Books
Broken on the Inside: Memory from the inside out
The task for the reader is to work out which parts are fiction and which are not
September 2, 2015 15:35
The task for the reader is to work out which parts are fiction and which are not
September 2, 2015 15:35Broken on the Inside, by Simon Hammelburg, was originally published in Holland in 1996. At the beginning of this new version (Aerial Media, £16.99) we are told that it "may be read as a novel" and that "it is based on 1,200 interviews with Holocaust survivors and their children". The task for the reader is to work out which parts are fiction and which are not.
The narrator is a middle-aged, Dutch businessman whose wife is, very early on, killed in a car crash. Although much of what he tells us is deeply disturbing, there is something curiously unemotional, almost anaesthetised about his narrative voice. When his parents, both Holocaust survivors, met in 1945 at a Red Cross office "neither of them found a single person who escaped the Nazis [sic] madness", and they remain deeply damaged by their wartime experience.
The mother is an astonishing creation: mad, violent, predatory. "From early childhood," the narrator relates, "my mother had been vomiting her distorted memories over us… She was an hysterical insatiable woman with severe mood changes."
She is verbally and physically abusive until, one day, the narrator punches her in the face in self-defence. "After a few seconds of silence she started to laugh. The physical violence ended there." At home, her husband is very withdrawn but in public he is prone to crazy confrontations.
As for the title, the narrator is but one of many characters "broken on the inside" and the whole "novel" is about the children of survivors damaged by their Holocaust-survivor parents' inability to deal with their traumatic experience.
There are characters who are walking vignettes, each with a story to tell of survival and trauma. One, Dave, tells the narrator how his father, a survivor from Auschwitz, "often locked himself in the bathroom. He just sat there for lengthy periods of time, in the dark. Sometimes we could hear him cry."
The home Dave describes is typical: "It was a house full of anxiety… Anxiety, fear and nervousness together formed a package of transmittable disease. A violent, deadly virus."
This is a bleak book, at times deeply disturbing. Its power, however, is not really from the fiction and it would probably have been more appropriately written as a series of case histories, a sombre, oral history from the second generation.