Götz and Meyer

In this disturbing novel, David Albahari takes one of the many infamous moments of Nazi history, and personalises it in the most extraordinary way.

In 1942, the majority of Serbia's Jewish population was murdered, primarily by means of a hermetically sealed truck into which was pumped cardon monoxide from the exhaust of the truck. The narrator of the book, an unnamed teacher who is investigating the annihilation of most of his family tree, becomes obsessed with imagining how the men who drove this truck were able to carry out their deadly purpose.

Gradually Götz and Meyer, as he calls them, and the details of their crimes come to overwhelm him even though he cannot bring their faces into focus or differentiate between them. He accumulates masses of data about the atrocity - the specific dimensions of the truck, the effectiveness of the carbon monoxide, the names of the personnel running the camp, how the bodies were disposed of - but this brings him no closer to understanding how such a thing could happen and begins to exhaust him:

It was about then, when summer was well along the way, that I began to give up … I stood before a glass wall, best to put it that way, and no matter what shoes I was wearing, no matter what I used to steady myself, I could not find a way to climb up and out. I slid, slid, and it got worse just when I thought I had finally figured out how to get a hold on the edge. Some things can never be grasped, and perhaps it is better that they stay that way, meaninglessness being their only meaning.

But of course, he can never really be free, and, driven on by his demons, he takes his students on a bus trip to the site of the camp, anointing them with the names of his dead relatives for the day and imagining that the bus is Götz and Meyer's deadly truck.

The book is written as one long paragraph, a stream of the narrator's disturbed consciousness that jumps, as his mind does, from one thing to another and back again. It is an incredibly controlled novel that takes the reader deep into the sheer unfathomability of the most heinous deeds, and explores the inability of those who come after to comprehend.