Gotz & Meyer
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Believing they were being taken to a better camp, Belgrade's Jews would climb into the truck with a sense of relief. Mainly women, children and the elderly, they expected a long and uncomfortable trip but, after crossing the border, their journey would come to an abrupt end. Here the drivers would get out and attach a hose from the exhaust to the back of the truck-Over the course of a few months in 1942 the Nazis systematically exterminated the majority of Serbia's Jews using carbon monoxide and specially designed trucks. The only information the narrator of this bleakly comic novel can find about the summer when his relatives disappeared is the names of the truck drivers: G-tz and Meyer. During his research he becomes fascinated by the unknowable characters and daily lives of these men. But his imagination proves a dangerous force, and his obsession with the past threatens to overwhelm him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Embodiments of the banality of evil, G tz and Meyer are two German SS noncommissioned officers who drive a truck in which, over a period of weeks, they gas to death 5,000 Jewish inmates of a Belgrade concentration camp. "They are conscientious, they always arrive on time, they are calm and cheerful... their uniforms tidy, their step light," and they even hand out chocolates to cheer up the children they are about to kill. The nameless narrator of this haunting Holocaust story, a Jewish teacher in post Cold War Belgrade, fixates on the two men to get a handle on the murder of his parents' families by the Nazis. Serbian novelist Albahari (Bait) imagines the mundane circumstances of their lives as their obscene task dulls into everyday routine, and delves into the history of those who died in the camp. He elaborates the details of the Nazi extermination apparatus, how the carbon monoxide gas acts, the hopeless stabs at normality by the imprisoned Jews. Eventually, the narrator's flat, prosaic recitation of facts merges with hallucinatory reveries in which both his relatives and their murderers come to life. Even as his attempts to extract meaning through a historical recreation of the catastrophe grow increasingly futile, they yield in the end a numbed but moving elegy.
