Few questions about the Holocaust are asked as frequently as, How could the Jews have gone so unresistingly to their deaths? Life with a Star, an extraordinary novel by Jiri Weil, a Czech Jew who survived by pretending to commit suicide and by hiding from the Germans, goes a long way toward answering the question. Weil's novel is one of the most important works of Holocaust literature to appear in English, but it is more than that. It is an important addition to the classics of world literature. Weil utilized his own harrowing wartime experiences to write Life with a Star, an account of how the Nazis organized the Jewish community of Prague for its own destruction and what it took, morally and psychologically, to escape the Nazi dragnet.
The novel tells the story of what it was like to live as a Jew during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia when all who wore the yellow star were fated for extermination. Josef Roubicek, the novel's protagonist, is one of a pitifully small number of Jews who has a chance to go underground, but such an opportunity is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for escape. Until the very end of the book, we do not know whether he will have the strength of character that resisting the Nazis requires.
Life with a Star is the story of the progressive intensification of rationalized bureaucratic sadism to facilitate mass murder with the least effort and expense to the perpetrators. The Nazis managed to shroud the extermination in mystery; people were scared but never sure. Only we readers looking on with present-day knowledge know the extent of the threat. The book simply portrays the effect of the Nazi occupation on the lives and psyches of the Jewish population in Prague. Yet, there is much more to Life with a Star than a tale of dehumanizing brutality. The novel is the story of how one altogether unlikely human being, Josef Roubicek, a lonely, unmarried former bank clerk, is able to find the inner resources to resist and survive.
The story
The book opens with Josef Roubicek, alone in his frigid garret, engaged in an imaginary conversation with Ruzena, the love of his life, a married Czech woman with whom he has had a love affair: "Ruzena, at this moment people are sitting down at well-set tables… and I am freezing… I am hungry." Having no one to talk to, yet desiring to escape his solitude, Josef is in the habit of talking to absent Ruzena.
Josef carries on his imaginary conversation as he prepares a "festive meal" consisting of boiled bones with a few scraps of meat on them. Normally, he is able to purchase only blood from the butcher. Ration cards for meat are denied Jews. The butcher is out of blood, however, and to his delight, has offered him bones instead.
The following day a messenger comes to Josef with a notice from the Community. The Community is housed in a four-story building filled with busy but generally unhelpful clerks and bureaucrats. Josef describes them: "Everybody was intent on seeing to their own business. They were irritable and unfriendly. They seemed to look at me angrily, as through I was one more person who would want something, who would make requests and leave less for the others."
The Community's staff was healthy and "full of bureaucratic eagerness." They
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