Teenager’s candid answer to a calculated question
Krakiel Publishing, £20
Reviewed by Amanda Hopkinson
How to write a biography of an absent subject? Absent not only because she left no personal records, but because relevant public records are also lacking. This was the challenge that confronted established Norwegian author and academic Espen Søbye, together with that of reconstructing, thereby reclaiming, the life of a schoolgirl, cut short at the age of 15.
Unexceptional for her time, Kathe Lasnik attracted no great attention. Her name appears almost only on lists: housing registers; school exam boards; index cards compiling “a complete list of Jews”; concentration camp deportees. Other traces, including all the family’s personal possessions, among them photographs, were systematically “liquidated” by the Norwegian Fascist Party acting with the Nazi Occupation from 1940-45.
Kathe was born in Oslo in 1932. Her father was a tinsmith, her mother sold vegetables. Her parents had escaped pogroms in Vilna in 1908; the family joined the Mosaic Religious Community. Yiddish was spoken at home in a succession of rented rooms. Kathe died at Auschwitz in 1942, together with her parents and one of her three sisters, the other two having fled to Sweden.
Kathe attended local schools and attained top grades in science and maths. The titular phrase “Always been in Norway” expressed her sense of identity and her defiance of the collaborative Quisling regime seeking to oust all those deemed inadequately Norwegian. It was her reply to the question: “When did you come to Norway?” on the compulsory “Questionnaire for Jews”. Within ten days, she was transported, with 532 fellow Jews, in the cargo hold of the troopship Donau.
Kathe’s only other surviving written words are on a single page read aloud to the class by her schoolteacher. It concluded: “Thanks for everything. You won’t see me again. Last night we were arrested”. It is tragic that the two documents in her own hand anticipated an ending rather than the beginning of adulthood.
Despite her insistence on being an echt Norwegian, Kathe was always aware that she was considered “other”. On making friends with a neighbour, she told her: “You’re lucky to be Norwegian. The Germans don’t hate you. The Germans hate us, the Jews.” Søbye’s exploration of the story, encapsulating Kathe’s own, is intense: the more circumstances dictate, the less Kathe herself can emerge. Søbye has created less a biography than a new historiography. Alongside an astonishing revelation of a brief individual life played out on the world stage.
Amanda Hopkinson is a literary translator, writer and reviewer