Q: I thought Girl Bandits was going to be an inspirational read about female friendships in the face of incredible odds but instead it was a dense bummer. A: You should never assume that any book about the Holocaust will be an inspirational, feel-good read unless it’s written by a complete charlatan. Also, the histories are dense and complex! - @historicity-was-already-taken FAQ
I used to struggle a lot with being a literary completist. If I started a book, I pushed through to finish it, even if I was just skimming. Then I grew much more relaxed about my reading, and allowed myself to say "I'm not going to finish this book" and just set some aside. It was freeing and wonderful and helped my reading overall.
I'm not sure what to do about The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto, a book I learned about through Tumblr and am about a quarter of the way through. It's good - well written, clear history, detailed without being swamped, and fascinating. It's also excruciating to read.
After one section, I found myself scrolling through Yad Vashem's names database, looking up murdered ancestors and relatives and discovering new details about their lives that I had either never known or had forgotten. Another section had me sending my father questions about the uncles he never knew. Another section had me reading up about the Polish town that was happy to see its Jews murdered. And so on and so on and so on. There is humanity galore in The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto, but there's also an ever-present reminder of the sheer inhumanity and scale of the Holocaust. It runs through the book, bleak and crisp and real. There is nothing uplifting about these facts. My brain keeps going back to the above quote: "You should never assume that any book about the Holocaust will be an inspirational, feel-good read unless it's written by a complete charlatan". And yet so many of these charlatans exist, for whom our suffering is just a backdrop to some other story.
It aches in how raw and recent it still feels, made worse by the daily barrage of antisemitism worldwide. And it means that reading The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto is something akin to torture. Maybe if it wasn't so well-written, I wouldn't feel so bad about feeling like I have to set it aside. Maybe if it wasn't so important to make sure I do know all of the details and nuances. Maybe if it was tomorrow. Or five years ago. Maybe. But the bottom line is that I may need to stop reading a book, not because I don't appreciate it, but because it is too good at reminding me of the world that was... and its echoes in the world of today.
