Some questions about “The Fighter.”

If you want to ask me a question: greif.jj@gmail.com

Why do you write about these awful events?
I guess the reason I write about Auschwitz is that my father spent a year there. He was there when I was born, on September 23, 1944. I didn’t know how lucky I was to come into this world: the Germans had caught my father in Paris about two weeks after he made me. I was six months old when he came back.
It is said Auschwitz survivors didn’t talk about the camp because people couldn’t understand. If this is true, then they could talk to each other. When I was two or three, I hid under the kitchen table while my father and his friend Pierrot compared Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The last time I saw both of them together, Pierrot in his eighties and my father past ninety, they still compared Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Before I had heard about Snow White and Cinderella, I knew that mothers promised their babies a good shower after three days in the cattle car and that poisoned gas rained down instead of water.
I grew up in Paris. I heard a lot about the war. French people talked about it all the time at least until 1960. I certainly didn’t want to know more about it, so I never questioned my parents and their friends. I found these friends very gross, with their Polish or Yiddish accents, and avoided them.
When my mother died—this was 1978, I was 33—I saw the whole lot of them. I had been a journalist for five years or so. Hey, I thought, these old wrinkled heads are full of stories. They have to be, since they all survived the war. I started interviewing them (not right away: it took me about four years before I overcame my natural laziness). I wrote hundreds of pages.
There was a time when my wife and I founded a school, and then I wrote things for my pupils. This was the start of my career as a writer of “young adult” novels. My first published books were about talking chimpanzees, Japanese warriors, Marilyn Monroe. But then I thought I’d try to do something out of these war stories my parents’ friends had confided to me. So I wrote Children, we’re at War, about a Jewish boy who spends the war in a summer camp in Mimizan-Plage, south of Bordeaux. Then Kama, about a girl who lives in Warsaw and flees to Central Asia with her parents.
During a period when my mood was dark for various reasons, I felt my books about the war were much too sweet. They remained at the edge of things. I needed to explore the core of the horror, which had resided deep inside my mind as far as I remembered. That’s when I decided to write about Auschwitz.

Why did you choose to tell Maurice’s story, rather than your father’s?
My father’s story would have been an easy choice. I did write it a few years later in my book Lonek le Hussard. Yes, but he spent only one year in the camp. While his extraordinary physical and moral strength helped him reach the end of the first month, while he was extremely lucky (like all the survivors), his story was untypical: because he was a communist underground fighter and a doctor, the ghost of a communist network which existed in the camp found him a safe job in the hospital.
His friend Henek spent three years in Auschwitz. I hope to tell his story some day. He survived (I think) because he was a good man, whom everybody liked.
I didn’t want to tell the story of a good man. I wanted to tell a shocking story. So I chose Maurice’s, which I had always found the most hair-raising one—as he worked in the early gas chambers, and so on. He was my father’s friend, but not a doctor. A leather-worker, born a very poor orphan in Warsaw, who learned to fight for his bread in the streets. Later, in Paris, an amateur boxer. In the camp, the SS tried to set up a fight between him, a tiny flyweight fellow, and a tall dying guy, whom they hoped he’d kill with one blow.
In France, teenagers study this book during the first year of Senior High, as part of World War II and Holocaust studies. I often visit them. They ask me why I’ve written so many books about the war. I tell them they are not books about the war, but books about people facing moral dilemmas. This may happen in daily life, but things become rougher and clearer during a war. For example, many people in France had a moral choice between denouncing Jews (or Resistance fighters, etc.) and helping them.
Maurice has a choice. He can either kill the tall guy, who is dying anyway, and save his own life, or refuse to kill him and probably be killed himself by the angry SS. This is one of the central scenes of the book. I thought it might concern young people. I’ve seen several thousands of them, so I know they appreciate the book. I can even prove it: they awarded it the five main literary prizes given by students in the year 2000.

Why are there so many characters in the book?
My books often follow a standard pattern. A person goes away from home, sees places and has adventures, then comes back home. The grand ancestor was Homer’s Odyssey, then the great model was Don Quixote, also known as the first modern novel.
I love Don Quixote. I read it as a teenager, then again some years ago. You could say the story is a series of experiences, locations, etc. It doesn’t have a regular plotline with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Many characters, for example travelers or inn keepers, come in and go out quickly—and we never know them well. It may be disconcerting to a reader to meet so many of them. (The reviewers didn’t like that book, and it was more succesful in France and England than in Spain.)
I created Brod for the very same reason Cervantes created Sancho Panza: so that my main character has someone to talk to. This is because I like a lot of dialogue in my books. I just made him up because he was necessary. We don’t need to know much about his background. What is important is that he has a pleasant and jolly character. He can be a good sounding board for Maurice, he can tell jokes to relieve the angst, and we’re sad when he dies.
While I was writing my book, I went to Hollywood to report about the place for Marie Claire. I met several scriptwriters. I asked one of them to tell me about script doctors. He said that just before shooting Tootsie, they felt the story was not right. They gave a million dollars to Elaine May for some advice. She said the Dustin Hoffman character needed a companion, someone he could discuss the strange things he was going through with. So they added the Bill Murray character. All he has to be is an easy-going fellow who has some common sense and listens well.

Did you really have to mention the horrible stuff?
Children in French schools often study this book. Then I go see them and they ask me questions. Recently, some kids in Pau, in the South of France, said they had found several pages in the book quite “raw.” They mentioned Maurice carrying corpses on his back. I showed them how the choice of images and metaphors gives a “raw” result without actually using raw words.
They also mentioned, as they always do, the paragraph that they consider the strongest in the whole book—where the mothers strangle their children in the gas chamber. They never say that they find it too strong. Neither do the teachers or librarians. This is the paragraph that really etches the Holocaust into their mind and memory.
I have tried to concoct a bitter brew. I think it would be a bad idea to sweeten it.

Is it a good idea to write a novel about the Holocaust? Does it add anything to what we already know?
As I wrote in my answer to the first question: my books are not about the war, but about people facing moral dilemmas. Not “about the Holocaust.”
If you want to know about the French Revolution, there are many books of history that give you an account. If you want to know how people behaved in these best and worst of times, you can read A Tale of two Cities. The author’s talent is such that you’ll become one of the characters and go through the Revolution yourself. That’s the power of the novel.
So what is added in my book, I hope, is that you’ll go to Auschwitz yourself—as opposed to what happens if you read the definitive book about the Holocaust, Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews.
My starting point, Maurice Garbarz’s book, was probably intended as “an account of the Holocaust as seen by a witness.” He describes the camp and what happens there, but you don’t really get to know him. I added the main character. I added his feelings and his thoughts. I added dialogue. You discover his personality when he talks to other people. You can become him.
I posted on my French web site an extract of a graduate student’s thesis. Her general theme is “Fictionalizing the Holocaust,” with Elie Wiesel as the central subject. She read my book and also Maurice’s original book. She was surprised to find my book more “real” than Maurice’s. I guess you can say this is the power of the novel: to make things more real.
A journalist of Libération, a leading French daily, interviewed me. She said the main quality of my books what a certain “liveliness.” She even found me more “alive” than other people. There are many books about the Holocaust, first-person witness accounts and also novels. I tried to write one with more life in it. Also more death, but life triumphs in the end.

Is anything lost when a Holocaust novel is written for children?
I don’t write for children. In a recent TV talk show about literature for young people, one writer said: “I write for an ideal reader. He likes to read, he is clever and has a good sense of humor. I don’t care whether he is ten of fifty years old.” People often ask me “what age” I’m writing for. I answer I write for good readers. They should be familiar with books.
The youngest reader I had a long talk with about this book was eight years old. His father is a famous French intellectual, Alain Finkelkraut. His grandfather is an Auschwitz survivor.
In book fairs, the readers who come and talk to me (I mean, who have already read several of my books) are adults about half of the time, often librarians or teachers. Also adults to whom someone in a bookstore suggested they read the book although it is marketed for “young adults.” Many old people read my books, because they like stories that take place during the war.
The young readers who talk to me are mostly girls aged 12 to 18. They read several books a week. A teacher told me something interesting. She was traveling on a train. She saw a boy reading a book intently. She asked him what he was reading. It was “Le Ring de la Mort.” He recommended it to her and that’s how she came to know me, to read my other books and so on. What’s interesting is the boy’s age: ten and a half.
I know many adults who couldn’t read this book because they never read books.
When I started writing for “young adults,” I tried to make my stories lively by keeping to short sentences and inserting plenty of dialogue and jokes. At first, I had tried to write stories for adults about my parents’ and their friends’ war adventures. None of these early versions was ever published. I noticed I improved the stories vastly by adding dialogue and liveliness. My most recent book, a biographical novel about Einstein, was published by a regular (adult) publisher. I wrote it exactly as if it was one of my “young adult” books.
Is anything lost? I withheld one thing. In his original book, Maurice described a very gruesome way of killing people. I thought it would be a bad idea to keep this description, lest some stupid teenagers tried to do it.

Do you think that his poor upbringing helps Moshe survive in the camp better than well-off Jews?
Maurice is a poor Jew and works with his hands. In France, he meets Jewish medical students who are intellectuals and don’t work with their hands. Some of them are well-off. Others are just as poor as he is. Families in Poland saved whatever money they could earn to send one member study in Berlin, Paris or London. These Jewish students shouldn’t be defined as “well-off,” but as “intellectuals.” Maurice has a feeling of superiority when these intellectual Jews play volley-ball or whatever on week-ends. He feels stronger, he has more stamina. But he felt the same thing when he fought the Polish kids while his brothers fled.
When he is a prisoner in Pithiviers, he is annoyed because his elder brother spends his time reading books and doesn’t want to escape. In Auschwitz, his brother, although he was raised in the same poor family as Maurice, lasts only two weeks. So a poor upbringing certainly didn’t help you survive. What Maurice’s brother lacked was Maurice’s fighting spirit.
Because of his subjective feeling of superiority over intellectuals, Maurice thinks they all die quickly in the camp. This is not objectively true. For example, we meet a secretary, a typical position for an intellectual in the camp, towards the end of the book. My father and several of his friends survived because they were doctors and found work in the infirmary. There is a Greek doctor, for example, in the book. The most famous intellectual survivor is Primo Levi, who was a chemist.
Since the book is concerned with the Jews who go to Auschwitz, it doesn’t examine the situation of Jews in general. Very rich Jews bought their way out. Concerning Polish Jews in France, a poor upbringing and a manual profession were handicaps. These people didn’t speak French well, didn’t understand what was happening, walked into the traps set by the French and German authorities.
In the group of intellectuals I studied, some also walked into the traps. Most of them escaped, though, because they understood what was happening. My mother didn’t declare herself as a Jew and had false baptism certificates sent from Poland. My father didn’t declare himself either. He wasn’t caught at the beginning of the war, like Maurice, but much later, because he was an underground Résistance fighter and somebody denounced him.
My novel “Kama” shows a family in Poland that escapes because they always keep one step ahead of the Germans. I know similar people in France. A woman I know, who was a teenager during the war, escaped with her divorced mother and brother (her father also escaped). Before the Germans reached Paris, the mother took her children to Toulouse, in the south of France. The Germans at first left this so-called “free zone” to the French government. In Toulouse, the mother found a person born in a small village in the Pyrénées mountains, near the Spanish border. She went to the village to see whether it was possible to walk across the border. Then, when she felt the Germans were going to enter the free zone, she took her children to the village and they escaped to Spain. Then they went to Casablanca, in Morocco, ruled by the General de Gaulle’s “Free Frenchs.” Other intellectuals I know went south. When the German invaded the south, they escaped to Grenoble, in the “Italian zone.” When the Germans also came there, they got fake papers and changed their names and worked for the French Résistance.
Maurice himself became a sort of intellectual, or at least an avid reader of books, after the war. Both his sons went to the very best universities and chose intellectual professions. The elder one worked as a regulator of Insurance companies in the French administration, the younger one as a psychiatrist in San Francisco.

So many “holocausts” have happened in recent times. Why write one more novel about the Holocaust of the Jews?
There are certainly a large enough number of books “about the Holocaust.” Kids can read those books if they want to learn about the Holocaust. I never intended to write one more such book.
I write books about people who try to follow the hard paths of life the best way they can. When you have a strong hero following a hard path, you have a good story.
My models are Ulysses, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, David Copperfield and others.
Hemingway did the same thing. His strong heroes followed the hard paths of life. World War I or the Spanish war provided the hard paths to follow. The books were not “about WWI” or “about the Spanish war,” though. They were about the guys who followed the path.
There were fascinating paths during the One Hundred Year war, so I wrote two books about Joan of Arc, who followed one of these paths. I wrote books about Mozart and Beethoven, who followed difficult paths in a changing world from 1760 to 1827.
World War II was the best of all recent wars for good stories, I think. So many countries and people participated, so many new ways of killing people were experimented. I like this war (as a novelist) because I was raised by people who talked a lot about it, but I am not its only admirer. When I was a kid, most of the movies took place during the war, with brave Americans fighting nasty nazis.
The war stories in movies or books sometimes pitted brave French résistance fighters against the nasty nazis, or those marvelous English guys who deciphered the secret code. There were not many good stories about the death camps, however. There was Elie Wiesel’s The Night, Primo Levi’s If this is a Man. In these stories, the narrator is a witness. I don’t recall reading stories with an actual hero or let’s say “strong hero.”
So I decided to write one. I pretend that, far from being “one more novel about the Holocaust,” it is the very first book with a Ulysses-like hero fighting the nasty nazis in Auschwitz. Tell me if you find another one!
It is not a book about the Holocaust of the Jews. It is book about a great Jewish hero. People have said the Jews went to the slaughter like sheep. Well, this Jewish hero fought like a lion and won.

Why is the end of the book so abrupt?
I wanted to avoid any kind of Hollywood-type “happy end.” There is no happiness. Survivors suffer to the end of their life. I wanted the readers to be shocked and frustrated when they came to the last page.
I wrote an afterword. Like my father and other survivors, Maurice says his life ended his Auschwitz and the story ended in 1945 and nothing worth telling happened afterwards. So I talked about the following generations a little.

Why did you translate the book yourself?
Authors usually write a short paragraph to thank their editor. I’ll write several long paragraphs to thank my editor, Jill Davis. She worked awfully hard, because this was a special project.
I wrote the original version of this book in French. It was published by L’École des Loisirs in Paris in 1998. Many children and adults read it. In France, everybody studies World War II and the Holocaust in school. This is usually done in the tenth grade, when kids are 14 or 15. The teacher often asks them to read my book. I’ve seen at least one hundred classes who invited me to talk about this book and answer questions.
Sometimes, they ask me about my favorite author. I write a name on the blackboard (or whiteboard): Charles Dickens. Most of them have never heard about him, as they study Victor Hugo and Balzac. I tell them I love English and American literature, and first of all the English language.
I love it so much that I decided to translate my book myself. This was not exactly a leap into the unknown, since I wrote several computer books in English long ago. Four were published in England and three in America. I had changed my name to Adam Greif, because I thought nobody would accept computer advice from someone named Jean-Jacques.
Writing computer books is easy. There are few words, no dialogues, no feelings. Translating my novel was much tougher. I discovered that my English wasn’t as good as I thought! I made outright mistakes, I used outmoded expressions because I read Dickens too much, I replaced good French words by monsters and chimeras that don’t even exist in English. This is where Jill Davis had to wield a well-sharpened pencil.
In some cases, I refused her suggestions. Maybe I thought her sentence drifted too far from the original French one. Or she wanted to make a paragraph perfectly clear, but it seemed to me that we lost some terseness and tension in the process. So if you find a clumsy bit of prose here and there, it doesn’t mean she should have worked even more. Put the blame on stubborn me!

How long did it take you to write this book?
Are you expecting some kind of exact answer: 183 days, 17 hours, 34 minutes, 6 seconds? I should buy a stopwatch. I would press the Start button when I’d begin to write in my head or on the computer’s keyboard, then the Stop button when I’d look at birds outside or go to the bathroom.
Well, before I began writing the French version of the book in 1997 or so, I spent time reading the book written by Maurice Garbarz and his son, then talking to Maurice. Then I gave him the first draft and modified it after he made some remarks about it. I’d say the whole process took between six and nine months. Of course, nine months is a good number, because it lets you compare a book with a baby.
I translated the book into English around 2001. I met Jil Davis in 2002. She read the manuscript and asked other people to read it. I felt that it really took her a long time. As I was far away in Paris, I didn’t know what was happening exactly. She’s a slow reader, maybe. She made up her mind in 2004 and we signed a contract. Then I had to rewrite the book once more when she sent me about a million remarks in red ink about the text. I’d say I wrote until the end of 2005, more or less. Then the book went to the printer.

Is it a true story?
I try never to use the word “true,” because I think there is no such thing as “true.” I don’t pretend that “reality” doesn’t exist at all, but once it’s in a book it’s not reality anymore.
I consider that all my books are novels, although in my afterword, quoted below, I use the word “story.”
My Marilyn book isn’t a biography, but a novel. The book where I tell the story of a boy named Jean-Jacques Greif in Paris in the fifties in the first person isn’t an autobiography or “memoirs.” It is a novel. If I want to make up a scene with my brothers because I feel it will flow nicely and be fun, I invent it.
In the afterword, I say: “With Maurice’s permission, I took his book as a starting point to write this story. I didn’t invent any event or situation. I didn’t change any fact. I just imagined dialogs and tried to guess what the narrator, whom I called Maurice Wisniak, might think and feel.” The sentence “I didn’t change any fact” is true and not true, as I did make up the character Brod (based on several people described by Maurice Garbarz).