Bearing Witness

By the simplest truth. -Timothy Foote

THE BOOK OF ALFRED KANTOR

by ALFRED KANTOR 127 pages. McGraw-Hill. $17.95.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut once proposed that writers adopt a basic unit of "conscience measurement," to be called the "Stowe" in honor of the "only writer in history who had an effect on the course of world affairs." What disturbed Vonnegut, though, was the knowledge that people "having read Uncle Tom's Cabin and cried, feel that they have somehow dealt with the problem."

Alas, too true. But these days, bad news arrives thicker and faster than the mind can follow, or bear to contemplate. Often it seems that all one can muster in response is, at best, some variation on Hamlet's simple formula for mourning--"Absent thee from felicity awhile"--or at worst, numb weariness and futility.

Anyone who has begun to wonder whether such quietism may make it all but useless for men to go on bearing witness to atrocity should ponder the manner and matter of this book created three decades ago but not published until 1971.

Alfred Kantor, now 48, works as an artist in a New York advertising agency. In 1939, because he was a Jew in Nazi-occupied Prague, he had to leave art school. In 1941, at age 18, he was sent to Terezin, a camp the Nazis used as a staging point for deadlier installations like Auschwitz. Kantor went there too, in 1943, but was saved from death because he was still strong enough to be drafted for work at a camp that provided laborers for a synthetic-fuel factory. In a brief introductory narrative, Kantor explains all this, and outlines what life and the presence of death were like in each camp. He also tells how he began to make sketches to have a record "if and when I was ever free." At first he memorized scenes during the day and sketched them at night. Much that he drew was smuggled out.

In 1945, while in an American D.P. camp, Kantor got the sketches together and created in a single bound book a visual diary of what he had seen, with brief captions, first in Czech, then in what he describes as "the best Prague highschool English I could muster." The Book of Alfred Kantor is simply a facsimile reproduction of that diary: more than 150 small and mostly cramped sketches that had sat in Kantor's library for years until friends persuaded him to have it published.

The work is hasty. The sticklike human figures sometimes suggest a drawing that a skilled child might send home from quite a different sort of camp. Partly for that reason, the book is a rare document that somehow reaches the reader's imagination in more enduring ways than more dramatically horrifying renderings ever could. Horror, of course, is organic to the world Kantor drew. He shows naked bodies being disgorged from a room after Cyclone-B gas has just been tested; the forlorn, rumpled figure of a woman in the snow who committed suicide by touching the high-tension barbed wire around Auschwitz; SS guards abusing prisoners. But he also has dozens of other details--women carrying soup in heavy barrels, prisoners being mustered for work, men searching for lice, sick call, scenes in a mess hall--until the whole experience seems so matter of factly part of life that it cannot be protectively blocked out of the mind as some sort of nether worldly nightmare.

In his captions and notes, Alfred Kantor almost never raises his voice or tries to heighten the impact of his little pictures with dramatic effects. On the rare occasions when he does so, even though the situation would seem to justify any amount of shrieking overstatement, the reader is immediately repelled. (One example of both verbal and visual "dramatics" is a posterish scene, all in black, labeled "The Hell of Auschwitz," in which a looming, faceless SS man threatens a crouching woman and child.) Whether Kantor generally avoided this kind of thing through wisdom or mere exhaustion at the enormity of what he had seen, his book proves once more something that the age of verbal bloat has forgotten. Sheer howl may or may not be all right for politics and selling soap, but the presentation of agony is best served by the simplest truth.

qedTimothy Foote

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