The Muselmann at the Water Cooler

Front matter

The Muselmann at the Water Cooler

ACADEMIC STUDIES PRESS

The Muselmann at the Water Cooler

Table of Contents

Foreword Preface

Glossary In the Beginning there was Bread and Freedom and Apathy One or Two?

A Journey Back in Time Quo Vadis?

Foreword

| started to read The Muselmann at the Water Cooler as a courtesy to an acquaintance | had known for some three decades. As a rule, | read survivors’ memoirs because they bring me, an outsider, closer to an event that | study.

| was intrigued by this memoir because while from the time we first met | knew Eli Pfefferkorn was a survivor, he was quite reticent about sharing his own experience. The fragments of his story that | learned over the years did not cohere. From his age, | knew that he was a child survivor of the Holocaust; from his self-presentation, | knew that he was an Israeli; from his Bar-llan pedigree — for Bar Ilan is Israel's only Orthodox University, quite akin to Yeshiva University — | presumed that he had come from a traditional background. But his Jewish journey was far from traditional. And his academic background, a Ph.D. from Brown University in English literature, promised that unlike many survivors’ memoirs, this work would be self-written and well-written.

| was not disappointed: within the very first page of this important work, reading it became imperative, intellectually and emotionally. | soon recognized that Pfefferkorn was a serious student of evil and could write brilliantly about it. His insights glisten throughout the work; there is no false heroism or selfaggrandizement, no simple story of cheap grace and miraculous escape from death, no simple affirmation of hope in humanity or trust in the noble efficacy of transmitting the story, of bearing witness. Rather, this is an honest and modest retelling by a man who spent a lifetime studying the evil once encountered, seeking to understand the human condition after the Shoah. His story was well worth waiting for, honed by time and life’s disappointments as well as achievements. We are experiencing a first telling by a man now in the Biblical years of his strength; he has now lived more than four score years.

Eli's post-Holocaust story is fascinating. Rather than go to Palestine after the War, he went to England. His depiction of English society and of his host family is insightful and charming, with a touch of English reserve. He was still a very young man, with a long future ahead of him, and his restlessness and

- VIIIinability to settle down attracted him to the sea, where he sought training as a sailor, an odd job for a young Jewish boy. His maritime training attracted the attention of the Zionist activists, who were preparing for the inevitable War of Independence and sought his seamanship skills to defend the coastline. Drawn to Palestine by a sense of duty to the past rather than Zionist aspirations for the Jewish future, Eli ended up in land combat far from the sea, in the sands of the Negev. A member of MACHAL, volunteers from abroad, he refused an order to fight in Israel's one-day civil war to disarm the LECHI-Stern Gang, and ended up in prison. His depiction of the prison is cheerful — no prison memoir writes he!

Pfefferkorn slowly made his way into Israeli society from the outside in. As an outsider in Israel, a Jew among Canaanites, he provides insights into Israeli society of the 1950s and 60s that remind us of a bygone era, its aspirations and pretenses intellectual and otherwise. As an outsider in the USA later on, Pfefferkorn is a keen observer of American academic life in the tumultuous years when universities were defied, when students confronted their scholarly professors, who were unable to understand them or to transmit the classics to them.

Despite the seeming openness of this work, Pfefferkorn conceals almost as much as he reveals. We learn more about his girlfriends than about his wife and daughter, more about his scholarly life and academic politics than of family and community. His narrative is about his early quests for a Jewish, rather than an Israeli, identity, a quest that took him to Bar-Ilan University and the study of Jewish classics. These studies were instrumental in resolving the identity ambiguity he experienced during his life in the Diaspora, in contemporary Canada.

Pfefferkorn describes in depth his time at the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, where he was associated with Elie Wiesel, then the chairperson of the Council. Notwithstanding his recognition of Wiesel’s contribution to bringing Holocaust awareness to the world, his criticism of Elie Wiesel is broad. Contrary to Wiesel’s views, Pfefferkorn does not mystify survival. While Wiesel elevates suffering to mystical level, Pfefferkorn notes that

Suffering is not necessarily a morally refining agent that turns apathy into compassion, greed into generosity, meanness into graciousness and ambition into humility. With few exceptions, the good did not become better and the bad might have become worse.

Few survived with the intention of bearing witness, he writes: “most merely wanted to live.’ Pfefferkorn’s views further deviate from those of Wiesel on a series of issues, particularly pertaining to the obfuscation of the human forces at work in history. “After all, the concentration camps were invented and operated by humans, not monsters or Martians; and human depravity does not begin or end with the concentration camps’, he asserts.

Sounding more like Primo Levi than Wiesel, Pfefferkorn points out that: Shocking as it may sound, the concentration camps demonstrate empirically that these mammoth human labs were essentially the microcosm of the human species and of the world at large; the predatory behavior of the inmates manifested in verbal and physical violence was a distorted reflection of the plots hatched at the water cooler, conspired in the Common Room, planned in the Boardroom and occasionally pillow-talked in the bedroom.

The core of this book is what happened to Pfefferkorn during the Shoah and its aftermath and the reflections he brings to bear on his experiences in his later life. Pfefferkorn knowingly walks us into the heart of darkness in a roundabout way and then pauses, inviting us to reflect upon it, changes the topic, only soon to return to that time and that place.. His weaving in and out from the narrative into ruminations requires the reader's attention and allows time to come closer to the core of the Shoah. If it is a hard journey, ultimately it is a rewarding one.

For a very long time, Pfefferkorn avoided sharing his Shoah experience publicly, concocting the story that he had spent the wartime years in England and had been part of the Kindertransport, the 1939 effort to bring German, Austrian and Czech Jewish children to England. His friends were not told, his professors were not told, his girlfriends were not told — even his wife was not told. Still, some surmised his true story from what he alluded to and wrote.

Still, for one who disguised his survivor identity for so long, Pfefferkorn insisted upon survivors’ prerogatives. There is a distinction, he writes, between knowing about it and knowing it, the latter of which only comes as a direct encounter with the human instruments of evil.

Pfefferkorn’s experience provided him with a direct encounter with the human instruments of evil. In the ghetto of Radzyń Podlaski in the Germanoccupied Poland, he worked as a sort of “gofer” for the Nazi Criminal Police. The Chief of Police, a fatherly figure, surreptitiously showed him kindness, a rare gesture of humanness.

In the Skarzysko Kamienna Forced Labour camp, he managed to get a job in the Mansion of the Camp Kommandant . From this vantage point, he was able to observe the dispensers of evil in their daily lives. He saw the perpetrators as men and women, inceptively made in God's image but disfigured in the service of the Nazi Dark Design. His portrayal of them is nuanced, and yet his revulsion at their deeds is no less intense.

Similarly to Primo Levi, who wrote of the concentration camp, “Here there is no why,’ Pfefferkorn notes that in that topsy-turvy reality there was no causal link between action and reaction. Survival required “quick adjustment, with ensuing traumatic effects.” For others, the absence of why, the inability to recognize the reason for the absence of causality, endangered their survival. His own modus operandi for survival he describes in the following telling paragraph:

Survival in this inhuman environment was driven by paradox. Exposure to rampant cruelty might intimidate you and dull your hunting instincts for extra food; a middle spot on the Appell; or a chance of getting into an Arbeitskommando overseen by a Kapo whose humanity had not yet been drained. Thus, to stay alert you had to shield yourself from the surroundings. But the protective shield that enabled you to keep the sight of terror at bay posed the risk of dulling your vigilance of your surroundings, a necessary condition while on the bread prowl. Darting back and forth between alertness and oblivion became my survival tactic.

It was true then, perhaps true of Pfefferkorn’s entire life, and certainly true of The Muselmann at the Water Cooler. One had to dart back and forth.

In his closing paragraph, Pfefferkorn reminds us that the Warsaw ghetto Diarist Chaim Kaplan ended his Scroll of Agony with a question: “When my life ends, what will become of my Diary?” Pfefferkorn wonders: “And when mine ends, will my memoir survive to keep on telling the story? And has it been worth it?”

The answer to the first question, | am certain, is: The Muselmann at the Water Cooler is a major and enduring contribution not only to survivor literature but to our understanding of the evil that he studies. As to the second question, only Eli Pfefferkorn himself can answer. But I certainly hope that his answer is yes.

Written on Shushan Purim, 5771, the festival when catastrophe was avoided and Jews were triumphant and joyous.