Greg’s Year in Books

What did you read this year?

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2023

10,404

pages read

books read

Greg

Shakespeare Insult Generator by Barry Kraft

Shortest Book

118

pages

Longest Book

864

pages

Average book length in 2023

335

pages

Most Shelved

248,566

people also shelved

Least Shelved

people also shelved

Greg’s average rating for 2023

4.4

Highest Rated on Goodreads

it was amazing

5.00 average

Greg’s first review of the year

really liked it

Gerhard Polt is the funniest comic and one of the most insightful people of whom I'm aware. His Bavarian dialect, insights into Bavarian culture, and ironic monologues as various German right wingers are masterpieces. And so very difficult to translate. The cultural nuances don't always come through in English. This small edition is only for devoted fans of Polt. It's a compilation of various parts of Polt's humor arranged in a Devil's Dictionary ...more

GREG’S 2023 BOOKS

Richtig leben, länger leben by Heinz Ludwig

it was amazing

The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist

By Hands Now Known by Margaret A. Burnham

it was amazing

P. G. Wodehouse In His Own Words by P.G. Wodehouse

Dirigieren verdirbt den Charakter by Hans Martin Ulbrich

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño

Götz von Berlichingen by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

it was amazing

Living Medicine by Frederick Appelbaum M.D.

it was amazing

Dr. Arnulf Schmitz-Zceisczyk by Gerhard Polt

Greg’s last review of the year

it was amazing

”One corruption in exchange for another, and this infiltrated their blood…”

Kapos were inmates selected to be overseers of other prisoners to maintain order in concentration camps. Nobel Prize laureate Imre Kertész questioned if they were “victim[s] or perpetrator[s].” Primo Levi went further. “[N]o one is authorised to judge them, not those who lived through the experience of the Lager and even less those who did not live through it.” Both Kertész and Levi are far too lenient. Their reasoning leads to a conclusion that little difference exists between Kapos and, for example, the post-World War II mythos of “innocent bystanders,” Mitläufer. Their logic comes close to absolving atrocities carried out in the names of nations, movements, or religions. Reckonings, accountings of individual decisions and deeds are necessary. We don't need equivocations, rationalizations, or acquittals. Aleksandar Tišma’s novel Kapo only underscores how mistaken such blanket exonerations are. Kapos were reprehensible people making conscious decisions and among the very worst of innumerable monsters who make the machinery of genocide operate as efficiently as possible.

Lamian (I don’t recall a first name ever being used) was a Kapo who survived Auschwitz. Born in Croatia between the world wars, his Jewish parents convert him Catholicism, hoping to spare him the degradations of living in an anti-Semitic world. Despite their love and concern for him, he becomes a pathetic, psychically selfish, irretrievably damaged man. He is incapable of relating to or empathizing with others, even when they try to show him love and care. Yet he is offended when others do so with him. When his “Jewishness” becomes politically insurmountable, leading him to be rounded up in Zagreb by Croatian fascists to killed to be eliminated, he takes on the identity of a dead Gentile who is also destined for Auschwitz, where he becomes a Kapo, more precisely, “that he must become a Kapo.”

“He no longer belonged to that corrupt race, he belonged only to himself, to his own body, which strove to vent itself, to burst its chains – in order to live."

Living for Kapos means creating chains for others, but they cannot escape becoming entwined themselves. Lamian rationalizes letting children innocently play games when he knows he will soon herd them into gas chambers, collect their bodies, and bring them to the crematoriums. The inevitability of the facts takes over his free will:

“He had hastened to carry out the truth, to carry it out in all its rigor, beating those who didn’t obey immediately. Because he…believed that to ignore the truth did no good, only harm.”

Lamian, like other Kapos, is

“…condemned to death like the rest of that great heap of flesh, but allowed to postpone their death by hastening it for others.”

Lamian’s truths include extracting the gold fillings from the teeth from Auschwitz’s dead. Gold he collects for his Nazi patron, gold he helps his patron escape with as both survive the liberation of Auschwitz. His truths include raping and tormenting a Jewish girl. One who also survives Auschwitz. And decades later, after he has made his way back to Yugoslavia, he resettles in Banja Luka.

“He had chosen that sleepy town among the mountains as a place to wait, peering out, for the hand of revenge sooner or later to clap down on him. Hiding, pulling into himself, fattening his body to alter his appearance, keeping silent so his voice would not be recognized, squinting behind dark glasses.”

And after a life of isolated anonymity, after he qualifies for retirement, he searches for the girl from Auschwitz, now an old woman. He is on a quest to find her. Is it to satisfy himself by tormenting her? Or to satisfy some perverse, sick reunion? Because

“the images trapped in the brain could not be cleaned away…”

He desperately wants to clean them away. Because like an authentic Kapo, he believes himself to be the real victim.

Tišma crafts a story that lingers. Actually, more than that. One that reminds the reader that Kapos have existed throughout history, probably never more so than today. They are our neighbors, coworkers, acquaintances, and friends. And sometimes they are even us. ...more

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