April 7, 2022 25Caught in the Coils
Ingrid D. RowlandPollak’s Arm
by Hans von Trotha, translated from
the German by Elisabeth Lauffer.
New Vessel, 141 pp., $16.95 (paper)How do we respond to barbarians at
the gates? On February 25, 2022, as
Russian troops invaded her country,
the young Ukrainian congresswoman
Kira Rudik tweeted, “I learn to use
#Kalashnikov and prepare to bear
arms.” When the Nazis invaded France
in 1940, the physicist and Nobel lau-
reate Frédéric Joliot- Curie smuggled
his working papers out of Paris but
stayed behind to help lead the Resis-
tance, turning his scientific talents to
the manufacture of Molotov cocktails.
The ancient historian Livy tells us that
in 390 BCE, as a troop of Gauls bore
down on Rome, the most distinguished
senators among those too old to fight
and too proud to flee dressed in their
most elaborate togas. Each one sat in
silence in the atrium of his own house,
on the ivory throne that symbolized
his high office, his hands holding the
insignia of imperium— high command.
At first the old men’s surreal tran-
quility cowed the invaders, but when
a Gaul stroked the beard of a senator
and was smacked in return by an ivory
mace, the raiders realized that these
men, too, were human and massacred
every one. In Hans von Trotha’s haunt-
ing novel Pollak’s Arm, published in
Germany in 2021 and now beautifully
translated into English by Elisabeth
Lauffer, the setting is Nazi- occupied
Rome on October 16, 1943, the Satur-
day when the Gestapo rounded up the
city’s Jews— the day when the barbar-
ians came knocking door to door.
German troops had seized the city
only a month earlier, on September- The Italian prime minister, Mar-
shal Pietro Badoglio, and King Victor
Emmanuel III had fled on the ninth—
one day after the truce Italy had signed
with the Allies on September 3 be-
came public knowledge— and taken
refuge behind Allied lines in south-
ern Italy. The Nazis wasted no time
in going about their brutal business
in Rome because they had no time:
Germany had been defeated at Stal-
ingrad in February and faced a slow
but inexorable Allied advance up the
Italian peninsula. A Nazi commando
unit sprang Mussolini from his Italian
prison on September 12 and set him up
with a puppet regime, the Italian So-
cial Republic, at Salò on the shores of
Lake Garda, far enough north to buy
them both time.
In Rome, however, SS officer Her-
bert Kappler worked swiftly to impose
a reign of terror as the Eternal City’s
new chief of security police, his atten-
tion fixed on Communists, anarchists,
Roma, and, above all, Jews. On Sep-
tember 26, he summoned two heads of
the Jewish community to his office on
Via Tasso and informed them that “we
will not deprive you of your lives if you
do what you are asked. With your gold
we want to equip new armies for the
Fatherland. Within 36 hours you must
provide 50 kilograms of gold.” Other-
wise, he threatened, he would deport
two hundred Jews to the Russian front.
The community delivered eighty kilo-
grams to Via Tasso on September 28,
convinced that the tribute would guar-
antee their safety.
In early October, however, Reichs-
führer- SS Heinrich Himmler entrusted
Italy to Theodor Dannecker, who had
coordinated the deportation of Jews
from France, Macedonia, and northern
Greece and would move on to Hun-
gary. At 5:30 on the morning of Octo-
ber 16, 365 Gestapo men sealed off the
former Roman Ghetto and delivered
a mimeographed sheet of paper to its
Jewish families, giving them twenty
minutes to pack “for eight days” and
assemble in front of the ancient Portico
of Octavia. Other detachments sought
out the more affluent Jews scattered
elsewhere in the city. By 2 PM, more
than 1,200 people had been loaded on
trucks and taken to the Collegio Mili-
tare in Trastevere. Some two hundred
were released as non- Jews on closer ex-
amination of their papers, but on Octo-
ber 18 those remaining— more than a
thousand people— were crammed into
cattle cars at the Tiburtina railroad
station and dispatched to Auschwitz by
way of Padua and Vienna. (In Padua,
bystanders reported their appalling
condition and forced the SS guards to
let the prisoners get water.) Of those
deported, fifteen men and one woman
returned to Rome after the war. None
of the children survived.The narrator of Pollak’s Arm, known
only as K., is “a secondary school
teacher from Berlin stranded in occu-pied Rome and harbored in the Vati-
can.” It is October 17, 1943, and he has
just arrived at the office of Monsignor
F. in “a building near the German cem-
etery Campo Santo Teutonico,” a suffi-
cient clue to identify it as the German
College (Collegio Teutonico) within
Vatican City. Here, during World War
II, a courageous Irish priest, Monsi-
gnor Hugh O’Flaherty, used his office
as papal chamberlain to set up a rescue
network, the Rome Escape Line, that
saved some 6,500 people from certain
death. Monsignor F., “a retired prel-
ate and ecclesiastical diplomat whose
German is flawless, virtually accentless
except for a trace of Italian inflection,”
is a member of O’Flaherty’s opera-
tion, and K. has come to report what
occurred the day before, when he had
been charged with bringing the Jewish
archaeologist Ludwig Pollak and his
family to safety in the Vatican.
The people of von Trotha’s novel
are real. Pollak was one of the most
colorful characters among the many
expatriates who found themselves in
early- twentieth- century Rome. Prague-
born, educated in Vienna at its famous
Archaeological- Epigraphic Seminar,
he reached the Eternal City in 1893 and
set up shop as an art dealer of wide in-
terests and exquisite taste. His work as
a consultant for the wealthy collector
Senator Giovanni Barracco eventually
led to his appointment as the director
of Barracco’s Museum of Comparative
Ancient Sculpture (featuring some
two hundred Greek, Roman, Etrus-can, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Cypriot
objects, as well as some choice medie-
val works).
Barracco donated this distinctive
collection to the city of Rome in 1902
in exchange for the rights to a plot of
land at the end of the new Corso Vitto-
rio Emanuele II. The Museo Barracco
opened in 1905 but fell victim to Mus-
solini’s schemes for urban renewal in
1938, just one of the demolitions that
heralded the successive incarnations of
New Rome in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries. Pollak, when K. comes
to fetch him, has seen too many of
them:His presence is as awe- inspiring as
ever, the way he holds your gaze
with those piercing eyes. However,
he seems weakened by pain, I my-
self was pained to see. How old do
I reckon he is? Mid- seventies, I’d
say. Yes, he must be in his mid-
seventies.
Quick, we must leave for the
Vatican this instant— you, your
wife, your daughter and son. Ev-
erything’s been taken care of; we
just have to go downstairs. The car
is waiting.But Pollak, as calm as those ancient
Roman senators before the invading
Gauls, chooses instead to talk, to take
K. on a long tour through his memories.
We hear spellbinding tales of Rome as
it was in the first flush of the Kingdom
of Italy; of Pollak’s long- demolished
studio on the Via del Tritone with its
frescoes by the eighteenth- century
painter Giovanni Paolo Pannini, the
sanctum where he played host to so
many works of art and so many distin-
guished collectors; and of the great dis-
covery that marked the triumph of his
career. In 1906 Pollak recognized the
battered marble carving of a bent elbow
in a stonecutter’s shop as the missing
arm of one of the world’s most famous
ancient sculptures: a statue of the Tro-
jan priest Laocoön and his two sons
being throttled by snakes. It had been
unearthed in the ruins of the Golden
House of Nero in 1506, requisitioned
for the Vatican’s collections by the papa
terribile Pope Julius II, and restored by
Jacopo Sansovino— who added an arm
outstretched rather than bent back, re-
placed in 1532 by Giovanni Antonio
Montorsoli’s still- straighter version.
K. listens, half- enthralled and half-
impatient, petrified as time and op-
portunity tick away and the danger
increases by the second. Pollak’s sole
concern is to testify— to his vanished
world and his vanished life, to the en-
during beauties that will survive even
this cruelty, this ugliness, like the Col-
osseum as it is now, bleached clean of
the suffering of the animals and people
sacrificed to ancient Rome’s unspeak-
able public spectacles:He gets caught up in pathos some-
times, K. says, and he’ll start using
dated language or unbridled ges-
tures. I think his emotions get the
better of him. He also wants to
share, and thereby preserve, what-
ever is unleashing these feelings,
including the force with which it
does so. Pollak erects monumentsIllustration by Alain PilonRowland 25 26 .indd 25 3 / 9 / 22 2 : 19 PM