Every story is personal. There are no purely abstract histories, no memories of disembodied lives. Otto Dov Kulka’s mother rode into the night in a train car. Through the window, she watched the desolate snow. When darkness fell, she quickly scribbled a few words on a piece of paper: «We are traveling east. We don’t know where to. If you find this note, please send it to the address above.» She opened the small window and let the wind carry her letter away. The woman didn’t know yet, though she might have sensed it. The east had a name, and that name was death: Auschwitz-Birkenau, the emblem of the twentieth century’s darkest hour, the geographic epicenter of terror. Yet that note traversed space and time, reaching not only its intended recipient but also us. Reading it today, we feel an emotion inseparable from its personal imprint. Her words testify to a ray of light piercing the darkness. Unknown angels do exist.

Half a century later, her son, historian Otto Dov Kulka, wrote one of the most haunting books I’ve read about the Holocaust—more than that, a book about the connection between history and memory, between documented fact and lived experience. Published in English as Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, it appeared in Spain through Taurus about ten years ago. I discovered it thanks to another scholar: the recently deceased writer Pauline Matarasso. I still can’t understand how I missed its publication. It is a masterpiece.

The author mines the depths of memory, trying to make sense of his life, his family and friends, his people. The great dance of death repeatedly claims his thoughts. Layers of meaning surface from its folds, along with unease and fear. And always in the background looms the incomprehensible mystery that confronts us. «How is it,» Otto Dov Kulka transcribes, «that the living—who enter in such numbers and such long columns and are processed inside those structures of slanting roofs and red bricks—are transformed into flames, into light and smoke, then vanish into those dark skies? Under the star-filled night sky, the fire keeps burning silently. This was part of daily life. Yet still, the enigma of life, this curiosity about life and death, somehow lived deep within us.»

In Auschwitz, an anonymous author also composed three poems that are—as far as I know—the only surviving poems written in the camp. They are powerful verses whose titles echo human anguish and hope. «We the Dead Accuse You,» proclaims the first; «Unknown Grave,» names the second; «I Would Rather Perish,» confesses the third. It begins:

I know: there are grand words

For which one might die.

These words grow precious

And to stay calm means cowardice

When they summon the masses

Under the regiments’ banner.

But anyone who knows the old mothers

Abandoned to their fate

And the fatherless children

Believes nothing they say.

And ends with these verses:

And yet, I would rather perish

With your spit upon my face,

I would rather die a coward

Than have blood upon my hands.

Humanity cannot reach much further than these words take us. In them—and throughout the book—an unspeakable truth pulses.