The Gift by Ita Willen

Review by R.D. Freeman

2/23/2006 - The Gift, Ita Willen’s introspective look at her experience as a child of Holocaust survivors, may seem to have the wrong title. But seeing the Holocaust as a gift is one of several paradoxes found within her book. Her feelings continually shift between hope and despair, love and hate, a desire to remember and the need to forget. Readers might experience similar contradictions in not wanting to read the book, yet not being able to stop reading - a bit like the need to slow down to see a car wreck - you feel guilty about it but do it anyway. For a small book, The Gift manages to say a lot.

  In the case of the title, the author realizes that the gift of the Holocaust is that survivors (and children of survivors) can learn to cherish every day of life as precious. “Every comfort, every good day, every friendship, every small freedom seems a blessing”, she writes (37).

  Another unexpected thing is the author’s desire to collect Nazi paraphernalia and her decision to own a German car. One would think she would avoid all things German, or at least all things remindful of Hitler and the Nazis. Instead, she drives a Volkswagen and finds herself inexplicably drawn to Nazi collectibles. “To the victor goes the spoils” she writes, but who the victor is seems unclear. Are the survivors the victors or is it the Germans who are ultimately victorious? She decries the fact that many of the Nazis who survived the war remained untouched in Germany; in one town, the SS concentration camp guards had the audacity to meet for a forty year reunion. “It is hard for me to see them as people,” Willen writes, “with bodies and graves... and visitors who leave them flowers”(35). But she comes to realize the importance of seeing the Nazis as people rather than as “emissaries of the Devil” in order to comprehend the magnitude of their crimes.

  While she sees the Nazis as devils, she also argues with a troubled friend that Satan doesn’t exist. The writer seems to be both a believer and an unbeliever at the same time as she wrestles with the pure evil of the Nazis. How could these people be so wicked on their own, without some outside influence? The Nazis and the Holocaust argue convincingly for the existence and influence of Satan. But if there is a Devil, must not there be a God as well, and why would God allow such evil to occur? It’s an age-old question with no easy answer.

  The book’s climax occurs when her father, after years of silence, reveals the fate of his younger brother in the Holocaust. The brother, about fourteen or fifteen, tried to escape from a hospital by jumping out a window but broke his leg in the fall. The Nazi guards decided to make an example of the young man by leaving him in the place where he fell, with a guard by him at all times. After many days of suffering, his brother died right there on the street. The family could only watch. “Suddenly I am sorry that I asked,” she writes. “This image is too terrible. Maybe he (her father) is sorry that he told me. Look how long he has kept his terrible secret. I am forty-one years old and my father has never breathed a word about this boy, never uttered his name, though for the last ten years he must have looked upon his grandson of the same name with the most painful love”(105). This legacy is the author’s inheritance, the ghosts she carries with her through life, and it is the most intimate moment of the book.

  After reading The Gift, and especially this last revelation, one feels a kinship with the writer, as one does when secrets are shared. At times in the book, her writing can become too introspective and her subject matter too common, like reading someone’s rather gloomy journal. And the book contains some difficult and controversial material that might be offensive to some Jews and Christians alike, but it can also be uplifting. Overall, the book’s weaknesses are overshadowed by its successes. The Gift builds momentum and gains focus as it progresses, and in the end, we may not have all the answers, but readers will have plenty to think about as well as some images we should like to forget.

  The Gift by Ita Willen, is published by the Wessex Collection, Denver CO 2005. Willen is a Colorado writer, and this is first of four reviews of local Colorado authors.