The Memory Monster

The Memory Monster -- I don't even know how to explain this book, however, I will try to gather my thoughts and put them as simply as I can. I might actually have to include a few spoilers to get my feelings and thoughts down on the page, and I apologize for that here at the start. 

This book is about a man who works at Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the victims of WWII's Holocaust, who is writing a letter report to the Chairman of Yad Vashem. 

 The Man who is writing this report works as a tour guide and expert in the extermination camps of WWII who takes student groups, VIPs, and at the end a Filmmaker through the Poland extermination camps. This book is shocking to me to how fast a person can become too deep into past history. I found it interesting that as the book moves forward in time, The Man, which btw- we never find out his name, becomes so mentally steeped into the lives of the Jewish people (victims) who died at the camps that I feel he starts to look like them when it comes to dressing and disheveled appearance. There are times when some of the students tell him to buy new shoes or clothes, his neighbor gives him a bag of clothes thinking he can't afford new ones, or his wife tells him he looks sickly. I do believe that leading that kind of a tour day after day would start playing with your mind and cause distress to anyone, especially when you can visually see what was happening as the Jewish People entered the camps by way of deception. 

At one point in time, The Man convinces an Auschwitz survivor to accompany them on the tour to tell his story. oh the hell of his experience, what I felt of his reliving it by visiting is too painful to talk about except that he ended up collapsing. The poor, poor man. What torture to make him re-experience that period of his life.  Talk about PTSD.

This book had some seriously mixed up stuff in it.

The Man takes Israeli HS students on a tour of the remnants of the Concentration Camps. A description of The Man's take on the students feeling's of what he heard and observed about the German Nazi soldiers was shocking to me as a grand-niece of a victim at Auschwitz-Birkenau who was liberated. It hurt my heart to actually understand that although this book is written in Satire to an extent people do actually feel as these students did.  Here is The Man's description of the feelings of the students: 

"They didn't hate the Germans, the kids in my groups; not at all, not even close. The Murderers barely registered...They hated the Polish much more. When we walked around the streets in cities and villages, whenever we met the local population, they would mutter words of hatred at them, about the pogroms they had committed, their collaborations, their anti-semitism. But, it's hard for us to hate the Germans. Look at photos from the war. Let's call a spade a spade: they looked totally cool in those uniforms, on their bikes, at east, like male models on billboards. We'll never forgive the Arabs for the way they look, with their stubble and their borwn pants that go wide at the bottom, their houses without whitewas and the open sewers on the streets, the kids with pink-eye. But that fair, clean, European look makes you wan to emulate them." 

So... they hate the Polish people, but not the Germans who did the actual torturing & killing? Disgusting. But poor little Arab kids with pink-eyed kids are unforgivable?!!!  I know I don't know the relationship very well between the Arabs and the Israelis, but seriously, these are little kids who didn't choose where they were born or to whom...

At different parts of the report The Man asks questions like, would you be able to take in a Jewish boy if he showed up at your door? Would you risk the danger? Another time, What would you do as a Jewish person put in charge at one of the camps, would you do the job to save your own life and end the lives of others, or would you protest and die with the others? These are questions aren't as cut and dry as you would think.  I feel until you are actually put in the same exact situation you can't really give an honest answer. 

Speaking of honesty, I had to take a break from reading for a while because it just hurt too much to continue reading sometimes. The descriptions of the sites themselves, the rooms and what they were meant for, the numbers of people killed and buried in Mass Graves, and the lies, oh the lies the Victims are all told to get them into the gas chambers was overwhelming, to say the least. 

The Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid is well written, a poignant piece of writing that everyone should read, not only for the immensely tragic tale of the victims which has to be retold, but also the prediction that comes from reading. as the saying goes, "if you don't learn from the past, you will relive it in the future." This hatred of a race or religion of people should never be taken to the extreme that Hitler took. We can not let it be repeated and The Memory Monster is a cautionary tale of how we can forget and commend those whose hatred was so vile that to some they were heroes. 

I am thankful that to Restless Books, and Yishai Sarid for allowing me the honor of reading this book in exchange for an honest review. It truly has challenged my thinking and opened up some extremely deep processing on how we can become too immersed in history and the problems of the world to the detriment of our future.

Yishai Sarid was born and raised in Tel Aviv Israel. He studied law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and has a Public Administration Master’s Degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of five novels.