ABSTRACT/INTRODUCTION
The French film Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran (Mister Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran) tells the story of a Muslim shopkeeper befriends a lonely Jewish boy named Momo (or Moshe) in Paris during the 1960s, and adopts him after his father commits suicide. They make a trip to M. Ibrahim’s homeland of Turkey, and the boy learns all about his adoptive father’s religion and cultural, which is the mystical or Sufi version of Islam. Both Momo and Ibrahim are members of minority groups that faced great discrimination in France at the time, and in fact Momo’s parents were Holocaust survivors, although they told him virtually nothing about those events. M. Ibrahim has to explain to him what really happened during the war and in the concentration camps, since Momo knows so little about the past or even about his own Jewish identity. He has no real guidance on anything at all since his parents are getting a divorce and his father is too sick with depression and concern about his personal problems to really act as a father or mentor. At first he even thinks Ibrahim is an Arab, and he does know about the poor relations between Arabs and Jews since the founding of Israel in 1948, but then the old man informs him that his is a Turk from Istanbul.
Moshe’s father seems like a broken and defeated man because of his experiences during the war, which may well have been so terrible that he cannot bring himself to talk about them at all, and his son truly suffers because of this. His story was reminiscent of that of Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz and prolific writer who also committed suicide. In his book Survival in Auschwitz, Levi described how he stayed alive in the camp, which depended not only on skill and cunning but also a large measure of good luck. He was fortunate in having a basic knowledge of chemistry that the Germans found useful, since the I.G. Farben Company controlled Auschwitz III (Monowitz) and required chemists and technicians for its laboratories. This allowed him access to extra food, a work environment without beatings and torture, and no heavy physical labor that would have drained his strength. As Levi noted, prisoners who failed to find some niche like this in Auschwitz would only survive for two or three months.
Like most of the prisoners and even many the S.S. staff, Levi had no real conception of Auschwitz before he arrived there because nothing quite like it had ever existed before in history. More than even a concentration camp or a death camp, it had evolved into a planned, industrial city for genocide. During the war years, the Nazi state became increasingly radicalized and genocidal, which reflected not only the ideology of its leaders but the momentum of the machinery of Party and state. At first the concentration camps existed to terrorize and destroy the political opposition to the Nazi state, as well as Gypsies, German Jews, homosexuals and others targeted for elimination. Once the war began, their numbers and size expanded greatly, and their inmates consisted of political opponents, slave laborers and POWs from all over occupied Europe. Under the pressure of wartime labor shortages, the camps “became more like transit stations, processing constant arrivals of new labor en route to the expanding network of satellite camps” (Caplan and Waschmann, 2010, p. 9). Death camps in Poland and other areas were also an innovation of the wartime period, and began as an extension of the ‘euthanasia’ program, with doctors overseeing the extermination of sick and debilitated inmates under the code name 14f13. Up to 1943, most Jews were held in ghettos and forced labor camps, being gradually worked and started to death and also sent to extermination facilities like Treblinka and Sobibor. After that time, those Jews still alive were sent mainly to Auschwitz, where most were gassed on arrival. At the end of the war, again under Hitler’s orders, the final phase of destruction took the form of death marches. Since these camps were ubiquitous, most Germans were well aware of them and they were “entangled in their local communities”, although after the war they generally denied all knowledge of them (Caplan and Waschmann, p. 14).
Even as Levi and the other prisoners were being put on the transports to Germany, with 650 people crowded in twelve boxcars, he received his first hint about how the Nazis really viewed this ‘cargo’. When an officer asked a corporal what the roll-call count was, the term he used was “how many pieces?”, as if they were some type of commodity or spare parts (Levi, 1996, p. 16). Once he had been processed into the camp, Levi soon learned the fate of those who had not been selected for temporary survival. Old people, children, the sick and disabled were not needed and the majority of Jews who arrived were gassed and cremated the same day. He was young and healthy enough to be considered useful for work and in Auschwitz those prisoners who did not fill some utilitarian purpose were not destined to survive very long. Levi learned to steal and to avoid being robbed, and described his existence as “I push wagons, I work with a shovel, I turn rotten in the rain, I shiver in the wind” (Levi, p. 37).
Musselmen were starved, demoralized and disoriented prisoners who had lost the will to live, basically like zombies or the walking dead. Levi and others who managed to survive learned that “to sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp” (Levi, p. 90). Nothing could be done for them in any case and if they did not simply die off on their own the S.S. would ‘select’ them to be gassed. Good luck also spared him from the final, chaotic evacuation of the camp in January 1945, even though he did not realize that at the time. Even so, Levi may well have experienced some type of ‘survivor’s guilt’, to use a highly clichéd term, which might have been a factor in his suicide. Moshe’s father may very well have had exactly the same kind of experiences that finally led to his suicide, which was unfortunately very common among Holocaust survivors, but at least he had the friendship and guidance of Ibrahim during this terrible period in his life.
REFERENCES
Caplan, J. and N. Waschmann (2010). Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. Routledge.
Levi, P. (1996). Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Touchstone Books.
Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran (Mister Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Qur'an). (2003). Prod: Laurent Pétin and Michèle Pétin. USA: Sony Pictures Classics.
