January 15, 2008
Review of Fred Wander’s "The Seventh Well"
A single day in a concentration camp would have been enough to fill a novel. So, it was probably wise of Fred Wander to pick just a handful of episodes to write about from his time as an inmate in the camps instead to trying to describe everything that happened to him during the Holocaust.
As a result, “The Seventh Well” is a slender 148-page novel that dutifully conveys the life of a concentration camp inmate without being maudlin. The book was published first in East Germany in 1971. Now, it has been published in English for the first time with a wonderful translation by Michael Hofmann.
In the translator’s afterword, Hofmann expands on Wander’s measured approach to telling the story of the camps by quoting from his German-language memoir:
Wander resists the temptation—if it ever was a temptation—to be exhaustive, to say everything, even about his own experience. “Six million murdered Jews!” he [Wander] writes in Das gute Leben. “It’s not possible to say anything about so many millions of dead. But three or four individuals, it might be possible to tell a story about!”
Wander was born in Vienna in 1917. His parents, poor Galician Jews, called him Fritz Rosenblatt. Later, he changed his name later to reflect one of the defining characteristics of his life.
[Related: Read an article about Holocaust books]
Indeed, Wander never stayed in one place very long — even when he was an inmate.
He would never see his mother and sister alive again after leaving them in Vienna shortly after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. He was barely 21 years old but even at that tender age he’d already done a fair amount of traveling around Europe.
He left for France and moved around from Paris to Avignon to Montpellier to Toulouse to Nantes to Saint-Nazaire to Le Havre and ultimately back to Paris. When the war began in 1939, he was detained as an enemy alien and spent time in several labor camps.
He fled and was recaptured multiple times over the next two years. In August of 1942, he tried to escape one last time and began heading toward Switzerland when he was captured by the Vichy police and deported to an internment camp. A few weeks later, he was sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
From September 1942 through May 1943, Wander worked at several satellite camps of Auschwitz before he was forced to go on a death march to Gross-Rosen where he performed slave labor breaking rocks for IG Farben and its Buna (rubber) factory.
In January of 1945, the Nazis transferred Wander to Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany. He spent about two months at Crawinkel/Ohrdruf, a satellite camp of Buchenwald, before being sent on another death march back to Buchenwald. On April 11, 1945, the U.S. Army liberated the camp and Wander was freed.
After two months of convalescing for tuberculosis and spotted fever, he returned to Vienna to look for his family. But, he found out that, with the exception of his brother, all of them died in Auschwitz or Sobib