Broken Silence: Dialogues from the Edge

Robert Seiler was Assistant Professor of General Studies at the University of Calgary.

Many writers have tried to reconstruct the horrors of their early years in order to come to terms with what the past did to them; few have produced a memoir as powerful as Broken Silence. In this remarkable book Andre Stein (b. 1936) confronts those shattering experiences that reduced him to silence for forty years.

It should come as no surprise to learn that the subject of Stein’s ruminations is anti-Semitism — to be precise, the anti-Semitism he experienced while growing up in Budapest during the period which extended from March of 1944, when the Germans marched into Budapest, to October of 1956, when the people of Hungary tried to throw off the Soviet yoke. Apparently the persecution of the Jews reached its peak during the three months between the cessation of hostilities and the liberation of Budapest by the Red Army, when the dreaded Arrow Cross Party (the Hungarian fascist party) and the unaffiliated mob of wild youths reduced the Jewish population from 200,000 to a little more than 50,000. The atrocities reached such proportions that even the sensibilities of the Germans were ruffled. Stein’s father was sent to Bor, where he lost his sight working in the copper mines; his mother fell into the trap of her own ignorance and perished in the hell of Bergen Belsen; and most of his aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews died in one camp or another. Stein, among other members of the family, survived because his aunt Sari became the mistress of the Chief Inspector of the Arrow Cross Police. Their stories are brilliantly evoked.

So is the story of Stein’s struggle to extricate himself from the demons of his past. During the Hungarian uprising (in 1956) he fled to Paris, where he experienced a second birth. However, loneliness made him feel depressed again. He then immigrated (in 1959) to the United States, where he joined his sister and her husband in Berkeley, California. In order to escape his loneliness he studied at the University of California. He married a Sicilian girl, but he still felt isolated. Even his wife did not know that he was a Jew. When he finished his Ph.D. he moved to Toronto, where he took a job as professor of human communications at the university. After so many false starts his reconstruction began: he divorced his wife and married a Jew. Quickly his sense of alienation vanished.

Not the least fascinating feature of this book is the narrative technique employed. Stein engages in a series of imaginary dialogues with a torturer, a victim, a spectator, and a survivor. At the end of the book he engages in a dialogue with himself as a boy. This approach enables the reader to join the author in his search for understanding. The reader gets the impression that he is trying to solve a mystery, for as he reads dialogue after dialogue the story is brought into sharper focus. The lesson Stein learns is that, while he cannot change the past, he can change the way he sees and feels it. Telling the story liberates him from the fear, the shame and the rage he harboured for forty years.

In Language and Silence (London, 1967) George Steiner argued that silence was the only response possible to the enormity of the Holocaust. The case presented in Broken Silence is that silence is no longer tenable. Stein’s exploration of his own past deepens our understanding of “the greatest single crime in history.”