Hearing cruel truths from a fading generation

Elliot Perlman’s historical fiction The Street Sweeper depended on Robert Nowak’s conversations with Holocaust survivors, says Caroline O’Doherty

The Street Sweeper

Elliot Perlman

Faber and Faber, €20.40; ebook £10.99

HAPPY and Auschwitz are not words Elliot Perlman would expect to say in the same sentence, but it’s his best way of describing his fortune in meeting the death camp guide who became crucial to his latest novel.

If Perlman’s exploration of the Holocaust was a mountain he had to climb, then Robert Nowak was his Tenzing Norgay.

It is testament to Perlman’s admiration for Nowak, an unassuming Pole, that when the pair meet up for the first time in four years, only to find their precious time together clashes with the book’s publicity schedule, it is Nowak, now resident in Midleton, Co Cork, whom the author insists speaks first.

Nowak is a little taken aback at being pushed forward. He hadn’t wanted credit for his input. He just wanted the story to be told.

The importance of recording and telling the stories that make up the often hidden history of the world is a key theme of The Street Sweeper, Perlman’s compelling examination of two of the 20th century’s greatest shames, the attempted annihilation of the Jews during World War II and the brutal resistance to the American civil rights movement.

A recurring plea from characters based on real people whose experiences are chronicled is “tell everyone what happened here”.

In the book, Perlman gives them an audience in the shape of present-day fictional characters linked in unexpected ways — Adam Zignelik, a Jewish Australian historian whose academic career and personal life are floundering, and Lamont Williams, a black New Yorker released from prison after serving time for a crime in which he unwittingly participated.

Perlman is seeking to find them a far wider audience in his own readership.

After six trips to Auschwitz, as part of his research, he says he owes it to the victims and survivors to keep their memories alive, not just as a generalised account, but as individual tales each as rare as the people who lived them.

Nowak shares that passion. “I was fortunate to meet a lot of survivors, working in Auschwitz as a guide, but I knew I was an eye witness to them passing away,” he says.

“The good thing is that many of them left their stories somewhere. They told their children or they wrote books, but I knew a lot who never wanted to tell their story. Maybe it was too painful to go back to the past to go through it again,” Nowak says.

“Sometimes, they were more confident to tell me their story than their children or grandchildren, because they knew that I would understand them, but these next generations are not going to have any real contact with those people. Every ten years they get further away from this story.

“And, you know, everyone could tell you a different story of the same place. There are people who could even have slept on the same bed, but every one of them would tell you a different story of Auschwitz. That’s why every survivor is a unique person.”

Perlman, too, became aware of the uniqueness of each tale and of the limitations of a novel — even a 544-pager like The Street Sweeper — to capture them all.

“You want to tell everybody’s story, but you can’t, and the way I placated myself was to say this one could be for another book. It’s the only way, because otherwise you feel terrible that you’re not telling all the stories,” Perlman says.

One story that Perlman could not leave out was that of the character known in the book as Henryk Mandelbrot and based on Henryk Mandelbaum, who died in 2008, but only after being introduced to the author by Nowak and revealing his experiences.

In the novel, it is Henryk who befriends the hapless Lamont and reveals his past to him in instalments, always with the instruction: “You have to remember.”

Henryk, both the real and fictionalised versions, survived Auschwitz because he was part of the Sonderkommando, the workforce plucked from the transported Jews to herd the other arrivals into the gas chambers and dispose of their remains in the crematoria afterwards.

The horrors he witnesses, and takes part in, are extraordinary and yet Perlman has him recount them without the reader recoiling.

“Mr Mandelbrot makes it possible for the reader to take the almost unbearable journey into the gas chambers.

“Since you meet him at the beginning, you know he survives. I’m not even sure if readers are conscious of it, but they know unconsciously, ‘I’m with a character and it’s like he’s holding my hand and he’s going to get out of this.’ If the reader is with the victim, I don’t think they could bear it,” Perlman says.

Similarly, we know the positive outcome of the civil rights movement, so it makes it easier to bear with the tales of those who suffered for the cause, although the disadvantage and prejudice Lamont Williams endures brings racism under a modern-day spotlight.

For Perlman, who is of Jewish-Polish background but was born and raised in Australia and lived for a time in New York, the urge to explore race, and the injustices built around it, came both from his personal observations and the influence of his father, a man of great social conscience.

Perlman is aware that he hasn’t felt able yet to apply his art to the Aboriginal question in his own country.

“It’s really a complicated problem. It’s like a third-world culture existing within a first-world country, so I don’t even know what exactly to recommend,” he says.

“I just know in the same way that we teach our children that if food falls on the floor you shouldn’t eat it, you should be disgusted by it, you should have a visceral and emotional response to it — you should teach them the same way to be disgusted by racism.”

If that’s the underlying message of the book, then The Street Sweeper delivers it clearly. But it also successfully argues, by its own example, for the importance of hearing and remembering people’s stories.

Nowak left Poland with his wife and three children in 2010, feeling emotionally exhausted by his time at Auschwitz, but since coming to Ireland, finding unrelated work at Cork Airport and seeing Perlman’s five-and-a-half years of research and writing come to fruition, now says he is refreshed and keen to start passing on the stories again through educational programmes he intends devising.

Perlman, meanwhile, has found himself cast into the role of Adam Zignelik, who in the book attempts to uncover evidence that black American soldiers were among those who liberated the Dachau concentration camp — a real-life controversy given official obfuscation on the matter.

After The Street Sweeper was published, Perlman was contacted by the daughter of a Holocaust survivor whose stories of being liberated from Dachau included reference to a black solider.

“He’s still alive and I interviewed him, so the novel led to the story being proved,” Perlman says with no small degree of satisfaction.

Nowak’s reaction on hearing how the book has become an accidental research tool is one of delight. “This story pushed people to tell their stories so we keep uncovering more history. The journey keeps going.”