How Eva Slonim survived as a child in Auschwitz

Survivors: Eva Slonim (in the white scarf) and her sister, Marta, peering over her shoulder, at Auschwitz. Photo: Getty Images

Gazing at the Stars
EVA SLONIM
BLACK INC., $29.99

The horrors of the Nazi concentration and death camps are seared into the collective memory of the West. As the embodiment of totalitarian terror, the camps continue to live in our imaginations; transmitted through iconic images and symbols such as the entry gates to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the piles of shoes, glasses and suitcases taken from victims upon arrival and just prior to their extermination, and the hollow stares of emaciated prisoners captured by the cameras accompanying the liberating Allied forces.

In one of these photographs stands prisoner A27201, 14-year-old Eva Slonim (nee Weiss), liberated from Auschwitz by Russian forces in January 1945. To her immediate right is her sister Marta and surrounding them stand a group of children wearing the oversized and pitifully inadequate ‘‘striped pyjamas’’ doled out to the prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau. These children were survivors of medical experiments inflicted by Dr Josef Mengele, the man prisoners dubbed the ‘‘Angel of Death’’.

Harrowing: Gazing at the Stars by Eva Slonim.

The photo depicts the end of Eva’s struggle to survive in Hitler’s Europe. Her memoir, Gazing at the Stars, provides a detailed account of the events leading up to this moment. Eva and Marta are child survivors, those aged 15 and under during the Holocaust who managed to avoid deportation to death camps largely through hiding, acquiring false papers, and appropriating ‘‘Aryan’’ identities.

Eva’s account of her experiences are remarkable in their detail, particularly when one considers her age. Through her 14-year-old eyes the daily humiliations, deprivations, and tortures of Auschwitz are thrown into sharp relief. Experiences that, in Primo Levi’s evocative phrase, demand a ‘‘new, harsh language’’, are illuminated, allowing the realities to be conveyed anew to readers now two or three generations removed from the events.

That said, while keenly descriptive the book does not display the nuance and literary prowess of the now canonical work of, say, Charlotte Delbo or the more recent autobiography by Otto Dov Kulka. In Slonim’s defence, however, and by extension that of all survivors compelled to leave a written record of their experiences, literary considerations in this ever-expanding genre are secondary to what we might refer to as the ‘‘demands of memory’’.

Slonim’s work illustrates how memory functions to forge a relationship with the past and to garner meaning from otherwise ‘‘useless suffering’’, an idea explored in the book’s introduction by Oscar Schwartz. Such meaning is not necessarily redemptive. Indeed, more often it is traumatic, consisting of the ceaseless intrusion of a painful past into an otherwise sunny Australian present. This constant disruption is most painfully expressed in Slonim’s description of being forced to watch the hanging of a girl her own age in Auschwitz: ‘‘Her suffering was not over, I knew. It lives on, and it repeats endlessly in my memory.’’

Then and now collide in Slonim’s work as they do in her life. And despite the relentless nature of the trauma, resilience is also apparent. Slonim’s focus on rebuilding individual and communal life is epitomised in her description of her family’s Torah, saved by her father and now read by her children and grandchildren on Shabbat and festivals; a symbol of both displacement and resistance, a resonator of individual and communal memory.

Despite or perhaps due to such resilience, it is to that moment of liberation, that photo that I find myself returning again and again. The children in the striped pyjamas stare back at me and in their faces the untold suffering of millions is contained and conveyed. Slonim’s work gives voice to one of those stares, confronting the unending impact of radical victimisation, and providing a perhaps timely reminder that notwithstanding their ability to renew and rebuild, in the words of survivor Jean Amery, ‘‘the tortured always remain tortured’’.

Avril Alba lectures in Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation at the University of Sydney.