History is the Study of Our Own Deception
WWII began a day earlier than you think
This week is the beginning of my little grass-roots book tour on the east coast of the USA. After a week of shenanigans in Brooklyn, where exactly zero bookstores responded to emails, I took three Peter Ban busses to Provincetown, MA, where this evening I’ll be doing a reading at East End Books.
Last week,
wrote a beautiful review of the book. This week, a dear literary friend wrote a very generous summary and review, too.The Requisitions
The 58,000 word novel (just over 200 pages) is narrated by someone very much like me, a former academic-turned-novelist who’s returning home to help his ailing mother (her memory is faltering) move out of their childhood home while he attempts to write a more authentic story about World War Two.
As his mother’s ailing memory forces him to reconsider his own past, the narrator finds solace in the fictional narrative of three intertwined lives Nazi-occupied Poland: Viktor, a disillusioned academic forced into the notorious Łódź Ghetto; Elsa, a young German woman who fled Nazism only to become a captive Gestapo secretary in Poland; and her estranged fiancé, Carl, a troubled policeman whose fixation with the past is pushing him towards unspeakable cruelty.
(for booksellers, librarians, and readers with a NetGalley account: follow this link for a free eBook download of The Requisitions)
The following excerpt is from the opening to chapter two,
when the narrator begins to doubt everything he’s learned about his own past and the official narratives surrounding World War Two:
“Truth,” Chapter Two, The Requisitions
“I rebel: against my past, against history and against a present that places the incomprehensible in the cold storage of history and thus falsifies it in a revolting way.”
—Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 1966
I realize I lied earlier. The writing on the spine of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was white, not red. Red made for a better visual, but it wasn’t the truth, so lest I make a mistake again, now that other memories are fading, let me repeat the truth: the writing on the book spine was white, not red. The distinction between what is remembered and “the truth” even has its own fancy word amongst academics—historicity.
Another mistake from earlier: I suggested World War Two began on September 1, 1939. At best, this is a half-truth, at least according to a 2009 Telegraph article by Bob Graham. On August 31, 1939, a Polish farmer named Franz Honiok was abducted from his home and murdered on the German-Polish border, thus becoming the first casualty of World War II. According to the facts, Honiok, a sovereign Polish citizen, was killed by known members of the German security services the night before Hitler’s armies invaded Poland. Honiok was kidnapped, drugged, outfitted in a Polish Army uniform, and executed at the border. The point was to insinuate Poland had attacked Germany first; but to suggest World War Two started on August 31, 1939, changes the official story, and requires an understanding of Operation Himmler, a series of false-flag operations conducted before the “official” beginning of World War Two.
Upon further research, I’ve learned about the Jabłonków Incident, when the Polish Army repelled German Abwehr agents along the Polish-Slovak border, six days before Franz Honiok’s murder … but if this was the first German military operation of the war, why don’t we speak of August 25, 1939, as the beginning of World War Two?
Alas, it seems all we can ever do is approximate some sense of truth. The writing on the book spine of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was white, not red, and there is more than one possibility to the beginning of World War Two.
Hear the crickets and their pulsing sounds. The sound of night. The rustle of trees. Men with rifles huddle together beneath a wooden radio tower, black and skeletal; the building grasps for something in the moonlit expanse.
On the road, exposed, reads a signpost: Gleiwitz. The men await the signal: “Grandmother is dead.”
Does Franz Honiok squirm? Is he hog-tied on the ground? We know this Polish farmer was abducted from his home in broad daylight on August 31, 1939 ... but when they came for him, was he raking, tending to livestock, or feeding the pigs? Did he even have pigs? And would it change the history if he did? Surely Franz Honiok didn’t invite his captors inside for tea, but did he peek through the blinds when he heard the truck pulling up? Was it a truck? Or was it a Volkswagen? And if Franz Honiok had window curtains, did he hide behind them? Were they white? Were they long, thick, and red?
It is August 31, 1939, and the history books will soon forget Honiok’s real name in favor of a German codename: konserve, “canned meat.” Once attacked, drugged, and cloaked in a Polish Army uniform, Honiok’s captors will drag him to the Gleiwitz radio station. SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks is at the helm of this operation (his affidavit at the Nuremberg Trials says as much), but who are the other commandos alongside him? Are their names important? Why or why not?
What’s important tonight is these men are here to justify an invasion. Tonight, both history and language will change irrevocably. Previously innocuous terms are already beginning to take on new meanings: Polish farmer, canned meat, special task, Gleiwitz, and hundreds of other words transmogrified to mask the reality of death.
The special unit approaches the sleepy radio station. Under cover of night and the sound of crickets, somebody injects Franz Honiok with poison. He takes his final breath some time before the elite SS unit masquerading as Polish saboteurs dump his corpse like a prop onto the stage of history, filling his cadaver with bullet holes for good measure. A lanky, insectan SS-Major disguised in a Polish uniform is among the first inside. He inserts a pistol into the mouth of a German radio operator, his brethren, and cackles with glee as a man named Karl Hornack—this man really did exist—takes hold of the radio transmitter to tell the first lie of World War Two: “Uwaga! Tu Gliwice. Rozglosnia znajduje sie w rekach polskich!” (“Attention! This is Gliwice! The radio station is in Polish hands.”) Although the transmission is weak and the Polish accent affected, credibility has never been part of Hitler’s casus belli.
“Last night, Polish soldiers opened fire for the first time on German soil,” Hitler announces just a few hours later. “This morning, Germany retaliated. From now on, bombs will be met with bombs.”
Abduct a Polish farmer, change his outfit, deem him canned meat, and dump his costumed body at a radio station. It is all too human how quickly the past succumbs to perception. But what about the Truth? What would Franz Honiok have said? Perhaps that he was more than an anecdote, more than a forgotten casualty of World War Two. Perhaps that history is a fiction first written by the aggressors, only to be revised by the victors and forgotten by the rest.
But what becomes of the vanquished, of those who once lived? History, in the end, is the study of our own deception.
Reviews / Purchase The Requisitions
Samuel - I'm writing a bit prematurely since I am about to finish your ambitious, heatbreaking, painful, life-affirming novel. I have not yet read the last 20 pages, but am moved to comment regardless. It has not been an easy read - given the history it recounts, how could it be - but it is brilliantly crafted. I often find historically faithful novels try so hard to exhibit their fidelity to the facts that the human drama and interiority of the characters is crowded out by general expository detail and the novel's individual voices get lost for pages at a time. Your approach succeeded at keeping me in the hearts and minds of the characters even as you detailed the horrible truths of their circumstances. Bravo. I look forward to meeting you in Paris for our tour of the 5th: two authors an ocean apart writing two distinctly different books that both have characters reference Mary Shelley's The Last Man will no doubt find much to talk about.