THE WALL
Novel by John Hersey, 1950
John Hersey's second novel, The Wall (1950), represents the Warsaw Ghetto from the construction of its enclosing wall in November 1939 through the April-May 1943 uprising, when the Jewish remnant held the Nazis at bay for more than six weeks. Suffused with history, the novel is one of the earliest fictional works in English to deal comprehensively with the Holocaust. Comprehensive studies of the Holocaust or the Warsaw Ghetto had not yet been written. The available documentation lay primarily in memoirs written in Polish or Yiddish during or after the war. One milk can full of material from the Oneg Shabbat archive, developed under Emmanuel Ringelblum, had been uncovered in 1946, but the second buried repository was not discovered until 1950, after The Wall was published. Hersey, who was not Jewish and could read neither Polish nor Yiddish, relied on two research assistants (one of them Lucy Davidowicz, later a well-known Holocaust historian) to translate the available works aloud into a wire recorder. These assistants not only translated but also added their own emphases and commentary. It was out of such material that Hersey—a well-known journalist and the author of A Bell for Adano and Hiroshima— constructed his narrative.
Hersey used a traditional narrative device whereby an "editor" announces that he has discovered an archive of more than four million words buried during the years of the ghetto. It has been put together by a historian named Noach Levinson, who died soon after the war, and includes testimony written by others or transcribed by Levinson from conversations. The editor, a fictionalized Hersey, has selected the narrative that becomes The Wall, keeping intact Levinson's scrupulous dating of the events and his careful notation of individual voices as well as the dates on which he actually wrote the notes. Levinson bears similarities to the historical Ringelblum, and the hint that the notes might constitute the Oneg Shabbat archives lends authenticity to Hersey's account. Hersey used actual historical events to construct his plot, thereby leaving him free to emphasize characters and their development more than action.
The narrative proper begins in November 1939, a few months after the Nazi occupation and before the actual ghetto was established. We live through the evolution of Jewish life in this setting, including the influx of refugees, the intense overcrowding, the restrictions on Jewish traditions, the completion of the wall, and the ban on Jews leaving the ghetto. We witness the emerging power of the Judenrat and the Jewish police as well as the lost interaction between Jews and Poles. In addition, we experience only a modest Nazi presence, given that the ghetto administration lay mostly in the hands of Jews.
Hersey focuses on a set of families that share cramped living quarters, becoming in effect an extended family centrally involved in the uprising, in which shared responsibility and work create the kinship of comrades. The nuclear families include the religious Mazurs, whose son Stephan joins the ghetto police; the wealthy, secular Apts, especially their two daughters, the plain but caring Rachel and the beautiful, shallow Halinka; and the talented but unambitious Dolek Berson and his sickly wife, Symka. Levinson joins the family later in the book. Earlier, he and Berson had met when the Germans arrested members of the Judenrat and forced them to share a jail cell for several days. The reader watches the characters evolve toward a collective consciousness of their fate as well as of their love and mutual responsibility. We witness the humanization of the cynical Levinson into a key member of the uprising; we watch Rachel Apt move beyond her plainness to become a charismatic leader; and we watch Berson emerge as a man of many talents, particularly after Symka's death, as he moves inevitably into a relationship with Rachel.
The resistance forces develop after the Jews realize that they are being systematically slaughtered at the nearby Treblinka extermination camp. Various Jewish organizations, including Zionists, Socialists, and religious groups, are initially unable to cooperate, but they finally agree to work together as the awareness of their collective fate overrides doctrinal and political differences. They manage to locate minimal weapons and ammunition, achieve some cooperation with Polish partisans, and hold off the Germans while moving from place to place. At the end about 40 escape. Did they resist to save Jewish lives? To show that Jews could actually fight back? To show that Jews were worth saving after all? Is this story of survival about the importance of resistance or the futility of it? Hersey's understated style forces the reader to live through his characters' experiences. Full of effective secondary as well as primary characters and well-imagined scenes, the book neither mystifies nor glorifies the resistance fighters, and its ultimate emphasis is secular rather than either religious or sectarian.
