Sachiko by Endo Shusaku is a book that will remain with you at long. It is moving and tells two different stories connected: the one of Sachiko, the female protagonist of the story and her boyfriend Shuhei and the one of Father Kolbe, who, I didn't know that, spent some time in Nagasaki.
Sachiko is catholic like the rest of her family and we see that there is a certain diffidence from the japenese government regarding christians and catholics
in general. The story starts in 1930s and the advent of war doesn't better these predjudices.
Father Kolbe that Sachiko knows, is intimidated by Nagasaki, but, oh he loves it so badly. He loved to spread a message of love wherever he went and same he did in Nagasaki.
Once returned in Polland and captured destination Auschwitz, he knows an 18 years old boy, Henryk. He doesn't believe in God. God doesn't exist, there is nothing. Father Kolbe will try to open his heart, although it is difficult, because this boy has a very hard heart.
While Sachiko growing starts to fall in love for Shuhei and while Shuhei asks to a friend of him if killing a man is correct, or what would it mean dying so young, Father Kolbe at Auschwitz is continuing to spread words of love.
This one, he said, is not technically hell, because it is possible to see love between prisoners. One day, Father Kolbe told to Henrick, he saw with his own eyes a prisoner passing to another one a piece of bread, for surviving. So, it meant, added Father Kolbe, that there was humanity, and that the horrible human conditions in which people lived didn't degradate their spirit, more weak because of starvation and cold and heavy work, but not less compassionate.
It was of course a fight for surviving, it wasn't anything else. One day prisoners escaped and germans nazis promised of killing twenty prisoners per fugitive. One day another one will escape away...Later, during another episode, when ten men were captured for being killed Father Kolbe offered his own life: the man who had to die had a wife, children. He told to Germans that he was a priest, not anymore young and alone. Yes, sometimes Father Kolbe, remembered the Japanese he had met at Nagasaki thinking: who knows who is remembering me and who is asking for me and my life? but he knew that he was alone.
The departure of Father Kolbe was extremely low and at the end they decided for a jag of poison, because prisoners after 11 days didn't speak anymore and they were in a horrible state.
In this final end, there is also the story of Martin, who worked at the camp, who killed everyday many people.
He talked with Father Kolbe, confessing him that to him killing didn't mean anything.
Father Kolbe anyway, remained in the heart of this man for unknown reasons. Beasts, not men where Nazis. We must always remember it. And it was so...Straining reading the life at home of Martin and the one in the concentration camp.
The existence of Sachiko won't be anymore the same after some losses and the nuclear bomb.
We find her thirty years later, remembering but without sharing, because what her eyes saw, when the bomb fell in Nagasaki was just too horrible to report.
Intense, it is the first time I read in detail the experience of Father Kolbe in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. I knew his history but not in detail and I didn't know how he was killed.
Look: in this book war is taken in consideration letting us see various "shades": battlefields, let's call them in this way, a nuclear bomb in Nagasaki and a concentration camp, Auschwitz in Polland. Is there an experience you would want to try? An experience of war less traumatic? No. The horrible devastations, destruction, losses, sufferances caused by a war, are in every country lived powerfully and with the same, damned intensity.
A war means just desperation. Sachiko suffered because she lost people she loved and because she was a survivor, shocked of what she saw when the nuclear bomb launched by the Americans destroyed Nagasaki and killed most of the people she knew; at the same time, Father Kolbe and his friends tell us the experience in the most horrible concentration camp created in Poland.
Leaving us a message: that love is more powerful than hate.
I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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