Review: As If It Were Life: A WWII Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto

As If It Were Life: A WWII Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto. By Philipp Manes. Translated by Janet Foster, Ben Barkow, and Klaus Leist (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), v + 289 pp. £18.99 cloth.  

Historians are getting beyond generalizations about realties in the Nazi-enforced ghettos, and none to soon as the last of the survivors may cross over by 2020 or thereabouts. This unique first-person account of life in a “model” ghetto in Czechoslovakia is invaluable in helping us understand the unreal situation in one of the best-known ghettos, an ersatz town that also served as a major transit camp (a way station to the “death factories” in the East). 

Written by a quintessential Old World gentleman, in every sense of that honorable term, this is the diary of Philipp Manes, a 67-year old Jewish patrician interred for two years in Terezin (the Czech name of the town). At once engaging (Manes writes with artistry and grace), it is also unexpectedly off-putting: unalterably proud of being German through and through, and obstinately blind to Nazi anti-Semitism and atrocities, Manes genuinely sympathizes with German fighter pilots endangered by allied bombers,  grieves over the harm being done to German cities under bombardment, and cannot bear the thought of Germany losing the war. 

As German propaganda artfully fogged the truth, Manes was unaware that irregularly scheduled trains that took ghetto residents to the east (including eventually Manes and his wife) actually went to death factories where nearly all were summarily murdered. Or, in the case of a very few, were consigned to slave labor lives of uncertain length and certain anguish. 

Manes focuses instead on his extraordinary contribution to the remarkable cultural life of the ghetto. Justifiably proud of developing over 500 well-attended public lectures by a wide assortment of personalities, Manes makes clear the precious life-enriching contribution to sanity and esteem made by such cultural activities (art exhibits, book clubs, choral groups, concerts, plays, library access, etc.).

One gets in this unforgettable book a behind-the-scenes look into the life of a very creative impresario. As well, we learn of the emotional toll taken by having to say frequent Goodbye to scores required to leave by train for the mysterious East. And we are rewarded with an unsparing assessment of the plusses and minuses of what passed under Nazi rule for ghetto self-governance (the Germans put Jewish men and women in nominal charge, keeping life-and-death power, of course, for themselves).

As if this wasn’t enough the book sheds unusual light on two well-known anomalies: Terezin was the site of an infamous propaganda film the Nazis made in an effort to daunt steadily-building condemnation of what was getting known about ghetto life. Similarly, after a rapid-fire superficial redo, it hosted a rare visit from the International Red Cross designed by the Overlords to send a positive [Potemkin Village] impression to the world. Inclined to give both activities the benefit of doubt, a self-deluded Manes offers a different take from that found more commonly in condemnatory accounts.

For all of its broad and also sometimes distinctive coverage the book has costly gaps: Divided by his advanced age from any extensive contact with the youth in Terezin, Manes has very little to say about the same-sex dorms of teenagers and their vibrant life-affirming and hope-sustaining culture therein. Boys published a literary magazine, girls helped nurse for the elderly, and both genders rushed to assist new arrivals become a little less frightened. Nor does he note an extraordinary “university-without-walls” that offered hundreds of courses, several thousand lectures, and classes often at 5am so young workers could still get to factory work on time. Above all, Manes, ever the pro-German patriot, seems to have been understandably excluded from knowledge of a considerable underground in the ghetto. 

Between 1941 and 1945 about 140,000 victims were temporarily housed in Terezin, only 19,000 of whom are thought to have lived through to the war’s end (65 percent died after being transported to the death factories; 21 percent died in disease-and-starvation-wracked Terezin itself. The ghetto’s story has been told from many different angles, with well-deserved attention going to its art, music, self-governance, youth culture, and especially to the insistence of residents to stay human despite everything that worked against this. This diary by a sensitive, caring, and cultured German Jewish aristocrat adds much of value to our nuanced understanding of a lost world almost beyond belief.

Arthur B. Shostak, Drexel University (retired), USA