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Thursday, October 11, 1979 — THE BULLETIN — 9.
Significant New Book Reviewed by Dr. Ages, ' Assocbte Desn ef Arts for Graduate Studies at UnfTiO!^ of Waterloo
WHEN MEMORY COMES
By Saul Friedlander
Farrar Straus Giroux 186 pages. $9.95.
SAUL FRIEDLANDER has a double appointment as a professor at Tel Aviv university and the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva. He is the author of at least four seminal works of political theory including one blistering indictment of the Pope that remained silent during the Holocaust.-
His reputation in academic circles is very high; Friedlander lives according to rigorous canons of intellectual probity, even when it brings him into conflict with the Israeli establishment.
His new book is somewhat of a surprise. A personal memoir, it differs radically from his scholarly productions. In addition, this series of reminiscences contains a poignancy and poetic flavor that elicits admiration.
It is the story of what the Holocaust did to one Czeck-Jewish family but it is refracted through the meditative lenses of a sensitive philosophical mind.
Saul Friedlander*s family were wealthy Prague Jews who fled to France at the outset of the war. His parents died after trying unsuccessfully to cross the Swiss border. (The author returned later to Novel near the border and found a document describing the plight experienced by frantic Jews in their escape venture).
IN VICHY, FRANCE, Saul was sent to a Catholic school where, despite initial discomfiture, he found a niche for himself. By !944 he had become a Catholic in heart and was
ANTWERP - The public prosecutor in Brussels has forbidden publication of a new book by Leon Degrelle, a wartime Belgian collaborator with the Nazis, who is living in exile in Spain.
The police confiscated about 300 copies of the book, entitled Open Letter to the Pope concerning Auschwitz, but it is understood that hundreds of copies have been sent to France.
The book is based on a neo-Nazi and neo-fascist claim that the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other death camps did not exist and that the Jews were the victims of Anglo-American bombing.
Jean-Robert Debbaudt, the head of the firm which published the book, is a leader of the neo-fascist movement.
Degrelle led the Belgian fascist Rex movement before the Second World War and later founded the French-speaking Walloon Legion which fought wth the Germans against the Soviet Union. After the war a Belgian court sentenced him to death 'in absentia.' ^
Spain refuses to extradite Degrelle, who fled to that country and obtained the personal protection of General Franco. Dcgfclle is deprived of political and civil rights in Belgium and is accordingly barred thtrc from writing or editing published material. ^
considering the priesthood as a vocation. A conversation with an honest priest in 1945 reyealed to him with searing impact his Jewish origins and the fate of Jewry in Auschwitz.
Barely out of his teens. Fried-lander abandoned his clerical plans and plunged into French life. In Paris he studied at a lycee and became associated with Zionist and Communist groups. He soon dropped the latter faction and became transformed into a Beitar zealot, in part because, the other Zionist groups told him he was too young to go the Jewish State.
Friedlander had the misfortune (if that is the correct word) to anive in, Israel on the Altalena, the ship which became the fpcus; of much contro^ versy between Ben-Giirion and ' Begin.
THAT IS THE skeletal outline of Friedlander's book. But there is so much more here. Interspersed among the childhood fragments are nunierous reflections on the author^s . career in Israel, his research activities, his political inclinations.
An indelible portrait of two of his graduate students—who were killed in the Yom KippUr War—animates several plangent pages.
A conversation with Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz (**I knew nothisig â– about the extermination of the Jews'*) held in 1962 provides a fascinating insight into the moral quagmire that was the Third Reich.;
Descriptions of the author's un-: .ease with Israel's extreme nationalism and romanticism alternate with sober thoughts about the real threats to the nation's security.
In Europe, Friedlander addressed a symposium! in the wake of the Six Day War. He was chagrined that no Arabs were speaking with him and invited them to speak from his podium. One eloquent Arab took him up and from the platform an Arab and Israeli communicated with sensitivity and respect.
Soon after, he was told that the Arab in question was dying of cancer and Friedlander saw tlds as an ironic
commentary on the Arab-Isratli conflict. Fuad Haled was the nanrs of the leukemia victim.
Friedlander then tells us that iu 1972, after his death, Fuad Halec: was revealed to be the organizer of the Black September attack at Munich.
THESE ARE SOME of the memories which come to Saul Friedlander in this book which is largely about ghosts the author has been trying to exorcise for 30 years. There is a restlessness in his contemplation of those memories and of the specters of a stolen childhood which haunt him.
But in summoning the good and the bad (most of it bad), Saul Friedlander forces us to confront the madness of the Holocaust and the consequences which flow from it for every Jew today.
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