The prisoner, i, announces,“I am rectum.” (7) This is an apt start to a book about Hitler’s attempt to eradicate a whole race. The prisoner, whose job is to dig latrines, tells us that his goal is to survive the daily onslaught, and in order to have a chance of survival, he must become inhuman — must obey, grovel, and not feel for other prisoners — in fact, stay numb. But i cannot seem to survive alone. He befriends one prisoner but feels bereft when that companion is no longer there. And when all who are close to him are gone, he adopts a young prisoner who is new to the camp, intending to show him how to survive. But again i gets too close, and survival ceases to be his primary concern.

The guard, Gunther, grew up dissecting live animals to see what made them live. His pastor taught him that the Jews killed Christ, but without even meeting one Jew, he developed a rationale to hate all Jews. While Gunther moans about the toll his job takes on him, maiming and killing gives him a rush akin to sex. As he pokes at a prisoner’s scrotum, he says, “I want to scream while I flail away at him, scream much beyond an orgasm. A Hitlerian shout to the gods!” (188)

Lamenting that he must hide out in Minneola, New York for the next sixty years, Gunther fantasises and rationalises about how he would testify if he were caught. He unapologetically explains, “A society that exalts death as the prism through which it engages life is a society without fear, inhibitions, controls, or impediments, a society of supermen.” (241) Because Gunther believes he has done no wrong, he continues to indulge in torture. Having uncovered his past but unable to leave him, his family is forced to live with the monster. His sons suffer both physically and psychologically. Gunther tosses five-year-old Conrad into the ocean to teach him to swim, leaving him to drown, and later eats the flesh off Conrad’s fingers. Conrad spends the rest of his life seeing his father’s traits in himself. His brother, Kurt, turns to drugs when he is not strong enough to accept Gunther. Both are Gunther’s victims and even begin to think like i when Kurt warns, “Never but never reach out to anyone even if what is left of feelings tells you to. Keep the urge under control.” (338) Gunther lives on — even after his death.

In his interview, Freese writes that while abhorrent, the most atrocious acts committed by Gunther do not make Gunther an anomaly. “To remove a scrotum for pleasure, for satiety, is not insanity - normal men do this....When individuals kill someone out of pleasured curiosity they feel god-like, perhaps omnipotent, or at least empowered for the grievous moment.” (358)

‘The i Tetralogy’ is both the worst book I have read about the Holocaust and it is the best. In the horror of Gunther’s actions, a detailed portrait of physical and mental pain, I forced myself to read on as I too became obsessed with the author’s search for meaning. Even as Freese describes the atrocities committed by guards like Gunther, our memories of the Holocaust are fleeting. But for now, I, the reader, am aware.

Coralie Hughes Jensen is a full-time professional writer and author of six novels. Two of her short stories received honorable mention in the Writer’s Digest 2000 Writing Competition, which attracted over 19,000 entries. Her book reviews have appeared regularly in Bibliophilos and her fiction in Bibliophilos, QWF, Vermeer and Nostalgia. She was interviewed by Rembrandt Publishing as an “up and coming” writer in 2005. She is author of six novels. A Canadian company epublished her novel, ‘Friends of the Earth’ and accepted her collection of stories, ‘Cape Ann Mysteries’. A local radio station interviewed her live for a non-fiction project involving the court system. She is currently speaking in front of book clubs and attending signings at bookstores in the States and in Canada for literary novel, ‘Passup Point’. A graduate of University of California at Berkeley, Coralie has lived and worked in the Netherlands and trained employees in high tech systems in Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea. She has also lived in Texas, New Mexico, Oregon, California, and Massachusetts.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.