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Overview
On a street in modern-day Norway, a writer kneels with his son and tells him that according to Jewish tradition, a person dies twice: first when their heart stops beating, and then again the last time their name is read or thought or said. Before them is a stone engraved with the name Hirsch Komissar, the boy's great-great-grandfather who was murdered by Nazis.
The man who sent Komissar to his death was one of Norway's vilest traitors, Henry Oliver Rinnan, a Nazi double agent who set up headquarters in an unspectacular suburban house and transformed the cellar into a torture chamber for resisters, a place to be avoided and feared.
That is until Komissar's own son, Gerson, and his young wife, Ellen, take up residence in the house after the war. While their daughters spend a happy childhood playing in the same rooms where some of the most heinous acts of the occupation occurred, the weight of history threatens to pull the couple apart.
In Keep Saying Their Names, Simon Stranger uses this unusual twist of fate to probe five generations of intimate and global history, seamlessly melding fact and fiction, creating a brilliant lexicon of light and dark. The resulting novel reveals how evil is born in some and courage in others—and seeks to keep alive the names of those lost.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780525657361 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2020 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A
A for accusation.
A for arrest.
A for all that will disappear and slide into oblivion. All our memories and feelings. All our property and possessions. All that makes up the framework of a life. The chairs one used to sit in and the bed one used to sleep in will be carried out and placed in a new home. Our plates will be laid out on the table by new hands and the glasses raised to someone else’s lips, who will sip the water or the wine, before resuming their conversation. Items once loaded with history will lose all their meaning and be transformed to mere shapes, like a piano might appear to a deer or a beetle.
One day it will happen. One day will be the last for all of us, none of us knowing when, or how.
According to Jewish tradition everyone dies twice. The first time is when the heart stops beating and the synapses in the brain shut down, like a city during a blackout.
The second time is when the name of the deceased is mentioned, read, or thought of for the last time, fifty, or a hundred, or four hundred years later. Only then is that person really gone, erased from this world. This second death was what made the German artist Gunter Demnig start casting cobblestones in brass, engraving them with the names of Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War, and embedding them in the pavement outside the houses where they once lived. He calls them Stolpersteine. They are an attempt to postpone the second death, by documenting the names of the deceased, so that passersby will look down in decades to come and read them, and in doing so, keep them alive, while ensuring that the memory of one of the worst chapters in Europe’s history is also kept alive—as visible scars on the face of the city. So far sixty-seven thousand Stolpersteine have been laid throughout Europe.
One of them is yours.
One of these stones has your name on it, and is planted in the pavement outside the apartment where you once lived, in the central Norwegian city of Trondheim. A few years ago my son knelt beside this Stolperstein, brushed away the pebbles and sand with his mitten, and read aloud.
“Here lived Hirsch Komissar.”
My son turned ten that year, and is one of your great-great- grandchildren. As is my daughter, who was only six years old that spring. My wife, Rikke, stood beside me. Also in this circle of people, was my mother-in-law, Grete, and her husband, Steinar, all of us gathered as though for the burial of an urn.
“Yes. He was my grandfather,” said Grete. “He lived right here, on the second floor,” she went on, turning to the building behind us, to the windows where you once stood looking out, in another age, when people other than ourselves were alive. I knelt down, and my daughter hung her arms round my neck, while my son continued reading the bare facts etched into the cobblestone.
HERE LIVED
HIRSH KOMISSAR
BORN 1887
ARRESTED 12.1.1942
FALSTAD
KILLED 7.10.42
Grete said something about the surprise invasion, recounting the story of how her father had seen the soldiers on the morning of April 9, 1940. Rikke stood up to join the conversation, and my daughter slid off my back and nestled up to her. Only my son and I continued looking down at the brass plate on the pavement. His finger stroked over the last line, then he looked up.
“Why was he killed, Dad?” he asked.
“Because he was Jewish,” I replied.
“Yes, but why?”
From the corner of my eye I noticed Rikke looking at me, following both conversations simultaneously.
“Well . . . The Nazis wanted to kill anyone who was different.” My son became quiet.
“Are we Jewish too?” he asked. His brown eyes were clear and concentrated.
I blinked a few times, trying to recall what he knew about the family’s history. What did my children know about being Jewish, and about our ancestry? We must have talked about how their great-great-grandparents on their mother’s side had emigrated from various parts of Russia more than a hundred years ago. I knew we had talked about the war, about their great-grandfather Gerson—whom they had both gotten to know before he died— and his escape to Sweden.
Rikke drew breath to say something, but then fell back into the conversation with Grete, and my eyes locked with my son’s.
“You’re Norwegian,” I replied, but I felt there was an element of deceit in my answer, and noticed Rikke looking at me again. “And a part of you is Jewish, but we’re not religious,” I said as I stood up, hoping that Rikke or Grete would say something too, that they would have a better answer than me, but their conversation had already leapt ahead, following the logic of association, and was now somewhere else entirely.
We went on our way, but my son’s question stuck with me. Why was he killed, Dad?
Shortly after, I started browsing through various archives, and before long some of the pieces became more visible. Soon I could picture the snow in the center of Trondheim, and the steam from people’s breath as they passed the small, crooked wooden houses. And soon I was able to see how the end of your life began, on a day like any other.
It is Monday, January 12, 1942. You are standing behind the counter of the fashion boutique that you and your wife own in Trondheim, surrounded by hats on stands, and mannequins wearing coats and dresses. You have just welcomed your first customer of the day, and told her about this week’s special offers, when you have to put down your cigarette and the order form to pick up the phone.
“Paris-Vienna, can I help you?” you say, automatically, as you have done thousands of times before.
“Guten Morgen,” says a man on the other end of the line, who continues, in German: “Am I talking to Komissar?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” you reply, also in German, thinking momentarily that it might be one of your suppliers from Hamburg calling, perhaps because of a problem at customs again. Maybe it is the summer dresses you ordered, but in that case it must be a new employee, because this voice does not sound familiar.
“Hirsch Komissar, married to Marie Komissar?”
“Yes? Who am I speaking to?”
“I am calling from the Gestapo’s security service.”
“OK?”
You glance up from the order form, aware that your customer can sense there is something going on. You place your cigarette on the edge of the ashtray again and turn your face toward the wall, while your heart pounds in your chest. The Gestapo?
“There is a matter we would like to discuss with you,” says the man in a low voice.
“Very well,” you reply apprehensively, and are just about to open your mouth to ask what that is when you are interrupted.
“Please come in for questioning at the Mission Hotel. Today, at two p.m.,” says the voice at the end of the line.
Mission Hotel? For questioning? Why on earth are you being called in for questioning, you think with your face still turned to the wall. Could it have something to do with Marie’s brother David and his communist views? The spike from a headless nail pokes out from the door frame. You hold your thumb against the metal, pressing the point into your skin while closing your eyes.
“Hello?” says the voice at the other end, in an impatient tone. “Are you there?”
“Yes, I am here . . . ,” you reply, lifting your thumb from the spike and looking at the white spot where the blood has been pressed away from the flesh.
“Some of my colleagues think I’m taking too much of a risk call- ing you like this . . . ,” the man says. There is the sound of a cigarette lighter being lit right next to the mouthpiece.
“. . . they think I should have sent a car and brought you in right away, so that you don’t just take your sons and disappear. After all you are Jews . . . ,” continues the voice, emphasizing the last word, then continuing in a more hushed tone, almost confidingly. “But I know that your wife, Marie, has been admitted to the hospital . . . A fall on the ice, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s correct . . . she slipped and fell on the ice a few days ago, and fractured . . . a bone in her hip,” you reply, unable to remember the German word for “femur,” not quite sure if you’ve ever known it. You make your point anyway.
How could Marie be so stupid as to walk in high-heeled boots on those icy streets, you think. So foolhardy, always elegant, and with an unwavering need to decide everything herself. If you so much as hinted that she could do things differently, perhaps be a little more careful, or you suggested that writing newspaper columns, or organizing meetings at home where political issues are discussed, was reckless—and might very well be seen as political incitement—she would just sniff at you. A dark look would fall across her eyes before making it clear that she would keep doing things her way. Now she has done exactly that, and just look where it has led, you think, as you stand behind the counter, still clutching the telephone.
“A fractured femur, yes . . . ,” says the faceless person at the other end, reminding you of the German designation, “. . . so I very much doubt you or your sons are likely to run away, right? If so, we would have to take care of her.”
Take care of her. You nod quietly, even though no one can read your body language through the telephone, before replying that you will not be going anywhere.
“Good, Komissar. Then we will see you here at two p.m. You know where to find us, right?”
“The Mission Hotel? Yes, of course.”
“Good. A good day to you.”
There is a click as the person hangs up, and you stand there behind the counter, with your thoughts scattering like a flock of birds. What will you do now? You look up at the clock. It is several hours until two o’clock. There is plenty of time, enough to simply run away from it all, you think, and consider, momentarily, creeping into the stock room and exiting through the delivery door. Vanish in secret and just run, as far as you can, without stopping, ignoring the taste of blood in your mouth, the looks from strangers, or the tiredness in your legs from running uphill. You could have run all the way to the woods, gone into hiding among the pine trees, and just kept going, toward the Swedish border, where your daughter, Lillemor, is already living in safety. It could work, you think. But you understand right away what a false notion this is, because what about Marie? What about your two sons, Gerson and Jacob? If you just ran off, that would put them in danger, you think while folding up the order form with your available hand. Even if you were able to notify Jacob, through the man you know at his college, you wouldn’t get hold of Gerson, because Gerson is out in the Norwegian countryside somewhere, with his college friends— and what would happen to him, when he arrives back in town from the cabin trip and finds German soldiers waiting outside his bedsit? And what about Marie?
Are they true, the rumors which have begun circulating in the shops, at dinners, and at the synagogue? About Jews being sent to special camps abroad. Or are they all just tall tales, exaggerations, like the monsters you imagined creeping around in the dark when you were a child?
You close up the shop, write a note saying CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS, and hang it on the inside of the door, before turning the key and walking up the hill toward the hospital.
What matter are they referring to? Perhaps it is nothing more than some vague accusation, nothing substantial enough to have you arrested, you think, on your way up the hill. You are careful to tread where it’s been gritted, and cling onto the railings to avoid slipping on the steps, on the clumps of polished ice that resemble small, flattened jellyfish.