An autobiography has the right to emphasize the psychological entanglements, or else the story with which the author settles his accounts through the political or social window. Louis Frankenberg, in “Five Times I Live”, fulfills these two tasks at the same time. And it does it enviably well.
The life of the author who survived the Holocaust is unique. He passed through two concentration camps — Westerbork, in Holland, and Theresienstadt, in the current Czech Republic — and he was only eight years old when he was freed from Nazism and ten when he arrived in Porto Alegre, in the house of his uncles who raised him. .
Only in 1988, as a mature man, did he go looking for his own past. He researched a great-uncle, a doctor in Alkmaar, the small Dutch town where he was born. Then he went looking for information about his parents, who owned a stationery and bookstore in town.
Louis and his sister Eva, three years his senior, were the only survivors among the closest relatives who remained in Europe during the war. The parents were murdered in the Sobibor camp in 1944, in details that the author reconstructed only in the 1990s.
Lode — as the author is familiarly called — says that for decades he tried not to approach painful episodes. He was just one of thousands of anonymous orphans that the heinous Nazism caused. His book, with a delicious text to which Ricardo Garcia contributed, works on multiple tentacles.
It brings, for example, detailed information about the stock of office supplies in the family store, which indirectly tells us about the pattern of consumption in the 1930s. Dutch beaches in summer, weddings and funerals.
It also reveals how many trains left Westerbork for extermination camps in Poland and how many Jews each train carried. And it historically contextualizes the whole logic of extermination, with Himmler, Eichmann and other institutional protagonists of the “final solution”.
The autobiography describes the tension shared by the prisoners of the transit camps, waiting for the weekly list of the occupants of the train who would depart towards extermination. The victims knew nothing about the gas chambers, but they supposed how fallacious the plan to just subject them to “forced labor” was, because from the east no one came back to tell how it happened.
Frankenberg’s book scripts characters with names and personality traits, talks in detail about insufficient food and precarious comfort, such as the mats on the floor on which prisoners in Theresienstadt slept.
The author doesn’t just provide us with a compact block of sorrows. We receive it broken down into details, which makes these blocks much more distressing and instructive. This structuring of the autobiographical text gives a historical dimension only present in great memories about the Second World War. In a way, Frankenberg’s book has the stature to occupy that place as well.
In two passages, the author is surprised by the ease with which, during his research in Dutch archives, he came to mentions about himself or about the exterminated part of his family. The truth is that the Nazi dictatorship worked with good rationality, because without it there would be a dispersion of the energy necessary for the concentrated practice of monstrous decisions.
Another factor that benefited the biographer was the quantity and quality of documents produced by the family. Especially the letters that his mother wrote from the end of the 1930s to his mother and sister, residents, as emigrants, of the gaucho capital.
The book takes advantage of these sources. And he addresses, without mincing words, a characteristic that Frankenberg would have omitted out of modesty — the urinary incontinence that haunted him late in childhood, an involuntary reaction to the lack of affection caused by the absence of his parents.
Hans and Trudi, that’s what they called themselves, stayed away from their kids so the Nazis wouldn’t take over the whole family if they found out where they were hiding.
Lode can’t remember when he last saw his parents. He was victimized by the same lapse that does not let him remember what the three days were like in a railway car for animals in which, in the company of hundreds of other Jews, he was transported between two concentration camps, from Holland to what was then Czechoslovakia.
