Mina Deutsch

Eli Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man are perhaps the best known memoirs written about the Holocaust. In 1944, late in the war, both Wiesel and Levi were transported to Auschwitz, which was both a labour and a death camp. Their autobiographical accounts are widely regarded as being of historical and literary significance. Memoirs that document the earlier experiences of Jews who lived farther east are fewer. Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale explains that this is because Eastern-European Jewish survivors and witnesses caught behind the Iron Curtain were not free to write and publish, while Jews from Western Europe were. Snyder identifies the East as the true epicentre of the historical event, where the greatest destruction of Jewish life occurred. An estimated 1.5 million Jews were killed early on at the death facilities of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. (Only a handful of people survived these full-out extermination camps.) From June 1941 to the end of 1942, close to 1.5 million more Jews were executed in Soviet territories by Nazi death squads. Snyder states that by 1943/1944, the Holocaust was mostly complete. So what most of us understand the Holocaust to be—the industrialized murder of millions of Jews at Auschwitz—is in fact only part of the story.

Dr. Mina Deutsch’s book is a noteworthy one because it describes her survival in the eastern territories during the major part of the genocide. It includes her experiences when the Soviets “liberated” Eastern Poland/Galicia in 1944 where she, her husband, and young child had been hiding on a farm. The memoir also covers the family’s post-war struggles in an intensely anti-Semitic Poland, where Poles were known to murder Jewish survivors for their possessions. Here Mina used false identity documents and passed as a gentile in order to buy and sell used clothing. The couple’s time working as doctors in displaced persons camps in Austria is described, and details of their immigration are related. Once in Canada, Leon and Mina faced still more challenges: learning English, undergoing medical retraining and certification, confronting further anti-Semitism, and enduring separation from their young daughter. Much of the final section of the book concerns Leon’s terminal illness in his mid-fifties.

I’m aware of only one other work that relates a story similar to Mina’s. The Secret of the Village Fool tells the true story of a poor, eccentric Ukrainian man who hid a Jewish family in an underground shelter on his property. The events related in that picture book occurred in the same region—Ternopil Oblast—that the Deutsches spent most of the war. Mina and her family also survived by hiding underground. They sheltered in a large hole underneath a chicken coop and potato storage shed on the land of poor Ukrainians—the Krawczuks. The Deutsches had been introduced to them by a wealthy Ukrainian farmer, Kukurudza. The man’s son had been receiving medical care from Leon, who, like Mina, was a physician. No doubt Kukurudza wanted the treatment to continue, and this was surely part of his motivation for helping. The Deutsches trusted him with their valuables, which he buried, dug up as needed, and traded for money to remunerate Krawczuk for keeping and feeding the family. Kukurudza also collected Mina’s sister Rachel (along with Rachel’s husband and son) from the forest where they’d fled from the Germans. The Goldigs were packed into the hiding place with the Deutsches.

Mina frequently comments that without their wedding silver and jewelry, her family would not have survived. The valuables didn’t spare them from innumerable close calls, however. At one point, the whole region was swarming with German soldiers retreating from the Soviets and desperate for shelter from the bitter cold. Krawczuk, clearly afraid for himself and his family (hiding Jews was punishable by death), told the two families they were going to have to leave. Given the frigid temperatures and the enemy troops nearby, this would have meant certain death. Ultimately, it was little Eva’s declaration of love for Krawczuk and his fondness for her that settled the matter. The families stayed. Heavy snow camouflaged their hiding place from the Germans.

To be clear, Mina’s Story, published when Deutsch was in her eighties, about a decade before her death in 2004, is not a work of literature. Deutsch had been encouraged to write the book by her daughter. Eva wanted her three children, Mina’s grandchildren, to know the story, so they could see that great hardships could be overcome. The memoir Deutsch ultimately produced, while rich in detail, struck me as curiously matter-of-fact and dispassionate in tone. The author had been a psychiatrist, and I suppose I expected a more reflective account. Emotion, especially rage, occasionally breaks through, but the reader is regularly left to make his own inferences based on what the author has chosen to report, as well as on certain points she regularly circles back to. Mina appears to have harboured anger towards North American family members who’d left Poland before the war. They had limited understanding of the harrowing ordeal the Deutsches had endured and were disinclined to help the couple financially. The Deutsches could have registered earlier for transport to Canada if relatives had stepped up to pay for their passage. In Canada, well-to-do relations didn’t even consider providing the penniless couple with a loan. Ruth, the elder sister Mina had helped to save, does not come across well either. It seems she was incapable of reciprocation; she refused to briefly care for Eva in post-war Poland, even after Leon had gone to considerable trouble to keep Ruth’s husband from being sent to the front by the Russians. There is a cold quality to Deutsch’s references to her. I honestly do not recall reading another memoir of the Holocaust in which family tensions of this kind were noted. There is little doubt that the pain of intense trauma was amplified after the war by the incomprehension and lack of generosity of relatives who’d been safe across the ocean.

In her later professional years, Deutsch was a researcher in psychopharmacology at McGill University in Montreal. Perhaps the detached perspective of the scientist had become a habit of mind for her. Possibly the way she’d survived—or had always approached life— was by containing feeling. The book’s cover photo shows a young Mina, who even before the war looked serious and buttoned-up. It is regrettable that a professional writer or top-notch editor wasn’t recruited to assist her. Important details about how Deutsch viewed the Ukrainians who hid her might have been elicited, and much needed historical context supplied. References to “White Russians” who resisted the Soviets, for example, really needed to be clarified. (White Russians are generally known as those who opposed the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War, so what are they doing in a memoir that concerns World War II, two decades later?) Dates, too, are often frustratingly lacking. In fact, I still lack clarity on how long the family was actually in hiding. Mina’s account appears to suggest late 1943 to spring 1944, but in an interview I found online, Eva says they were hidden for 1.5 years. I got other valuable information about small villages the author mentions by visiting the Yad Vashem website. It seems possible that the Ukrainian whom Deutsch refers to only as “Kukurudza” is the “Mikhail Kukuruza” named on the Yad Vashem site as one of The Righteous of Nations.

Mina and Leon lost most of their families during the Holocaust. Their deaths haunted her. One of the most painful and arresting of Mina’s descriptions is of their arrival in Canada in 1948. When relatives warmly received the Deutsches in Montreal, the normally restrained Mina broke down. “Why did we survive,” she cried out to her family, “why did we deserve to survive when the rest of our relatives, our parents, sisters, brother, died such terrible deaths?”

Why? Why did any of this occur? How? The brain may be “wider than the sky,” but is any brain—no matter how many survivor testimonies it has encountered—wide enough or deep enough to take in tragedy and horror of such magnitude?

Rating: a solid 3.5… (mehr)