DROWNING: GROWING UP IN THE THIRD REICH (Drenkeling kinderjaren in het derde rijk)

Memoir by Gerhard Durlacher, 1987

Five-year-old Gerhard Durlacher was growing up in the German town of Baden-Baden when the Nazis came to power. He describes hearing the news of their takeover of the city. A room in his home falls silent while an excited voice on the radio reports that the new chancellor of the German Reich is Adolf Hitler. Stripes in the Sky was Durlacher's first memoir, in which he described his experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1942 to the end of the war. Drowning is the prequel, a small collection of penetrating remembrances from the years 1933 to 1936. Drowning was published in English translation in 1993.

In one scene Durlacher describes an experience at a Christmas pantomime when he is called to the stage to sit on Santa's knee. The young boy immediately recognizes his Uncle Herbert behind the beard and says so loudly. While the boy returns to his seat a man sitting nearby, with perfectly Aryan daughters, whispers menacingly to him, "Smart-aleck little Jewboy." Other scenes in the book capture the eerie sense of the unreal initial years of Nazi rule. Increasingly the sense of menace that alters his world begins to cave in on him: the windows of the hotel of friends of his family are smashed; his parents' non-Jewish cleaning lady stops coming to his house; his father gradually loses his business clients. The younger Durlacher sees the Brownshirts as "devils stamping their hooves" and led by a man on horseback who resembles "the cruel knight" in his book of fairy stories.

Despite the experience at Birkenau that enshrouded Durlacher's teenage years, he is able to retrieve from the past not only his memories but his sense of childish innocence and wonder. According to Durlacher his memories came back after reading two books in the early 1980s: Martin Gilbert's Auschwitz and the Allies and Walter Laqueur's The Terrible Secret. Both books attempt to investigate why the Allied forces ignored pleas for help after the true purpose of the concentration camps became known. Laqueur's conclusion, which Durlacher also espouses, focuses on the nature of belief. The horror of some atrocities is so harrowing that they are impossible to accept. Durlacher illustrates how even people new to Auschwitz, people on the brink of their own destruction, could still not believe that the smoking chimneys did not belong to factories and interpreted the stories from other prisoners as a kind of cruel initiation rite.

Although the tone of Stripes in the Sky is one of anger and vengeance, the tone of Drowning is that of acceptance mixed with sorrow. The title story refers to one illuminating incident. While on a holiday in Riva young Gerhard watches two boys playing with toy boats at the edge of the jetty. Adults nearby are intent on listening to Italian and German radio announcements coming from loudspeakers when first one boy, then the other, falls in. Gerhard screams for help, but the parents listen with undivided attention to the radio: the Nazis have assassinated the Austrian leader Dolfuss in a failed coup attempt. It was the first palpable demonstration of Hitler's real menace. The boys are rescued only at the last minute.

This story becomes Durlacher's metaphor for the Jewish experience in Nazi Germany. A kind of desperate optimism comprises the paralysis that takes over Durlacher's family, even as full realization of their plight begins to dawn on them. By the time they flee to an uncertain safety in Holland it is already too late; they are deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942. Durlacher ultimately puts the blame for the destruction of Jewish families like his own on "those countless Germans, indifferent or paralyzed by fear, [who] watched us drown before their eyes."

—Martha Sutro