Bitter Roots

By John Skow

WHEN MEMORY COMES by Saul Friedlaender Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 186 pages; $9.95

Still they come, the recollections of Jews caught in Europe during World War II, and still the genocide the authors try to describe is not fully understandable. We know about the Teutonic strain of extreme self-righteousness, Germany's economic chaos between the wars and about the ideology that found a target for this bitterness in the Jews. We have Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil, which suggests how good citizens, following orders given by other good citizens who were also following orders, could have run the death camps. We know in great detail how the rounding up and the killing were done.

This is incomplete knowledge because it is only rational. We hold back from the leap of despair that would let us see that human society always carries within it the capacity to commit such butcheries and think well of itself. Yet as World War II recedes into the past, the death camps have become part of the common memory of those who were neither victims nor executioners, but who share uncomfortably the humanity of each.

The memoir that stirs these thoughts is muted in its anguish. The author, Saul Friedlaender, 46, now an Israeli historian, was a child of seven in Czechoslovakia at the outset of the war. His parents were nonpracticing Jews, and the religion that Pavel, as he was called, knew most about as a boy was the Roman Catholicism of his beloved governess Vlasta. It was this happenstance, perhaps, that made it possible for him to endure the enormous change in his life that occurred when he was ten. The family fled to France in 1939, but by the summer of 1942 they knew, as his mother wrote in a letter that has survived, that "we can no longer exist legally ..." Before the parents were seized and shipped off to their deaths, they managed to have their son accepted in a Roman Catholic boarding school at Montluc,on as "Paul-Henri Ferland," a Catholic orphan.

The political atmosphere surrounding the school was pro-Vichy and of course antiSemitic. Young Pavel/Paul-Henri languished, sickened and nearly died, but in the end survived, in a masquerade that became a reality. He found in the Virgin a kind of substitute for his mother, he says, and became a wholehearted convert.

Only after the war did the boy learn what it had meant, in those years, to be a Jew. His allegiance shifted away from the Catholic Church to a belief in Zionism.

In 1948, lying about his age, he boarded an Irgun ship at Marseille and sailed for the newly proclaimed state of Israel.

There he took the Hebrew name Shaul, became a scholar and eventually wrote a study of the troubling question of the Roman Catholic Church during World War II, Pius XII and the Third Reich.

The passionate Zionism of Friedlander's youth has become the sometimes uneasy commitment of a citizen not always sure that his country is taking the right course. He sees his own past not as that of a victim but as that of some one who took part in the bitterness of humanity. He recalls being bullied in France by Jewish children who did not think that he acted Jewish enough. Later he sneered at Judaism with the rest of his Catholic classmates at Montluc,on.

He wonders whether "the Jewish state may perhaps be only a step on the way of a people whose particular destiny has come to symbolize the endless quest -- ever hesitant, ever begun anew -- of all man kind." His memoir is a work of eloquence and compassion.

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