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Black Swastika, Red Swastika, by Alexander Askanas. Xlibris Corporation, 2009. 199 pp. $29.99 (c); $19.99 (p). Orders@Xlibris.com.
Black Swastika, Red Swastika is a striking contribution to the literature of witness and historical accounts of the two totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Soviet, that defined the twentieth century. Alexander Askanas lived through both; the twinned tales reflect his experience and personal memories. A cardiologist by profession, he knows how to tell a gripping suspense tale. Like Primo Levi, Alexander Askanas is a medical scientist who is able to ground his stories in precise historical context, combining “as it was” with “might have been.”
Askanas is the rare ghetto survivor who can weave personal and collective memory with a flair for storytelling. His life as a child of the Warsaw ghetto informs the first tale. He combines a harrowing account of a five-year-old's poignant family memories with events remembered and told. These layers achieve great dramatic tension.
We first see the ghetto through the eyes of a small child, Adam, walking to his grandparents’ place. He feels secure, holding the hands of his parents, Rachel and Leo Berens, both doctors at the ghetto hospital. For Adam, this is the inception of dread, as the situation encroaches before he can fully comprehend it. Understanding comes later, through his mother’s diary, begun in August 1942, which registers the terror in the ghetto as Germany’s deportations to the death camps began. In the diary, one of the Actions takes away Rachel’s parents, Adam’s beloved grandparents. Rachel’s voice is seamlessly interwoven with that of the narrator, conveying the full impact of this crushing tale of loss, devastation, and fear. Askanas’s sparse, suspenseful narrative, peppered with ghetto Jewish slang, creates an organic immediacy. His eye for vivid detail and dramatic incident conveys both the horror and the reality of the situation.
The Berens family was lucky—they managed to escape from the ghetto to occupied Warsaw in March 1943, just a month before the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Hidden by Polish families, supplied with Polish identity documents, they managed to avoid both the Gestapo and the informers. The author provides a judicious account of this violent chapter in the Polish past: a history of pre-war antisemitism not eradicated by the war, with accounts from the Poles who resisted the Germans and risked their lives by hiding Jews and their families.
The second tale, Red Swastika, catches up with the Berens family seven years after the war. Since Rachel’s death, Adam (fourteen) and his father Leo have reconstituted a comfortable household in Warsaw, soon to face another crisis of shattered peace. A wave of official anti-semitism in the Stalinist Soviet Union of 1952 presents a vital threat to the Russian Jews, still reeling from the trauma of World War II.
Here the novel becomes an adroit political thriller, set against the chessboard of international travel at the time of tightly watched Soviet borders, where Stalin could mastermind his covert plan against the Jews. The plan involved disbanding the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, murdering or exiling its members, imprisoning prominent Jewish doctors in 1952, and circulating rumors about planned mass deportations, all calculated to invoke nauseating wartime memories.
Dr. Leo Berens, now a famous Warsaw cardiologist, becomes the hero of Red Swastika. He takes up the cause of the Russian Jews, and his recent experiences dodging danger in the Warsaw ghetto serve him well. He is apprised of their troubles while on a brief trip to Moscow (to treat a Polish Prime Minister in the Kremlin hospital, as the author’s father did on several occasions). Leo gets drawn into another historical crisis, and the resulting suspense is compelling: personal courage, brilliant co-conspirators, international travel, and romantic love all gel in the shadowy setting of a police state.
As a Polish-Jewish doctor, Berens is the only person the Moscow Jews can trust to smuggle out the documents and news of their impending disaster to the west, when he travels to an international medical meeting in Europe. In a strangely familiar scenario of the indifferent west and the weary U.S., Berens is thwarted in his attempts to call attention to the crisis; KGB agents pursue him and try to run him over.
Here Askanas allows himself an imaginative leap as Dr. Berens becomes the Polish-Jewish James Bond. In a swift move, Berens takes his message to the Israeli embassy in Paris. The response is immediate and he is flown to the one country where Jews matter. He tells his tale to Ben-Gurion, who assures Leo that Israel’s voice in the defense of the Soviet Jews “will be loud and clear.” Leo’s mission is successfully accomplished and he returns to Warsaw. He then travels to Moscow, smuggles out his true love Tatyana, and brings her home as his wife.
The deft doctor Berens defies dark political forces once again, in this second tale with a touch of poetic license for the hero. Leo’s integrity, quick intelligence, and great personal courage help him salvage a civilized life in a century that threatens to destroy it. With a masterful touch, Alexander Askanas delivers two defiant survival stories out of the disasters of his twentieth century.
Greta Slobin
University of California, Santa Cruz
and
Wesleyan University
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