As David Rieff notes in his afterword, there has been a sentimentalisation of the holocaust. The need to make it a palatable experience for a film-going public has lead to an event of unimaginable horror being the backdrop for imaginable stories of love or valour. Aleksandar Tisma’s novel is a severe corrective to this trend. It is a book which I did not enjoy reading. This seems entirely in keeping with how the process of reading about the holocaust should be. It’s not meant to be entertaining or fun. It’s meant to be unpleasant. Kapo, tells the story of a Croatian kapo, Lamian, who survives Auschwitz in large part because of his own immorality and cruelty. Tisma presents the character in old age, as his day-to-day life and memories merge. Lamian escaped but on the other hand he can never escape. He wants forgiveness, but he is too imprisoned in the gaol of his mind, deservedly so, to ever be able to seek it. Tisma, I learn, translated Kertész's Fatelessness into Serbian. He is writing within a discourse about the holocaust. (And the asides in his novel about Israel are fascinating.) In short, although the novel is shocking, cruel, to the point of being transgressive, even Sadeian, he is not writing in order to shock the reader. He is writing in order to inform, that history, the real history, might not be forgotten.
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