We Must Not Think of Ourselves: A Novel

“I myself had been an English teacher, and in fact I remain an English teacher, the only one I know who’s still at it. My vocation is so useless that I’m not surprised to be the only one, and often I’m surprised I’m still alive.”

Language and literature are both important motifs in the book. Language underscores the theme of Memory and Documentation, being a tool for resistance, as Adam uses language to interview and record people’s experiences. Literature, similarly, points to the theme of The Resilience of the Human Spirit, as, among other things, Adam uses poetry to lift his students’ spirits. Thus, despite Adam’s belief about his vocation’s uselessness, his work greatly contributes to the survival of the Jewish community and culture.

“The only other language, in my humble opinion, that used poetry to rise above its station was German. […] Still, I was unsure that a language that could order children to be mowed down by gunfire was still a sane one to use for poetry.”

Besides being a motif that speaks to the theme of Memory and Documentation, languages are also synonymous with cultures and worldviews in the book. Thus, although poetry elevates both English and German as languages, the German language is now associated with the Nazi regime. This makes it difficult for Jewish children to appreciate literature in a language they associate with violence and hatred.

“What happened in Germany was a German problem, not a Polish one. If Germans wanted to punish their Jews, their Jews would have to either fight or leave. Jews in Poland had faced those two choices for generations.”

Adam reflects on how the Jews in Poland initially viewed the Nazi regime in Germany. This passage points to two things: The Jews have been persecuted multiple times across history, and their survival despite this setback contributes to the Resilience of the Human Spirit they continue to show. It also points to a human tendency to think about one’s condition in isolation. The Polish Jews did not concern themselves with the fate of the German Jews until the Nazis arrived in their country.

“And once again I had expected her to get up and leave, but once again she’d stayed put, sitting with me in my small space, and although I hadn’t been this close to another person in years, found I really didn’t mind.”

Adam is surprised by how comfortable he immediately feels with Sala. From their very first interaction, there are indications that these two characters will grow closer over time, and they eventually begin an affair. Adam and Sala’s relationship is an example of The Moral Complexities of Survival Under Oppression.

“‘We are creating a three-dimensional portrait of everyone’s activities, everyone’s survival,’ Ringelblum said. ‘We are not painting some fanciful portrait of the last of the Polish Jews. We are telling the truth.’ ‘The last of the Polish Jews?’ ‘Ask her,’ Ringelblum said. ‘We want her story.’”

Ringelblum encourages Adam to interview Szifra because his intention is to gather all versions of a single event or circumstance. The archival work is meant to portray Jewish life in all its richness and complexities and not present a single, biased perspective. This passage also connotes that Ringelblum is aware that the Polish Jews may not survive the Nazi regime, and hence the work of Memory and Documentation takes on even greater significance.

“I refuse to believe that, even in this situation, the German soldier whose acquaintance I have made is necessarily evil. […] And while I’m at it, I might as well tell you that I object to the idea that every Jew is a good person. […] Just because we’re the so-called victims here doesn’t mean we all have the individual moral high ground. […] I refuse to see every Jew as some sort of angelic martyr.”

Szifra defends her choice to get close to the German guards. She argues that the situation is not black and white; although the circumstances see Germans and Jews on opposing sides, she does not believe that everyone on either side is categorically good or evil. While Szifra’s reasoning is sound, she uses this argument to justify her actions to the point where it blinds her to her community’s censure and the danger this places her in.

“The problem was that it was hard for us to realize that we did not matter to anyone outside our own small company. For so long, we had lived under the illusion that our lives were still worth something to the broader community of mankind, and even though that illusion was shattered brick by brick […] we still refused to let go of it.”

Adam reflects on how the Jews continue to hope that their plight matters to the world at large. This train of thought is echoed later in Pan Forman’s perspective, even though he takes a far more cynical view of the circumstances. Nevertheless, this passage displays why Adam, and others like him, continue to hold onto hope of help from other quarters for as long as they do, despite rising evidence to the contrary.

“There’s a poem by Wordsworth I often teach called ‘Surprised by Joy.’ Despite the title, the poem is not about joy specifically, but about the strange combination of feelings that accompany joy in the midst of grief—when a person who has been deep in grief feels unexpected joy.”

Joy amidst grief is a phenomenon Adam has experienced in his life prior to the ghetto, after Kasia’s passing. Now, this combination of feelings has become a fact of life for many in the ghetto, where in the midst of suffering, they experience snatches of joy and laughter. This experience speaks to the Resilience of the Human Spirit and its capacity for survival.

“‘I’m sorry, but I hate the Nazis […].’ ‘Of course you do, […] But hate isn’t a particularly useful emotion. […] Perhaps it is better to have some sort of reaction that isn’t hateful. Perhaps it is better to […] Forgive?’ I said, the word sounding stupid as it escaped my mouth. […] ‘In Yiddish?’ asked Rafel […] But I couldn’t ask them to forgive in Yiddish.”

Adam and his students discuss the ideas presented in the Rudyard Kipling poem “If.” This passage shows how language, thought, and culture are intertwined. Adam is able to speak of forgiveness in English but not in Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazi Jews, when they are being persecuted for their culture that is represented in this same language.

“But in a way, knowing how to read and write just made everything worse. Because the world wasn’t hidden anymore. We had newspapers in Oświęcim. There was theater. I wanted to do things, go out, be part of the world, but I knew it was impossible.”

Sala describes how learning about the world through what she read in the newspapers growing up left her wanting more from life. Sala’s experience underscores how literature exposes one to different perspectives. She accesses the world and its possibilities through what she reads, and this leaves her open to new experiences.

“My point is that Oneg Shabbat is trying to create a memorial to a hollow people […] who prefer to think of themselves as mere victims instead of moral actors like everyone else.”

Pan Forman opines that the Oneg Shabbat is meaningless work. Pan Forman echoes both Szifra’s perspective and Adam’s own thoughts: Like Szifra, he does not believe that the Jews’ victimhood earns them the automatic moral upper hand; like Adam, he thinks that no one beside the Jews themselves care about their fate. However, Pan Forman’s cynicism is extreme in that he believes that the Jews are morally “rotten.” His views points to how even among the Jews, there are differing perspectives on their own suffering and accountability.

“These are, of course, neither actors nor actions we can affect, […] Which means we must continue to concentrate on the things we can do, the stories we can record, the history we can record.”

Ringelblum updates the Oneg Shabbat members on the worsening global situation and stresses that the only thing they can do is record their own stories. For Ringelblum, the work of Memory and Documentation is a form of resistance and the only resistance they can offer in the face of uncontrollable global events. Recording Jewish history becomes a way for the Jews to take back control of the narrative even if they will be long gone by the time a light is shined on their stories.

“When I pictured Americans, I pictured tall people with smooth skin and blindingly white teeth. Full heads of hair, sweet breath. Could it be, an entire race of people like that? I was certain there was. Goodness shining around them like halos.”

Adam reflects on his hope that the Americans will come to the Jews’ rescue once they join the war. His conception of the Americans as all inherently good is naive and stands in direct opposition to Szifra’s worldview. However, it speaks to Adam’s characteristic hope that things will, in the near future, begin to turn around for his community.

“Once back in the flat, I turned the mirrors in our house around. I put away the cushions on the sofa. In the absence of any real rituals for grief, I relied on what I remembered from my own father’s death: We must not be comfortable. We must not think of ourselves.”

Adam returns home from Kasia’s funeral and performs his own mourning rituals for her. This is the origin of the book’s title: a sense that one must not think of oneself when one grieves the dead. The sentiment is applicable in the context of the Jews’ constant losses and suffering under the Nazi regime. It is also applicable to the Oneg Shabbat Archive and the work of Memory and Documentation: The archivists are working to preserve their history for posterity, not to affect immediate change. In this sense, as they work, they must not think of themselves alone, and their stories and fates, but those of the entire community.

“The problem with you, Adam, if I may […] Is that you have no will. You just accept things as they are. You don’t stand up and fight. You don’t believe in the power to change. You’re a realist, which isn’t a bad thing, but if the world were only made of realists the world would never change.”

Henryk berates Adam for not having done more about finding a way to treat Kasia’s fatal injury. Henryk views Adam as a “realist” who accepts things as they are; this view of Adam is colored by Henryk’s grief over Kasia’s death. More than a realist, Adam comes off as an optimist, or at least someone who believes that things will eventually work out. This is what informs his lack of proactivity, more than his acceptance of a negative situation.

“[M]y husband always says that it was in the Polish heart from the beginning, that they were always looking for a reason to shun us, to banish the Jews, but I don’t think so. I think Piotr loved my father once. But he grew scared […] Of associating with Jews anymore. I don’t know. It’s easier to think that someone is a coward than a bigot.”

Mariam remembers Piotr, her father’s assistant who inherited his business and eventually broke ties with her father after the Germans arrived. Mariam chooses to believe that Piotr’s behavior stemmed from cowardice rather than bigotry, as she doesn’t want to taint her image of Piotr’s early relationship with her father. Despite what her husband thinks, Mariam is partially justified in this belief by the anonymous delivery of fish that arrived after her father’s death. Although antisemitism is a result of bigoted attitudes, there are a number of stories like Piotr’s—people who changed their behavior out of fear of Nazi retaliation, rather than an actual belief that Jews are to be hated and reviled.

“I was writing everything down, […] but it did strike me that perhaps […] [the] most important thing we could do for ourselves was survive. Not just in words, but in actual bodies. And to that end, the archive was of no use at all. In fact, the archive suddenly seemed to me a sort of capitulation, an acceptance of the truth that we would not be here and so our written words would have to say what we ourselves could not.”

As things worsen within and outside the ghetto, Adam experiences moments of doubt over the necessity of the Oneg Shabbat work. His thoughts here reflect how, unlike Henryk’s assumption of him, Adam is not a realist willing to accept a bad situation. He sees how bad things are getting and doesn’t want his archival project to signify his capitulation. This passage also displays that Adam still holds onto hope that the situation can be altered. In all of this, he proves himself to be neither a realist nor one that readily accepts a bad situation.

“Finally, I hung Gela’s watercolor on a wall away from the sun. Despite my caution, however, the paint started to fade, and within days the painting was little more than a series of smudges on white paper, a faded wheel of color where a wedding had been.”

The painting’s fast fading away symbolizes how transient the joy of Jerzy’s wedding celebration was. Not long after that short-lived celebration, all the color fades away from the Lescovecs’ lives after Filip’s and Mariam’s brutal deaths in quick succession.

“If you had told me that, I might have countered that each one of those thousands is, in fact, no more and no less than an individual tragedy. In fact, the deaths of thousands is not at all a tragedy: it is just an abstraction that becomes clear only when you focus the abstraction down to each individual loss. To each individual person gone from this earth.”

Adam reflects on how the mass deaths taking place feel like an abstraction; the pain of these deaths is made real only when one sees each individual loss and the impact that it has. This is the exact impact that Adam’s interviews for the Oneg Shabbat have on him and the reader. There are constant mentions of deaths, mass exterminations, and other atrocities throughout the book. However, the characters in the book become real when Adam learns of their backstories. When the characters that have touched his life in some way—Szifra, Filip, Mariam—are killed, Adam feels their losses more keenly than anything else. This is the point in the story when he finally begins to lose hope.

“Walking home without the necklace, I felt surprisingly light. What was this lightness? It didn’t make sense. And then I realized: I had given it away. I had given everything away. This was the lightness that came with the freedom from hope. I practically floated all the way home.”

After having experienced the deaths of people he knew intimately, Adam is already shaken; when the news of the deportations arrives at the ghetto, he finally decides to trade in the necklace for a way out of the ghetto. This passage points to a couple of different things: First, it points to the theme of Morality Under Oppression—Adam is desperate enough to seek passage out of the ghetto just for himself, as he is looking to survive. Second, the necklace is a symbol of both Adam’s hope and the privilege he experiences by association with Kasia; trading in the necklace mirrors how he has lost all hope, and the fact that it buys him freedom speaks to the privilege he has.

“My thoughts, rid of any ability to imagine my fellow man, now turn only toward Yiddish as I watch the German trucks crush our streets and our people under their wheels. If I somehow manage to leave this place, I will conduct the rest of my life in English or in Polish (or in French, or in Hebrew, or even, God forbid, in German). And if I die, my Yiddish will die with me. Will anyone miss it or remember it? Will anyone miss or remember me? Nein, nein, nein.”

Language is synonymous with thought and culture in the context of the book. Adam recognizes that if he and the other Polish Jews were exterminated, an entire culture would die out. This is the thought underlying his reflection that his Yiddish will die with him, as the other languages he knows (and their related cultures) will be preserved by other populations across the world.

“They weren’t innocent; they knew what was happening all around them. But they were not insensitive to their fortune, and they were going to use it to learn English.”

Adam’s students survive the first deportations, and they all turn up to class the next day. Adam recognizes that his students, although young, have seen enough of life to understand that their fellow Jews are suffering. However, at this point in their lives, each of them is aware of their precarious positions, and they capitalize on whatever skills will help them survive. Learning English happens to be one of them, both because it is a useful skill and because the classes give them a sense of purpose and solidity that keeps their spirits intact.

“And the more I ponder it, I think it’s possible that Pani Duda was a crone of such enormous and terrible power that, in cursing me, she accidentally ended up cursing her own family, her own country, her youngest daughter—all to die awful deaths. […] Of all of them, I was the only one left alive. Perhaps that, in the end, was the true nature of the curse.”

Adam reflects on Pani (Mrs.) Duda’s “curse” at his and Kasia’s wedding. He ponders two different takes on the same instance, mirroring the Oneg Shabbat’s approach to events: On one hand, he considers that Pani Duda brought on her family’s misfortune with her ill will; on the other, he reflects on the pain of being the one left behind while everyone else has died. Adam’s observation that he is the only one left alive also subtly foreshadows that within the ghetto, too, he will be the one to escape.