The messenger, p.1
The Messenger, page 1
Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
IF WE ARE THE MESSAGE...
NOTE
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
AFTERWORD
Copyright Page
PRAISE FOR THE MESSENGER
‘The Messenger is an extraordinary book. It requires the reader to judge whether its undeniable literary power establishes its authority to attempt to awaken us, through the voice of a fictional Jan Karski, to a terrible possibility—that the reason Karski’s message did not shake the conscience of the world was because there is no such thing to be shaken, no such thing as a common humanity that would show itself in the sympathy of all the peoples of the earth for evil done to their fellows. “With the extermination of the Jews of Europe,” the fictional Karski declares, “the very idea of humanity died.” I believe that it has earned that authority.
‘The Messenger has already provoked fierce controversy in Europe. It could not be otherwise. It is a controversy we need and The Messenger is worthy of it, which is a fine achievement in itself.’
RAIMOND GA I TA
‘Strong and intelligent, a huge act of empathy. A brilliant book.’
JOAN LONDON
‘Deftly crossing the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, The Messenger explores what it means to remain human in the midst of extreme brutality and indifference. This portrait of a man of exceptional courage and nobility, who bore witness to the darkest crimes of the twentieth century, is both profoundly disturbing and uplifting.’
ARNOLD ZABLE
‘A literary exercise of the highest order, which breaks the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction…’
Le Figaro Littéraire
‘A troubling novel about the memory of evil…a brilliant book.’
Le Monde
‘Who bears witness for the witness?’
PAUL CELAN
Born in Rennes in 1967, Yannick Haenel is the author of several novels,
Les Petits Soldats, Introduction à la Mort française, and Evoluer parmi les avalanches.
His novel Cercle won the Prix Décembre, and the Prix Roger
Nimier in 2007. Jan Karski (The Messenger) won the Prix du Roman Fnac,
and the Prix Interallié in 2009. Yannick Haenel lives in Paris.
Ian Monk is a British writer and translator, based in Lille. Since 1998, he has been
a member of the French writing group Oulipo. His translations include novels by
Daniel Pennac, works by his fellow Oulipian Georges Perec and a rhymed translation
of Raymond Roussel’s New Impressions of Africa.
Mark Baker is Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and Associate
Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University. He is the author
of The Fiftieth Gate, a personal book about memory
of the Holocaust.
Michael Berenbaum is a professor, museum creator, writer, and filmmaker who
specializes in the study of the memorialization of the Holocaust. He was deputy
director of the president’s commission on the Holocaust and director of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Research Institute.
For fifteen years he taught with Jan Karski at Georgetown University.
IF WE ARE THE MESSAGE...
An introduction by Mark Baker
Facing the mass graves of occupied Poland, Himmler boasted to his SS officers that their deeds would be ‘a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written’. The witnesses to this unwritten history had been silenced in the death camps, their execution in forested enclosures concealed by a conspiracy of euphemistic memoranda. Yet from deep in the earth the bloated corpses resisted oblivion and formed cracks in the soil, threatening to write their own version of history with the blood of their wounds. So the order was given to dig up the earth for a second time, exhume the corpses and incinerate them. The unformed words in the burned pages were returned to the ground or scattered in the ash that blew across the face of the world.
There were others who tried to write the secret history of those years before it was given the title Holocaust. Emmanuel Ringelblum, an historian from Warsaw, preserved fragments of ghetto life by burying archival documents in steel milk containers. Members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando kept diaries of their daily work and hid them beneath the crematoria. There were some who scratched out their testimonies on the walls of a gas chamber or on the ceilings of a freight train. Those few who escaped appealed to the living, or the not-yet-dead. Elie Wiesel describes one of the men who jumped from a train and returned to his village in Transylvania, where he was dismissed as a madman, a messenger from an imaginary inferno. Another of these unheeded messengers was Kurt Gerstein, who had witnessed one of the unwritten pages through the peephole of history: a hole in the door of the Belzec gas chamber where the Jews in agony could be heard ‘weeping as in a synagogue’ until they froze together like ‘basalt pillars’.
Jan Karski first became a messenger for the Polish Underground but nothing could have prepared him for what he would later describe as his journey across the mythical River Styx that runs between Earth and the Underworld. Like a reluctant biblical prophet, he was tapped on the shoulder by two Jewish members of the Polish Underground, one a Zionist, the other a member of the Bundist socialist movement. They entrusted him with a message to ‘shake the conscience of the world’ and stop the murder of Jews. Their message was delivered in words and then in a vision which would forever be tattooed on Karski’s eyes after he was smuggled inside the Warsaw ghetto and a camp he confused with Belzec.
Written in three parts, Yannick Haenel’s The Messenger unpacks the transformative moments of Karski’s life. It opens with a question informed by Karski’s tortured testimony given in the 1980s for Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. Haenel recounts the visual sequences of the film, prefiguring a major theme of the book that explores the inability to sever language from sight and action. We see/hear/read of Karski in his New York apartment, as poised as a Polish aristocrat, before the camera/reader/mirror. He is invited to give his testimony. Karski sobs, resists returning to the past and flees the room. Haenel’s book is a meditation on this moment that forces itself on Karski—the impossibility and the imperative of remembering, what Haenel will describe as a ‘silence that speaks’ through the cracks of memory.
The second section is a description of Karski’s book, Story of a Secret State, written in 1944. We learn how Karski wrote this book in a fury, dictating it in Polish to a translator and then directly in English, as though speaking the prophet’s message in tongue. The transmission of the message is hindered by many obstacles: there is the problem of language, which Primo Levi taught demands a new vocabulary to defamiliarise us with ordinary words that have taken on a new meaning after Auschwitz—words such as hunger, cold, man. But the main problem that will haunt Karski for the remainder of his life is that a messenger cannot deliver a message without a receiver. A Secret State sold hundreds of thousands of copies; Karski obtained private audiences with dignitaries as high as US President Roosevelt. Yet people received his message with a yawn of indifference, animated in some cases by malevolence toward Jews, or by the inability to interpret the gap between the message and its commanding imperative. ‘I cannot believe it,’ said US Supreme Court Judge Felix Frankfurter to Karski in 1943. ‘Do you think I’m lying?’ challenged Karski. ‘No,’ answered Frankfurter. ‘I just said I cannot believe it.’
Haenel wants to show that by refusing to recognise the message we have woven ourselves into its text. The message that warns of a crime against humanity has become a crime by humanity. It implicates us all, thereby redefining human history. And this is the point of the third and final section of the book, in which Haenel himself becomes Karski by assuming his voice in the first person. It constitutes a leap of the imagination from non-fiction to fiction, an attempt to ‘coincide brutally with the book in question’. Critics like Lanzmann will regard the invasion of those physical and mental crevices where Karski conceals himself from the gaze of the camera as the ultimate sacrilege. In Lanzmann’s conception there is a point of unknowability, a divide that separates the eyewitness from the actuality of the past. That is the meaning behind Lanzmann’s quip that, had he discovered archival footage of the death process, he would have burned it rather than permit the pretence that memory can escape its rootedness in the present. But Haenel is spurred by the ethics of the messenger—the belief that it is possible to eradicate the divide between time and place. The messenger must become the message by creeping along the cracks of silence and giving form to it through speech, vision, and deed. It is not too late, Haenel urges, to awaken humanity from its collective yawn and deliver Karski’s message from the broken heart of the twentieth century.
Haenel offers several images for how we might dissolve the barriers between message and messenger, between their time and ours. He tells us that to overcome a fear of spiders one must become the spider. One can replay the life of Karski by becoming Karski. But is this the brazen conceit of an author? Is there any way, as Haenel writes, for the extermination itself to be reversed, which was the core of the plea embodied by the founding message? And here, Haenel resorts to religious mythology to offer the most radical notion of his book, indeed, its entire interpretative thrust. The message can still reach its audience, he suggests, because the past is not irr edeemably dead. If we are the message then we can reverse the death of humanity by bringing ourselves back to life through our actions. The past, says Haenel, can be resurrected by ‘rekindling a fire from its embers’ and creating life through the word. In this sense, The Messenger offers a Christological account of the murder of Jews, who have (again) been nailed to the cross of history, enabling the promise of redemption from the fall of humanity. If Lanzmann chose to name his film Shoah in order to resist the association of the word Holocaust with its origins as a ‘burnt offering’, then The Messenger reinstates the Jews in their historical role as messengers, be it in the guise of Christ, or in a more Jewish attribution as the archetypes of Exile.
This is the ultimate message of The Messenger, shaped by an encounter between Karski’s Catholicism and his Judaism. This is not a book one merely reads; it is a book one receives—visually, aurally, and existentially. This is a message delivered by each and every one of us, to ourselves. ‘If a book does not change the course of history,’ Karski/Haenel asks, ‘is it really a book?’
Is this really a book?
Haenel, like Karski before him, desperately wants us to answer that question.
Mark Baker, 2010
NOTE
The words spoken by Jan Karski in Part One come from his interview with Claude Lanzmann in Shoah.
Part Two is a summary of Jan Karski’s book, Story of a Secret State (Emery Reeves, New York, 1944), which was translated into French as Histoire d’un Etat secret, then republished in 2004 by Points de Mire in its ‘Histoire’ collection, as Mon témoignage devant le monde.
Part Three is fictional. It is based on certain aspects of Jan Karski’s life, which I have gathered from, among other sources, Karski, How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust by E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw M. Jankowski (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1994). But the situations, words and thoughts that I attribute to Jan Karski are pure inventions.
PART ONE
It is in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Near the end of the film, a man attempts to talk but fails. He looks about sixty and is speaking in slightly awkward English. He is tall, thin and wears an elegant grey/blue suit. The first word that he pronounces is: ‘Now.’ He says: ‘I go back thirty-five years,’ then at once: ‘No, I don’t go back, no…I can’t…’ He sobs, hides his face, suddenly stands up and moves out of frame. The scene is empty, all that can be seen are shelves of books, a couch and plants. The man has vanished.
When he returns to his place, his name appears on the screen: ‘JAN KARSKI (USA)’. Then, just as he sits down: ‘Former courier of the Polish government in exile’. His eyes are very blue and brimming with tears, his mouth is moist. ‘I’m ready,’ he says. He starts talking in a formal tone of voice, as though giving a recitation: ‘In the middle of 1942, I was thinking to continue my service as a courier between the Polish armed Underground and the Polish government in exile, in London.’
This manner of starting his tale protects him from emotion: it is as if we are at the beginning of Dante, but also in a spy novel. He explains how the Jewish leaders, in Warsaw, were informed of his departure for London and a meeting was organised ‘outside of the ghetto’ as he puts it. We understand at once that this is what he is going to talk about: the Warsaw ghetto. He says that there were two people present: one a leader of the Bund, or Jewish Workers Party, the other a Zionist leader. He does not reveal their names, or where the meeting took place. His sentences are short, direct, encircled by silence. He says that he was not ready for this meeting, because at the time he was extremely isolated by his work in Poland. And that he was not well informed. Each of his words bears a trace of the difficulties he experienced at the beginning, when he moved out of frame. It is as if his words reflect the impossibility of speaking. Jan Karski cannot play the role of witness, which is being given to him, and yet it is his, whether he likes it or not. His speech broke down straight away because what he has to say can in fact only be said in broken language.
Once again, Jan Karski says: ‘Now…’ as though to say: ‘How can I say this?’ As though to convince himself that he is still very much alive, and out of harm’s way. Then he corrects himself once more with his first sentence: ‘I don’t go back.’ It is a sentence which he will repeat frequently during the interview: ‘Even now I don’t want…I am here…I don’t go back in my memory…’ It seems to be a way to protect himself against his own words, and against what they will reveal. He does not want his words to expose him once more to the object of his tale. He does not want to relive it. That is why he emphasises distance so much: ‘I wasn’t part of it,’ he says. ‘I didn’t belong.’
Jan Karski tells how these two men described what was ‘happening to the Jews’. He repeats that he was not aware of it. They explained to him that Hitler was in the process of exterminating the entire Jewish people. And not just Polish Jews, but all the Jews in Europe. The Allies are fighting for humanity, they tell him, but they shouldn’t forget that the Jews in Poland will be totally wiped out.
Jan Karski grimaces, his hands seem to be imploring, as if at that moment he is identifying himself with these two Jewish leaders, as if, as he speaks, he is taking their place. He describes how they paced around the room: ‘They were breaking down.’ He explains how: ‘at various stages of the conversation, they lost control of themselves.’ Just like him, Jan Karski, in front of Claude Lanzmann’s camera. But, in 1942, he was just being spoken to; he remained motionless on a chair and asked no questions. He just listened.
Thirty-five years later, it is his turn to speak. He repeats what the two Jewish leaders told him. They understood his ignorance, he says, and after he had agreed to relay their messages, they started to tell him about their situation.
Claude Lanzmann then asks him if he knew that most of the Jews in Warsaw had already been killed. Jan Karski says that he did: ‘I did know, but I didn’t see anything.’ He says that nobody had told him about it: ‘I was never there,’ he says. ‘It is one thing to know statistics…there were hundreds of thousands of Poles also killed, of Russians, Serbs, Greeks. We knew about it. But it was a question of statistics!’ Who knew? And how much did they know? ‘We’ knew—but who is this ‘we’? Jan Karski ‘knew’—without knowing. Presumably because we know nothing without first having seen it, and this is precisely what Jan Karski is about to say. Because the two messengers invited him to see for himself what was happening in the Warsaw ghetto, and offered to organise a visit for him. The Bund leader asked him to ‘give oral reports’ to the Allies. ‘I am sure,’ he said to Jan Karski, ‘it will strengthen your report if you will be able to say: I saw it myself.’
On several occasions, the camera draws nearer to Jan Karski’s face. His mouth is speaking, his voice can be heard, but it is his eyes that know. Is the witness the person who is talking? It is above all the person who has seen. Jan Karski’s bulging eyes, in a close-up in Shoah, stare at us through time. They have seen and now they are looking at us.
Claude Lanzmann asks if the two men emphasised the utterly unique nature of what was happening to the Jews. Yes, Jan Karski says. According to them, the Jewish problem was unprecedented, and could not be compared to the Polish problem or the Russian problem, or any other problem. ‘The Jewish problem is unprecedented in history,’ that is what these two men told him. And so they had reached the conclusion that the Allies’ response should also be unprecedented. ‘Unless the Allies take some unprecedented steps, regardless of the outcome of the war, the Jews will be totally exterminated.’ It is clear that the two men wanted Jan Karski to inform the Allies. For him to be their emissary. That he should bear witness in London to the fate of the Jews.
So, Jan Karski goes on, in that solemn formal tone which he perhaps feels is protecting him: ‘Then they gave me messages.’ In his Polish immigrant English, his international English, Jan Karski says precisely: ‘Then they gave me messages.’ But this is translated in the French subtitles as ‘So they delivered their message to me.’ It is like a verse from the Old Testament: the angels have come to tell the chosen one what he has to hear, so that he can then make it be known in turn. On pronouncing this sentence, Jan Karski becomes a messenger. ‘Then they gave me messages.’ The plural ‘s’ can be clearly heard—there were to be different messages: ‘To the Allied governments’, ‘then to the Polish government’, ‘then to the president of the Polish republic’, ‘then to the international Jewish leaders’, ‘and to individual political leaders, leading intellectuals…’ Approach as many people as possible, they told Jan Karski, to the best of your ability.
