Marilyn Shimon (2020) Auschwitz Survivor 31 321: A Memoir. First One In, Last One Out.

Marilyn Shimon recognises that Holocaust literature has become a literary category. It’s one that speaks to many of us, including me. I’m never happier than when I’m reading about someone being miserable. Power corrupts. But as Robert A. Caro in his study of Lyndon B. Johnson shows—it  also reveals. We can learn lessons from Holocaust survivors about what it means to be human but treated as sub-human.

Everyone has their story. Marilyn Shimon reminds us readers that first-hand accounts of mass murder and genocide will no longer be heard as those that were incarcerated and brutalised by the Nazis die.

She quotes some of those whose words resonate.

Primo Levi. ‘It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.’

It is happening in the Gaza Strip now.   

In the Preface, she tells the reader her mother and father attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Her Uncle, who took the (American first-name) Murray Scheinberg, was one of a handful of prisoners that spent five-and-a-half years in the Nazi concentration camps.

His survival was miraculous.

A memoir implies memories. First-hand account of what happened. She draws on her uncle’s recollections of what happened. What he has written down. What he told others.

In marketing terms she asks a question and offers a unique selling point.

‘My uncle’s story is unique in that he was literally the first one in and the last one out of the concentrations camps.’  [italics her own]

The world wasn’t ready for his story. Her mother, ‘an accomplished author’ found it difficult to find a publisher in the early 1960s.

These things couldn’t have happened, her mother was told. No one could have survived that treatment.

That Moishe (Murray) Scheinberg born 11^th July 1911 in Warsaw and was a Holocaust survivor is factual.

Marilyn Shimon, his niece, ghost-writes his life.

Let me tell you a story of the million-seller, Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

Second-hand, fictional piffle.

I’m not arguing these things did not happen. And are still happening. What I’m saying is nothing in these books, and I include Shimon’s, resonate, and show the authorial marks of authenticity. You might feel differently. Read on.

Notes.

• Auschwitz: Liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945. Around 7,000 prisoners were found alive, most of them sick or dying.
• Buchenwald: Liberated by American forces on April 11, 1945. Approximately 21,000 inmates were freed.
•  Dachau: Liberated by U.S. troops on April 29, 1945. Around 32,000 prisoners were found.
• Bergen-Belsen: Liberated by British forces on April 15, 1945. About 60,000 inmates were discovered, many suffering from typhus and starvation.