It is a simple, beautiful, and deeply moving story of one man’s work to heal. Blood Brothers is at once the story of Elias’ life growing up by the Sea of Galilee and an impassioned plea for reconciliation between the forces that have torn that area apart during this last century. “A state like a weapon depot,” she thinks. Elias Chacourt is a Melkite Catholic priest and a Palestinian. After the brothers tell of their initial train travel to the camps with German soldiers pointing guns at them, the narrator finds herself on a crowded train platform observing an Israeli soldier who stands casually with a weapon inadvertently pointed at her. These sections occur in 2001, at the time of the Second Intifada and increasing violence in Israel/Palestine. She reflects on what the brothers tell her, often during train travel to and from their home.
The narrator’s interludes set this book apart. There are moments of hope that stem from how strong these men had to be, including their reunion in Buchenwald and Yitzhak’s work to keep Dov alive during the death marches and in the hospital after the war ended. Blood Brothers, a musical by Liverpudlian playwright Willy Russell, revolves around twin boys (Mickey and Edward) who are separated at birth and brought up in. The reader comes away feeling as if they’ve spent hours getting to know Dov, the optimistic yet fragile brother, and Yitzhak, the cynical and determined younger brother. The differences in the brothers’ personalities and the effects of their trauma gives this book emotional heft. That is, of course, not a critique of the novel but of humanity. Johnstone laments in song, begging the narrator and audience to tell me it’s not true. As with any Holocaust story, the details are horrific and heartbreaking and repetitive of other books of this type. The language is sparse, appropriate for harrowing, traumatic experiences.
The book is based on the true stories of these brothers, as well as the author’s reckoning with their history as a Jew and an Israeli. As teenagers after the war, they moved to a village in Galilee, and the author/narrator interviews them in their old age. The Brothers of Auschwitz recounts the story of two brothers from Hungary, Dov and Yitzhak, who survive the concentration camps and death marches of the Holocaust. Written by Malka Adler Noel Canin (trans.)
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