The Seventh Well, by Fred Wander, is a novel set in several Nazi prison camps. The title refers to the mythical well of truth and, in the way of many novels, the larger truth is brought into focus more clearly through story than through a recitations of the facts. This book's truth: survival of any inmate was achieved through the collaboration of others, sometimes conscious, sometimes accidental, in an elaborate dance of death and life and those who gave their lives live on in the survivor.
Literature on the subject of the Holocaust has always fascinated me. There is something about the mix of survival and brutality that attracts and repels. My father's family came from Germany only a generation before WWII so I am sure I have relatives who saw first hand the horrors of Hitler's world. It also makes me look at my German-American relatives in a new light. Could my Great-Grandma have looked the other way while children were starved and worked to death or burned in the gas chambers? Of course, everyday Germans had very little input by the time all that was going on and would have disappeared themselves had they spoken up. Survival for them was a daily dance, too.
The book is a fascinating, fictional account of the inner lives of several inmates at multiple camps. Fred Wander was a survivor of twenty concentration camps himself, so he knew the subject well. Written years after his release from the camps, his description of the forest still resonates with the longing of one held captive.
This book gives us fully drawn, fully alive people, with hopes and dreams and quirks.
Rabbis argue the finer points of the Torah in the barracks at night, an inmate sarcastically conducts imaginary tours of the Louvre, and Karel, the Russian Jew, whose father wanted him to be a doctor but who gave up his medical studies in favor of the pleasures of the red light district, struggles to save as many inmates as he can.
This is a must read for anyone interested in the Holocaust but also a must read for students of human nature.
Literature on the subject of the Holocaust has always fascinated me. There is something about the mix of survival and brutality that attracts and repels. My father's family came from Germany only a generation before WWII so I am sure I have relatives who saw first hand the horrors of Hitler's world. It also makes me look at my German-American relatives in a new light. Could my Great-Grandma have looked the other way while children were starved and worked to death or burned in the gas chambers? Of course, everyday Germans had very little input by the time all that was going on and would have disappeared themselves had they spoken up. Survival for them was a daily dance, too.
The book is a fascinating, fictional account of the inner lives of several inmates at multiple camps. Fred Wander was a survivor of twenty concentration camps himself, so he knew the subject well. Written years after his release from the camps, his description of the forest still resonates with the longing of one held captive.
This book gives us fully drawn, fully alive people, with hopes and dreams and quirks.
Rabbis argue the finer points of the Torah in the barracks at night, an inmate sarcastically conducts imaginary tours of the Louvre, and Karel, the Russian Jew, whose father wanted him to be a doctor but who gave up his medical studies in favor of the pleasures of the red light district, struggles to save as many inmates as he can.
This is a must read for anyone interested in the Holocaust but also a must read for students of human nature.
