BOOKS
A bipolar diagnosis
and a feud with his
wife transformed
Emmanuel Carrère’s
yoga book. Interview
by Peter Conradi
MY BESTSE
E
mmanuel Carrère can remem-
ber only fragments of his
four-month stay in the Paris
psychiatric hospital to which he
was confined after his depres-
sion became so bad he was a
danger to himself. The “XXL high” he
enjoyed after being given ketamine; the
poster of a beach scene on the wall of
the ward to which he awoke after
his sessions of electroshock therapy;
and the tree in the courtyard from
which he contemplated hanging him-
self — only to realise it existed only in
his imagination.
Such snippets are at the heart of
Yoga, the latest book by one of France’s
most acclaimed and popular writers,
which is finally out in English two years
after it topped the bestseller lists on the
other side of the Channel. Such snip-
pets were all the briefer after lawyers
acting for Hélène Devynck, to whom he
was married during his ordeal,
required him to remove all references
to her.
Carrère reluctantly made the cuts
demanded, although it was a challenge
given the book was the story of three
years of his life “in which she was one
of the main characters”. “It’s sad to
have to remove her because she was
there and very helpful,” he says. “I’m
aware there is a hole in the middle of
the book and that it is not a perfect
object, but it was still quite successful
in France.” Which is something of an
understatement; it sold more than a
quarter of a million copies.
I am sitting opposite Carrère, 64 —
who is trim, with cropped hair and
dressed in a T-shirt — in his loft hidden
away in Paris’s hipsterish 10th
arrondissement. In a literary career
spanning four decades and 15 books,
he has tackled various topics, including
the early years of Christianity and
the double life of Jean-Claude Romand,
a fake French doctor who murdered
his family when he was about to be
unmasked.
Along the way he has written plenty
of journalism and found time to direct
award-winning films, most recently
Between Two Worlds, in which JulietteFreedland’s book is the life
story of the younger of the
two men: originally Walter
Rosenberg, but better known
today as Rudolf Vrba, a name
he adopted after his escape.
Born to Jewish parents in
Slovakia in 1924, Rosenberg
was only 17 when he was
rounded up and sent to
Majdanek camp, across the
border in Poland. Two weeks
later, having answered an
appeal for “farm workers”, he
was put on another train,
heading to Auschwitz. On his
first day he saw other
prisoners loading a cart with
hundreds of bodies “like so
many carcasses on a butcher’s
truck”. He asked: “What’s
going on here?” A man replied:
“They’re today’s harvest.”
More than a million people
were sent to Auschwitz, and
the overwhelming majority
never left. What made
Rosenberg different wasn’t
just that he escaped, but that
he kept a painstaking mental
record of everything he saw,
obsessively repeating facts
and figures so that he might
one day tell the world. He got
a job as an assistant registrar,
then as camp clerk, which
meant he saw almost
everything. As a result
Freedland’s book is rich in the
kind of details that haunt you
long after you have turned the
last page.
A rabbi is late for roll call;
an SS man dunks him in a
latrine, then douses him with
cold water and shoots him
dead. In summer fluid from
the rotting corpses leaks from
their graves, polluting the
very air of the camp. And all
the time Rosenberg notes how
the edifice of destruction
depends on lies. He sees that
when the SS open the cattle
trucks bringing new victims,
they are often polite, even
reassuring, “offering a helping
hand”. The doomed must be
kept docile, they cannot know
they are walking into a
slaughterhouse.
One night, while they were
unloading a transport from
Theresienstadt, one of
Rosenberg’s fellow prisoners
mutters to a well-dressed
Czech mother: “You’ll soon
be dead.” The woman goes
straight up to an SS officer and
demands to know what’s
going on. “My dear lady,” the
SS man says, “we are civilised
people. Which gangster said
this to you?”
She points out Rosenberg’s
friend. A few minutes later, as
the mother and her children
are walking into the gas
chamber, Rosenberg’s friend
is taken away and shot.
Some people, Freedland
writes, “would have been
destroyed seeing what Walter
saw, others driven mad by it”.
But somehow he kept his
sanity. He committed every
single transport to memory
— the number of trains, the
number of passengers, the
point of origin — carefully
building a “mountain of facts”
and reciting it to himself every
morning. Telling the world,
he believed, was the only
effective form of resistance.
For if people knew they would
surely stop it.
Tragically he was only half
right. After Walter and his
friend Fred Wetzler escaped
in April 1944, making their
way across the border into
Slovakia, they went straight to
the senior officials of the state-
approved Jewish Centre, theUZ, and poured out their
story. The result was an
extraordinary document, the
Vrba-Wetzler report, which
was designed to save Europe’s
largest remaining Jewish
population in Hungary.
Crucial days went by as
Jewish community leaders
debated what to do next.
Every day tens of thousands of
Hungarian Jews boarded the
trains to the death camps,
utterly ignorant of what
awaited them. Only in late
June did the report first appear
in the international press.
Although the Allies considered
bombing the death camps,
they never did so — partly
because of bureaucratic
wrangling, but also, perhaps,
because few outsiders could
bring themselves to face the
overwhelming truth of the
Holocaust.
At last, in early July, the
Hungarian regent, Admiral
Horthy, called a halt to the
Jewish deportations. Thanks
to Rosenberg and Wetzler,
200,000 people had been
saved. But as Walter insisted
to the end of his days, the
total could and should have
been more.
Not surprisingly Rosenberg
“never escaped Auschwitz’s
shadow”. Under his new
name, Rudolf Vrba, he
became a biochemist in
Czechoslovakia, then Israel,
then Britain, then Canada. He
testified at the trial of Adolf
Eichmann and was
interviewed for the landmark
documentary Shoah.
But he was too spiky to play
the martyr, and vociferously
attacked the Jewish leadership
for failing to act more quickly
on his warnings. As a result,
Freedland says, he never
gained the fame he deserved.
When the organisers of
a Holocaust symposium at
Rosenberg’s own institution,
the University of British
Columbia, organised a panel
of survivors for high-school
students, he wasn’t invited.
In 2006, after his death, only
40 people turned up at a
memorial event in Vancouver.
Rosenberg deserved better.
He survived horrors that most
of us can barely imagine and
never wavered in his
commitment to the truth. His
life makes for an enormously
moving story. Now, thanks to
Freedland’s impeccable
research and immersive
storytelling, he has the
biography that he deserves. cFree men Walter Rosenberg
and Fred Wetzler, bottomRosenberg
never gained
the fame he
deserved
(^) COURTESY OF ROBIN VRBA In shock Carrère
spent four months in
a psychiatric hospital
HELENE BAMBERGER/OPALE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
He enjoyed
an XXL high
after being
given doses
of ketamine
20 5 June 2022