Götz and Meyer by David Albahari

Götz and Meyer by Daivd Albahari

Serbian Fcition

Original title – Гец и Мајер

Transator – Ellen Elias – Bursac

Source – Personal copy

Do we all have that list of books you have seen reviewed a long time ago and said I’ll get that when I see it in a second-hand shop? Well, I have a long list, and I must admit this has always been near the top. Had I seen a new copy in a shop at some time, I’d probably have brought it. So when IO saw it last week I had to get I’m sure the last mention I remember of it was on the Mookse podcast and I think the first time I read about it was on the complete review Michael has introduced me to so many great writers over the last two decades I had read another book by David Albahari, set in Canada, where the writer spent the latter part of his life. But I knew he had written some books about his Jewish heritage, and he was from a Sephardic Jewish family. So he wrote this book around a writer in the present trying to find out what had happened to his Jewish Family in Blregrade during World War Two.

Götz and Meyer. Having never seen them, I can only imagine them. In twosomes like theirs, one is usually taller, the other shorter, but since bothwere SS. non-commissioned officers, it is easy to imagine that both were tall, perhaps the same height.I am assuming that the standards for acceptance into the SS were rigorous, below a certain height you most certainly would not qualify. One of the two, or so witnesses claim, came into the camp, played with the children, picked them up, even gave them chocolates.We need so little to imagine another world, don’t we?But Götz, or Meyer, then went off to his truck and got ready for another trip. The distances were not long, but Götz, or Meyer, was looking forward to the breeze that would play through the open truck window. As he walked towards the truck, the children returned, radiant, to their mothers. Götz and Meyer were probably not novices at the job

The opening lines  and he finds these two names

As our narrator is trying to pick apart what had happened to his family. The one thing he found out was that they had been put onto an SS truck. Many in the camps at that time felt these trucks were tacking them to a better life. But they were about to be gassed with fumes and buried. He only knows that the two non-commison officers driving this van around Serbia are Götz and Myer. What follows is him trying to imagine what these two unknown characters were like as people to put a face to evil, so to speak. What did they feel about their jobs? How were they looked at by those around them? What part did they play in the wider picture of the war? But he does it with a sort of darkly comic way of making these two come alive and the events they were caught up in. He often asks if Götz or Meyer did such and such, trying to weigh them up.How did the evil they did match with them as a people? They drive around Belgrade as they go about the job of taking the truck to fetch and kill people. Cogs in a killing machine or true evil? This is the question we face as readers.

Götz, or was it Meyer, the one who gave sweets to the children, clearly was not as squeamish as I am. Perhaps at home, in Germany or Austria, he had a dog, so he was used to fleas, was quick to catch them and, with a little crunch, crush them between his fingers. I never saw Götz or Meyer, so I can only imagine them, but somehow I feel certain that Götz, or Meyer, had a poodle, a small fluffy thing called Lily. If Lily had only come to the Fairgrounds camp once, what joy she would have brought those children! They would have crowded round her, touched her little nose, patted her little tail and paws, forgotten all about the chocolates. In a report dated February 6, 1942, sent by Commander Andorfer to the Municipality of Belgrade, there were I, 136 children at the camp who were under 16 years of age, and 76 children still nursing.

He oimagines one with a dog as he talks about the kids killed at the time

 

As we enter the writer’s mind, this is told in a stream-of-consciousness style. He imagines these two lowly SS officers as the last people a lot of his family would have seen in the war. He is putting the face to them at times. They sound like they fall out of a Beckett play, a darker pair to Vladais and Estragon as they wait for evil to engulf them. They are faces left, but they are on the page. Taking evil out of the dark into the light. There are nods to writers like Bernhard. He has the acid humour that Thomas Bernhard had in his writing. These never fully come alive, but the sense of the presence is in the book as you read along the war years and the part in the final solution and how it killed so many of our narrator’s family. All he has is this as a small thread to that horror, which is these two characters and their names, as he tries to fill in the gaps in the information he has . A darkly comic book at times I ‘m pleased I have got to it and hope to find more books by him to read. Have you read David Alahari ?

Winston’s score – A -a pair of SS truck drivers brought to life as someone in the present wants to uncover the horrors that happened to his family.