November 14 New York Times Holocaust Book Reviews
Nonfiction
A Memoir of a Young Girl's Survival Amongst Mounting Horrors
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MALA'S True cat
A Memoir of Survival in World State of war Two
Past Mala Kacenberg
In the wood outside Tarnogrod, Poland, in Oct 1942, an orphaned xiv-year-old Jewish girl and her true cat hide in the shadows between fallen tree trunks while a pair of SS men lounge nearby, taking whiffs of forest air, eating biscuits, drinking wine, singing victory songs and gloating over the jewelry they've collected from their victims that twenty-four hours: "Yes, they volition exist lovely presents for our wives." Finally the SS men mount their horses and ride off, not knowing they've been watched, not imagining that the person who saw them was recording everything in her mind to be documented afterward, and surely not conceiving the thought that occurs to this lonely girl as she hears them singing: "I felt similar taking some branches and hitting them on the backs of their heads. I felt like hitting them many times — ane for every person they had killed or tortured."
The observer is Mala Szorer (the futurity Mala Kacenberg), whose half-dozen-twelvemonth fight for survival is the subject of her recently republished memoir (the more aptly titled original, "Alone in the Wood," was published by CIS in 1995). Despite the difficulties that inhere in Holocaust memoir — we believe we know this history, and its bailiwick affair defies linguistic communication — "Mala's Cat" is fresh, unsentimental and utterly unpredictable. (Information technology is non in any real mode well-nigh a cat, though cat lovers won't be disappointed: You lot, too, volition be satisfied past the cleverness, resourcefulness and fidelity of Mala'due south feline companion, Malach, whom she fancies to be her guardian angel.)
After she witnesses the coldblooded killing of her older brother and, soon afterward, the violent roundup and displacement of her family unit and of every Jewish person in her boondocks, Mala escapes into the forest and fends for herself for months, relying on the kindness of residents of the surrounding towns for food and habiliment. (Those residents are equally probable to turn Jews over to the Nazis, a phenomenon Mala witnesses more than one time.) When cold weather threatens, Mala adopts a false Christian identity and joins a forced labor detail spring for Frg, where she hides in plain sight as a maid in a pocket-size eatery-hotel until the cease of the war in Europe.
All of this is far easier said than washed: The memoir is a relate of Kacenberg's amazing creativity, intelligence, courage and plain old chutzpah. She is wise across her years, knowing when she needs to consume and slumber and grieve, and even when she needs to do what is not wise ("I had to become to Tarnogrod in one case more to convince myself that in that location was no more future for me among my own people"). And she's sensitive to millions of virtually-invisible threats and opportunities: a seeming ally'southward hostile optics, a fellow laborer's overfriendliness, a Ukrainian overseer'southward vanity. Most threatening, time and once more, is the encroachment of her ain despair; simply, as Kacenberg writes: "More and more, I became adamant to put upwardly a struggle and die a hero's death if need be. … So what if I was only a young daughter with no i to teach me how to exercise it?"
What actually guides Mala, what keeps her company at dark, is a powerful and unshakable sense of her own self-worth, and of the injustice of her situation: "I always came to the same conclusion. I was innocent, and it was my pursuers who should have been hunted, not I." This is the ultimate source of her fierceness — this, and her faith in a divine plan, of which she is simply i small part. And, perhaps nearly compellingly, the desire to capture her experience for posterity, to "make certain the whole world remembered what the Germans had done. I badly wanted to survive even if it was just for that purpose."
Equally Rebecca Frankel, author of "Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Beloved," pointed out in these pages not long ago, the stories of the 25,000 Jews who survived the war in the woods of Eastern Europe are just beginning to come to light. This memoir, rescued from obscurity by the efforts of Mala Kacenberg'south v children, should exist read and cherished equally a new, vital document of a history that must never be immune to vanish.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/12/books/review/malas-cat-mala-kacenberg.html
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