The story of Out of the Depths

The year is 1945.  Russian Army trucks, their flags snapping in the frigid air, roar through the gates of the Birkenau concentration camp. Camp guards scatter, some exchange places with prisoners, but most simply shed their uniforms and disappear. Prisoners, mostly walking skeletons, are collected and given food. Unfortunately, their starved bodies can’t handle the nourishment and many die from their inability to digest real food. Chaos reigns.

Those who do survive eventually make their way to misplaced person’s camps and then on to rehabilitation facilities to begin the long road back to organized society. All carry emotional scars that will remain with them throughout their lives. Many of these folks have preserved their stories in taped interviews, and many have been unable to share anything. One can only imagine the pain and suffering they have silently carried.

But to me, the remarkable thing is that any of them can laugh, can enjoy life.  What a tribute they are to the human condition.  What inspiration they give the rest of us who can only think we understand what they experienced.

Out Of The Depths is a fictional account of one man who survived. And he survived interment for years when few prisoners managed to stay alive more than eight months.  If the gas chambers didn’t kill them, starvation did.

This story revolves around survivor’s guilt. I first came into contact with survivor’s guilt when I was about 14 years old.  I sat fascinated when one of my father’s truck drivers, a marine who had survived several bloody battles in the Western Pacific, perhaps at Iwo Jima, perhaps at Tripoli, told me how he was walking across the beach when every man around him fell to the sand dead.  He told me how he ran to another group of marines and continued his march toward the enemy only to have everyone of those men on his new company fall dead around him. Why, he asked, begging for an answer, did he survive when hundreds, perhaps thousands, died that day?

Of course I had no answer. I still don’t.  But a seed was planted. Out of the Depths is the tree that grew from that conversation, helped along by stories of survival from concentration camps survivors and others.  Originally, I tried to understand the experience of being a Jew in Nazi Germany by creating a family, with a son and daughter, and tying to imagine how they lived before Hitler, during Hitler, and after Hitler.

That was my first draft. It was long. It depicted life in rural Germany and life in the camp. It then went on to the rehabilitation center and how Bernard Helgman, the central character, managed to get himself through it and to the US. He then goes through surgical training and onto his life as we find it in the book now.

The only problem being that I had never been to Germany, to the concentration camp or to rehab. And I didn’t know anybody who had. For my purposes the writing had solved whatever reason it was that I undertook to write it, long before the Internet. So I tossed out everything except for the survivor’s guilt and the devastation that caused to Helgman’s life.  That, to me, was the essence of the story I wanted to tell.  A story that we all, I believe, can relate to.