SS Felix Landau. Viennese, portly and armed with a dog whip, he was responsible for the work or the enslavement of the Jews of Drohobycz. He called himself “Judengeneral”, the general of the Jews. He lived in a requisitioned villa with his mistress Gertrude, whom he will marry by divorcing his first wife, and was the “protector” of Bruno Schulz, author of a novel about Drohobycz, Cinnamon-colored shops, considered one of the literary peaks of the 1900s. Short and frail, Schulz knew how to draw and paint very well, and had created a mural with the motifs taken from the tales of the Brothers Grimm in the villa of Landau. Before the war, he had taught drawing and manual labor. Bernard Mayer had been his pupil and had a bad memory of him. Interviewed by Armano, he said that Schulz entered without looking at anyone, left a drawing to copy and left to return only at the end of the hour. In the manual labor class, when the noise was too loud, he would order to put down saws and hammers and tell a story by reconnecting the turbulent children “to the umbilical cord of childhood where the blood of mystery still circulates”. She hated teaching because it took time away from writing but had to continue to work hard to support her grandchildren and her widowed sister after her husband’s suicide. Though full of talents, he was born under an evil star unlike Naftali Backenroth. Backenroth even managed to get himself declared “Aryan” by fabricating false documents in which he appeared to be the “bastard”, ie the illegitimate son of an anti-Semitic Polish doctor. His name appears among the righteous at the museum of the Holocaust in Jerusalem. There is not that of Ivan Bur who had risked his life but for a fee of resounding gold coins and for all his life he will keep hidden what he had done fearing the reproach of his anti-Semitic compatriots. Only a few hundred of the more than 15,000 Jews in Drohobycz survived the Nazi occupation. Among these was not Schulz, killed by an SS rival of Landau during “Bloody Thursday”, a “savage Aktion” in the streets of the ghetto, on November 19, 1942. Others were deported but most were killed in the near the wood of Bronica, above mass graves and under the fire of a machine gun.
Fight for survival
The story of the adventurous struggle for survival of the Mayers and other families, combined with essays and literary digressions (Schulz, the Messiah …), distinguishes The Boy in the Bunker from the classic narrative on the Shoah. We are far from the lager planet because the story unfolds in the city where the victims and some executioners were born and raised. Including a math professor from Mayer who will remove the salute and join the infamous Ukrainian militia. The intertwining of stories rich in contrasting nuances – there are also Jews enriched by collaborating with the Nazis – makes the book a collective memory of the community lived in Galicia between periods of prosperity and very violent sudden pogroms, atavistic discrimination and openings (especially during the Habsburg domination ) and finally the extermination and emigration of the survivors. The few who escaped the Shoah, who came out of their shelters like ghosts amidst the hostility of the Poles who considered them accomplices of the Soviets, will leave after various assassinations and the Kielce pogrom of ’46: in America (the Mayers), Brazil (the Schwartz), Israel as Hana Silashi. At the time of the war she was only a child, but she will carry “the bunker inside” forever.
Matters of style
In the days dedicated to the memory of the Shoah, this one by Armano is proposed as the ideal book for an at times unusual and nonetheless “historically legitimized” reading. The aesthetic-stylistic value here does not prevail over the “true”, but that to speak of the Shoah one must be analytically-pedantic is nowhere written. This book is proof of that. In short, we can and must continue to write about the horrors of the Shoah – and I underline the must, even more today among the bizarre villainy (to be minimalist!) Of possessed no-vax as well as conspiracy-deniers – to continue writing for future reference. How to do it then – without necessarily falling between the extremes of an irony as an end in itself or of a “philological adhesion for employees only” – is a completely different story!
Antonio Armano, The boy from the bunker. History of Bernard Mayer, survivor of the liquidation of the Drohobycz ghetto, Piemme, pp. 397, 18.90 euros