Stories sear into the soul and can never be untold.

Dorothy Porter

Contemporary philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, says that ‘reading takes us on excursions of sympathy.’ Life writing texts have much to offer adolescents as they have a particular power which allows the reader to journey with the writer and to discover something about the nature of grief or love or time or memory or childhood. Last week we looked at memoirs by Anne Frank, Malala Yousafzai, Roald Dahl and Tim Winton. This week, we explore compelling texts by Elie Wiesel, Eudora Welty and Paul Auster. These stories most definitely ‘sear into the soul’ and, as a result, can ‘never be untold’. 

Harrowing, heartbreaking and brutal is the unforgettable memoir Night – the story of a teenage survivor of the Holocaust. Born into a Jewish family in Romania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when his family were taken by the Nazis and transported by train to the death camp, Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald. Describing with immense power the murder of a people from a survivor’s perspective, Night provides rare insight into the darkest side of human nature. Yet, Wiesel’s account of this horror has the positive effect of communicating the enduring power of hope amidst the darkness. This may resonate with many readers across the world today. 

“Pressed tightly against one another, in an effort to resist the cold, our heads empty and heavy, our brains a whirlwind of decaying memories. Our minds numb with indifference. Here or elsewhere, what did it matter? Die today or tomorrow, or later? The night was growing longer, never-ending… My father had huddled near me, draped in his blanket, shoulders laden with snow. And what if he were dead as well?  I called out to him. No response. I would have screamed if I could have. He was not moving. 

The train stopped in an empty field. The abrupt halt had wakened a few sleepers. They stood, looked around, startled. 

‘Throw out all the dead! Outside, all the corpses!’

The living were glad. They would have more room. Volunteers began the task. They touched those who remained on the ground. 

‘Here’s one! Take him!’

The two ‘gravediggers’ grabbed him by the head and feet and threw him from the wagon, like a sack of flour. 

They were shouting: ‘Come on! Here’s another! My neighbour. He’s not moving…’

I wake from my apathy only when two men approached my father. I threw myself on his body. He was cold. I slapped him. I rubbed his hands, crying ‘Father! Father! Wake up. They’re going to throw you outside …’

The two ‘gravediggers’ had grabbed me by the neck: ‘Leave him alone. Can’t you see that he’s dead?’

‘No!’ I yelled. ‘He’s not dead! Not yet!’

And I started to hit him harder and harder. At last, my father half opened his eyes. They were glassy. He was breathing faintly. 

‘You see,’ I cried. 

The two men went away. 

Twenty corpses were thrown from our wagon. Then the train resumed its journey, leaving in its wake, in a snowy field in Poland, hundreds of naked orphans without a tomb. 

* * *

Eudora Welty’s memoir One Writer’s Beginnings captures an engaging portrait of her family and childhood. In the following extracts, love and empathy are privileged. 

“When I was young enough to still spend a long time buttoning my shoes in the morning, I’d listen toward the hall: Daddy upstairs was shaving in the bathroom and Mother downstairs was frying the bacon. They would begin whistling back and forth to each other up and down the stairwell. My father would whistle his phrase, my mother would try to whistle, then hum hers back. It was their duet… They kept it running between them, up and down the stairs where I was now just about ready to run clattering down and show them my shoes…” 

“I believe the guiding emotion in my mother’s life was pity. It encompassed the world. During the war (World War II), she heard on a radio broadcast that the Chinese, fearing their great library would be destroyed, took the books up in their hands and put them onto their back and carried all of them, on foot, over long mountain paths, away to safety. Mother cried for them, and for their books. Almost more than eventual disaster, brave hope that it could be averted undid her. She had had so many of those brave hopes herself. Crying for the old Chinese scholars carrying their precious books over the mountains gave her a way too of crying for herself, with her youngest child, who was serving with the Navy at the battle of Okinawa. 

She suffered perhaps more than an ordinary number of blows in her life. We her children, like our father before us, had to learn the lesson that we never would be able to console her for any of them…”

* * *

Paul Auster’s memoir The Invention of Solitude is currently read by Year 12 students. In this sustained contemplation of death and loss, Auster constructs a lament for his father and his grandfather which includes an explicit commitment to the discovery of meaning and consolation. The event which triggers Auster’s autobiographical writing is the sudden death the author’s father. The tremendous desire for the son to make the father present is fuelled by a determination to hold onto him and understand him. For Auster, life writing turns out to be a continuous engagement with memory where the redeeming force of love, and the necessary struggle with the ‘magic’ of language are at play. The book opens thoughtfully with the following:

“One day there is life. A man, for example, in the best of health, not even old, with no history of illness. Everything is as it was, as it will always be. He goes from one day to the next, minding his own business, dreaming only of the life that lies before him. And then, suddenly, it happens there is death. A man lets out a little sigh, he slumps down in his chair, and it is death. The suddenness of it leaves no room for thought, gives the mind no chance to seek out a word that might comfort it. We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.”

Drusilla Modjeska states in her book Timepieces that ‘We live so intensely in time, so restlessly and speedily, pulled forwards, pulled backwards, worrying about the future, fretting about the past, snagged in the present, it’s very hard to know what meaning there can be for our lives; we can’t get a perspective on it from inside the rush.’ Yet Paul Auster’s beautiful memoir privileges love and connection as the elements which brace and unify the account of a life. ‘Perhaps this is what really counts: to arrive at the core of human feeling, in spite of the evidence.’

Mrs Clare Murphy

English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach