Times Change

Tunda, then, is what polite opinion would call the model of an unreliable character. For Roth, however, Tunda's ideas were as little egotistical as they were moralistic. What defined him was his restless desire for freedom and 'he was as willing to throw away his assets as he was able to avert what was of disadvantage. He behaved as the mood took him, occasionally from conviction, always from necessity.' Tunda's story is one of personal loss and alienation, of restless disappointment. And like all of Roth's characters, the personal loss symbolises a larger one, the passing of a way of life. Roth ends the novel with the striking line: 'No one in the whole world was as superfluous as he.' The great struggle in which Lotnik fought and suffered ultimately made of him a superfluous character. And the world he once knew disappeared as well.

In the shadow of the ideological confrontation between the Nazis and the Allies another and older struggle was taking place. I have no way of judging the reliability of Lotnik's testimony. But he was certainly a man who showed a restless desire for freedom, whose experiences seem to prove how both egotism and morality are easily discounted in the collective struggle of war. He moved in a conflict where conviction was difficult to distinguish from necessity. As a youth he took up arms with the Polish Resistance but was only rarely engaged in battle with the Germans. The real war was fought against the pro-German and anti-Soviet Ukrainian militias along the ethnically mixed borderlands in the upper reaches of the River Bug. Lotnik recounts the systematic destruction by both sides of Polish and Ukrainian villages. He also details the consequences: the rape, mutilation and murder of young women, the execution of all males of fighting age (a flexible category), the torching of homes and the destruction of all goods and effects which were not of immediate use to marauding partisans.

He makes clear that the killings on his own side were done both out of conviction (ethnic hatred) and necessity (destroying the enemy). That sounds like honesty. For his own part, the author himself appeals mainly to necessity even if his account repeats the familiar tropes of ethnic self-righteousness - Polish victims and Ukrainian aggressors. The book also tells of his ordeal of survival in the extermination camp at Majdanek. After an ambiguous involvement as a spy with the NKVD in Soviet 'liberated' Poland (he claims to have deserted when his best friend was about to inform on him for lack of revolutionary fervour) and a bloody period with the Polish Home Army in 1945 (still settling accounts with the Ukrainians), Lotnik escaped to the West.

If to be superfluous was Lotnik's personal fate (in that cruel world-historical sense which, for Hitler and Stalin, was beyond good and evil) then to be superfluous was also the fate of whole peoples. The horror which this book retails is the recognition of the profound contingency of everything that is humanly decent. The murderous barbarity of Nazism and the barbarous rationality of Stalinism attached to themselves, in Goldhagen's phrase, large numbers of willing executioners and even larger numbers of willing benefactors of such execution. In his pithy essay on the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, Ernest Gellner once wrote that for a central European, and especially for a tutejszy - literally, 'one of the people from here', that is someone without a distinct nationality and probably a Jew - the ideal functions of government ought to be threefold. They were to keep nations from fighting one with another, to protect particular cultures which give richness and colour to life and to protect nations from the Russians and, later, from the Germans. For Malinowski, the Habsburg Monarchy had, for all its stupidities, come closest to that ideal. In Gellner's words, it was a case of 'better Franz Josef than Josef', better a self-interested but distant ruler than a fervently nationalistic next-door neighbour. The national incompatibilities and nationalist antagonisms that were assiduously fed between the wars did lead to fighting, did destroy cultures and did let in both the Germans and the Russians. Lotnik's book chronicles this triple disaster in all its brutal and frightening detail.

For the overall effect of this book, the Russian word skushno may come close. It appears in Gregor von Rezzori's novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. That novel begins in Czernowitz, close to the scene of the action in Nine Lives. Rezzori admits that skushno is a difficult word to translate but suggests 'a spiritual void that sucks you in like a vague but intensely urgent longing'. The massacres and ethnic cleansing in the Polish/Ukrainian borderlands were conducted with intensity and urgency, a longing to make clean lines. It all took place in a spiritual void. The great ideologies, for all their sense of historical destiny, could not fill that void. (In 1943 Arthur Koestler famously described them as utopia betrayed, tradition decayed and destruction arrayed). They only generated greater urgency and intensity. The disturbing thing is that the void may be there in all of us. Equally, we are all, like Tunda and Lotnik in their different ways, potentially superfluous persons.