Posted on January 15, 2008 by Steve Pollak
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.
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 Sobibór.
According to the notes in "The Seventh Well," he went to Leipzig in 1955 and stayed in East Germany for almost three decades. He worked as a travel writer and a photographer, specializing in the French island of Corsica.
It was only after the death of his only daughter in 1970 that he sat down to write about his time in the camps. The result was “The Seventh Well,” a work of fiction inspired by his wartime experiences.
Wander moved back to his native Vienna in 1983 and continued working as a writer. He published his memoirs, Das gute Leben, in 1996. He died on July 10, 2006.
He lived a long but difficult, sorrow-filled life. There is an episode in "The Seventh Well" in which a Jewish inmate imagines returning home to his Paris apartment after the war. You could easily imagine these being Wander’s own thoughts and realize why it’s only through this type of writing that you could begin to feel — but never truly comprehend — the depths of his pain:
“[I]f I should be spared to see the ground-floor apartment in the rue des Rosiers again in my life, I will just stand and listen, and the walls will speak to me: ‘This is where you lived,’ they will say, ‘this is where you brought up your children, where are they now, did you look after them properly?’ And I will reply, ‘I believed, I put my trust in God. I was happy,’ I will say. ‘Every day I was happy. I had my worries, and I quarreled sometimes with my family, with my wife, with my children, and I cursed, and I committed sins of every kind, I lied, I told thousands of little lies, that was my life. But still I was happy, they were my best years, with my children, with my wife, all of us together …’ but the walls will demand an accounting and they will ask, ‘Here you sat, and frittered away your time. You were a dreamer. You daydreamed. You knew nothing. And what happened, where are they now?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I will say. And then I will cry. But the walls will be implacable with me: ‘You are crying now, because you have suffered misfortune. But did you cry then? And yet the world is full of misery. Did you not see it?’
“I will cry, and not understand. One can understand the sorrows of others, one can find words of comfort for others, even those who have lost everything. One’s own sorrows one cannot understand. Nor find comfort or advice for. And the people who offer advice, because they don’t know and haven’t suffered—You should flee from them. You should run away and hide. Speak to the walls. Only they know. But because they know, they will remain silent.”
I would concur with what others are already saying — Wander deserves a place on your bookshelf alongside the works of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and Paul Celan.