When I told my friend Mira Rosenthal that I’d taken on a translation job for a book on Jasenovac, she didn’t miss a beat. “And how are you protecting yourself?” she asked.
Naive me hadn’t even considered this, even though I know the words and the scenes always seep inside you when you’re translating them, sometimes without your quite knowing how much. So I didn’t have a good response, because I hadn’t really thought about it.
So yes, the past months have looked a lot darker to me, no matter the happy occasion. People have looked ugly and mean and also pitifully weak. The book doesn’t aim for anything but accuracy. It compiles statistics, reports on the contents of care packages, postcards to and from the inmates (a twenty-word limit, in Croatian or German), jobs in the camp complex, methods of torture and killing, transport, disease, body disposal, organizational structure, resistance, children, hope, goodbyes.
I think if the author were trying for drama or emotion, it would be less effective. It’s just facts based on a ton of archival research. It’s implacable.
I have learned things. That’s always one of the main reasons I do this. So that much is good. But the something new on the next page that I’ll remember, know for the rest of my life, in this case, is often not something I want to keep in my head, before my eyes. Too late.
One thing I learned was about a town I once passed through on the border between Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. We were made to get off the bus, give up our passports. It was a lot like other border crossings I’ve been to, but there was a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I didn’t want to stay there long.
Then in the book I came to a part, one of the most gruesome, that takes place in that town. It goes on for quite some time. The town is now etched in my mind, and I can’t help but think that was what I was feeling there standing beside the bus, even if it was seventy years ago.
I won’t mention the name of the place. People live there. People live in all sorts of stupid places.
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Russell Scott Valentino 