Book Review: Into The Tunnel
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Into The Tunnel The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943. By Götz Aly. Translated by Ann Millin. 121 pages. $20. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company.
In 2003, the German Remembrance Foundation awarded the historian Götz Aly the Marion Samuel Prize, which commemorates the one million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. It was named for a young victim whose name was chosen at random from the lists of the dead, a gesture meant to underscore the tragic anonymity of the Holocaust's casualties. In accepting the tribute, Aly set out on a mission to uncover the life of Marion Samuel, to rescue her at least from obscurity.
The idea was inspired, though perhaps not surprising, given Aly's background. He is the author of "Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State," in which he argued that ordinary Germans supported the Nazi regime not because they were inherently anti-Semitic, or blinded by Hitler's charisma, but for the relatively mundane reason that the Reich's policies raised their standard of living.
To buttress his argument, Aly mined a staggering amount of data - a method he uses again to great effect in "Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943." In his quest to learn about Marion, who was 11 when she was killed, Aly draws on every imaginable source: He places an article in a German newspaper and scours municipal records, old Berlin telephone books and even switchboard.com - to dig up what is quite probably every recorded word and artifact relating to Marion and her family. He finds exact schedules for the train that transported several of Marion's relatives to their deaths, and discovers that her own deportation cost six and a half Reich pennies per mile. Among other sources, this slim volume reproduces the Gestapo decree concerning the expropriation of the Samuel family's property and the listing of Marion's name in the German national archive's memorial book of murdered German Jews.
The sheer number of these rich sources comes in strange contrast to the brevity and ordinariness of Marion Samuel's life. She was born in 1931 in Arnswalde, 100 miles northeast of Berlin in what is now Poland, the only child of a shopkeeper and his wife. When Nazi sympathy in the town increased, the Samuels moved to Berlin, where (like many Jews) they hoped the anonymity afforded by a large city might let them skirt danger. Sadly, Aly writes, this move often backfired. When the deportations began, new arrivals like the Samuels "lacked, as a rule, the contacts who could give timely warnings and make it possible to go into hiding." Here and elsewhere, Aly extrapolates from his knowledge of the forces at work in families like the Samuels and in places like those where they found themselves. But the historian also manages to turn up several swatches from his subject's particular life. He receives a poignant letter from Hilma Krüger, one of Marion's former classmates, who remembers meeting her friend in the street in May 1938: "Suddenly Marion began to cry, and said that she was frightened. I was surprised, and then she said, 'People go into a tunnel in a mountain, and along the way there is a great hole and they all fall in and disappear.' "
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In a February 1943 roundup, Marion was separated from her family and held in a building with other children awaiting transport to their deaths. The separation lasted only three days, Aly informs us, and here the historian's meticulousness turns up a heartbreaking detail: "Because Ernst Samuel filled out Marion's property declaration form, we know that they were reunited at this collection point, and that she did not make her final trip alone." Marion died one week later, on March 4, 1943, in Auschwitz.
"Into the Tunnel" is more an exercise in historical inquiry than a rich narrative of a girl's life. But Aly can hardly be blamed for this. Marion Samuel did not live long enough, or visibly enough, to leave behind more clues.
Alana Newhouse is the arts and culture editor at The Forward.
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