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[EARLY ILLUSTRATED NAZI CAMP SURVIVOR MEMOIR] Khochu zhyty! Obrazky z nimetskykh kontsentratsiinykh taboriv [I Want to Live! Images from German concentration camps]

Danskyi, O(leksa) [pseud. Danylo Chaikovskyi]

Item #2628

Munich: R. Oldenbourg, Graphische Betriebe GmbH for Ukrainska Vydavnycha Spilka v Miunkheni, 1946. 163 p., ills. 21 x 14.5 cm. Publisher’s illustrated wrappers. In Ukrainian and occasional German. Very good. Extremities are a bit frayed and faded due to acidic DP–era paper stock used. The book block is good and clean. Overall a firm, well–preserved volume.

Expressive artistic front cover, pictorial endpieces and numerous b&w illustrations in text — all by prominent Ukrainian–American artist, book illustrator Edvard Kozak (1902–1992). Throughout his career, Kozak mostly contributed lighthearted illustrations for children’s literature, or, a caricaturist, for the newspapers, like his own satirical Lys Mykyta. For long, Kozak’s art due to its youthful joviality was a selling point for the booksellers clientele. But the present book is a radical stylistic shift for Kozak, as it focuses on the most harrowing chapters of modern history: the witnesses of inhumane prisoner extermination at the WWII Nazi prison camps. The author of the text published as Khochu zhyty!, Oleksa Danskyi, is one of many cryptonyms used by the publicist Danylo Chaikovskyi (1909–1972). Chaikovskyi started as a devoted long–standing member of the Stepan Bandera organisation. For some 50 years, Chaikovskyi edited, published and wrote articles on Ukrainian national identity. He authored some larger works, but it is this memoir that is considered historic. The volume is a DP publication (Boshyk & Kiebalo, RB127187), but the text details, the volume and the quality of text all postulate that the book was in preparation already in the Nazi camp. The scholarly research describes earlier Polish and Lithuanian works on the Nazi prison camp memoirs. Polish ex–prisoners formed local victim unions and began to print so–called Jednodniówka as early as Autumn of 1945. Those were occasionally illustrated non–periodic almanachs with the aim to focus on the tragiс events, to foster a cathartic stream of collective memory. Most known Ukrainian memoirs were later ones (see: Mirchuk P. U nimetskykh mlynakh smerti... NY–L: Ukrainskyi soiuz politychnykh viazniv, 1957).

The text by Chaikovskyi, divided into 10 collections of short chapters, is written in the form of reporteur’s chain of quasi–interviews. Echoing the psychological resilience found in Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Chaikovskyi tunes in the voices of fellow prisoners; something that helped himself to battle shock, depression and apathy. The interviews lay out details, struggles of deportations, selection, hard labour, beatings and barrack daily life. The text escalates to the level of anthropological study with dissection of prisoner habits, jargon, reactions to usual grim and sad or rare happy events. The spine–shivering details include Nazi officers forcing the prisoners to write happy letters to their relatives — mentioning orchestras and candies. The internal struggle for the hierarchy expressed with the color triangle on the uniform is also a telltale sign of adopted survival tactics. Combined, those moments form a grand illustration of the social mechanics where a mix of moral degradation and purely selfless heroic deeds co–existed amidst the daily asperities. With the humanistic drawings by Kozak, a book on death turns out to be a book on the will for life. And it was possible not in the least thanks to Kozak's approach of humanity amidst the wires as a testimony of the inhumane. After all, as Kozak underlines with the cover design, for any prisoner, his will to live became something that defined the personality of a survivor.

Price: $350.00