Hidden Away
Once I heard in a movie that it’s not a good idea to put together a sad boy with a sad girl. I think there is some truth in that, like Peter Bruegel’s picture “If a blind man leads a blind man both will fall into a pit”.
Too much pain together can’t be good. But then we meet John’s thoughts: Kurt understands him, there is not need of words. I don’t know yet which is the winning belief, maybe it depends on the person, rather than the generalization to the human being at a whole.
This book has been a vain attempt. I admit I’ve cried in one chapter (what’s not to cry for, anyway?) because the topic is sad, and that’s why it’s difficult for me to separate the feeling the Holocaust itself has grown in me and the feeling this book tries to portray. I’ve read some books about concentration camps, and seen even more movies. I rebel against the topic because I believe only Jews are remembered and I don’t think it fair. It seems only Jews exist in the movies, but the Gulag is nonexistent. It seems religion is Hitler’s main reason and the rest of “degenerates” are less.
Russians are forgotten, gypsies are forgotten, political prisoners are forgotten, foreigners are forgotten, dwarfs and sick people are forgotten, old people are forgotten.
Homosexuals are forgotten.
And, lastly, the raw cruelty of this theme repels me to the opposite direction. I didn’t know exactly what this book was about, I expected a different perspective when I read it was about concentration camps, I thought there would be a post-war story with some isolated flashbacks but that was not the case. There are two parallel plots here, each one of them from the pov of each MC.
John’s story is set the 50s. He and his unit liberated Dachau in the spring of 1945. He never overcame the war with its suffering and pain. He has bad dreams that haunt him. He forgets periods of his actual life with the resulting loss of memory gaps. He can’t forgive himself and the past. But it all gets worse when one day he catches a college’s janitor playing the piano. There is something in his looks and accent that awakens something in him and chases his sanity. In the end, he has to get to know this man, and pursues him. But knowledge is not easy and light, it brings even more pain and suffering. And mixed with it all, he begins to fall for something he didn’t know he would find.
Kurt’s tale is set in the 40s, he is an Austrian pianist who moves to Munich and joins the orchestra where he meets Peter, a violinist.
This story is beautiful and sad, pure and ugly. They fall in love and manage to be happy for a short while, but betrayal brings him to Mathausen, next to his beloved, and hell on Earth releases on them both. This is the tale I liked most. It’s awful and poetic, I wanted cover my face with my hands, reading between my fingers.
Because it’s absolutely heartrending, on one part due to the situation, on the other part due to what people who love are forced to do for those they love.
I liked this book and ignited some sentiments within me, but my issue is that, in spite of getting the MC’s emotions, they were sensed far away, like deafened, like the sound thought water. I could feel close to the characters in certain moments, but in others it seemed like the first time I meet them. I could feel close to Kurt in this pov, but I couldn’t feel the same with John, or with Kurt in John’s pov. Even more, I couldn't understand why do they fall for each other.
It’s like there are missing small pieces, but they are important to make the bigger ones shine. It looks like a tarnished picture that had lived better times, or like I had skipped pages, or like some sentences were erased accidentally. It frustrated me because it could have been a wonderful novel, but sometimes I find a pea that annoys me while sleeping on fifty mattresses and there is nothing to do.
