Death In Poland

By John Skow

WARTIME LIES by Louis Begley

Knopf; 198 pages; $19

Holocaust survivors talk of the shame of being alive. Relatives, playmates, teachers, strangers were shot where they lived or were shipped away and gassed, but they themselves somehow did not die. Why? By what justice?

Louis Begley, a Manhattan lawyer, was a young boy in eastern Poland when World War II broke out. In a remarkable, elegiac novel that surely is mostly memoir, he walks the poisoned ground. His narrator, Maciek, is the son of a prosperous Jewish doctor. Maciek's mother died in childbirth, but a large, protective family surrounds him: grandparents, servants, neighbors, a nursemaid named Zosia and a beautiful aunt, Tania. But solidity melts away as the war and the Jew hunting begin. Maciek's father is evacuated by Russian troops. Tania becomes the mistress of a German officer. She and Maciek resettle as Roman Catholics in a nearby town, then flee to Warsaw when their protector kills himself to avoid being arrested for fraternizing with Jews.

Hiding becomes a tangle of lies -- their own and those of the Poles who, as long as the two have money, pretend to believe them. As life in Warsaw disintegrates, Maciek and his aunt live for months with peasants, then are on the run again. Always, food must be scavenged, shelter of some kind found. Eventually the war ends. Maciek has grown taller, noticed girls, had a kind of boyhood. But he is blighted. "He became an embarrassment and slowly died," writes the author. A man who bears one of the names Maciek used has replaced him, but he "has no childhood that he can bear to remember."