I read the entirety of The Bureau of Unknown Fates with the assumption that the International Tracing Service (ITS) is as fictional as Gaëlle Nohant’s protagonist, Irène. With this lack of knowledge, I followed Irène, a senior agent at the ITS, whose main job is detective-like: take items confiscated from concentration camp prisoners and return them to the owner’s family.
The trouble lies in finding the items’ rightful homes: the novel is set in 2019, so Iréne must work to piece together lives and family trees from data, letters, incomplete or partially destroyed records, and the items’ intrinsic information. Theoretically, the result is not just the preservation of history, but closure for families with gaps in their ancestral timelines. It seemed, in my American pessimism, hard to believe that a country was or still is willing to put time, money, resources, and a coordinated international effort towards illuminating the darkest parts of its history.
One of Nohant’s characters asks the same question: ‘Pierre expresses his amazement that, in a world governed by so much profit, an international archive centre is taking so much trouble to return objects with no market value’. The ITS is in the business of re-opening wounds that people would sometimes prefer to leave sealed, however loosely sutured the wound in the first place.
The townspeople in Bad Arolsen don’t seem to have welcomed Iréne nor the ITS as a whole, and the love which led her from France to Germany has ended in a contentious divorce. That said, she thrives in her work in the face of bureaucratic nightmares and is helped by competent, often inspirational colleagues . . . while being thwarted by bad bosses and the unwilling recipients of her findings. Rightly so, Nohant writes, ‘An archive . . . is a little like a collection of grenades with all the pins pulled out.’
Belonging, or a lack thereof
The novel is full of keen observations and conversations between characters about homecomings, wounds, and belonging. Where people should ‘go’ after experiencing systemic trauma is a question left without an answer.
A Holocaust survivor and one of the novel’s main historical figures, Eva, is asked about home, to which she replies, ‘At home? I don’t know what that means. My childhood was my home. I’ll never feel at home again.’
And while Irène similarly wonders where her home is — France or Germany — the main driver of the narrative is less about Irène and more about the historical characters she is busy piecing together, like Eva, as she turns letters, items, interviews, postcards, homes, descendants, into a type of historical record.
A side effect of these braided storylines is that Irène and her motivations, emotions, and inner landscapes slip backwards, as if she is more of a conduit or vehicle for the story than an author of her own life. This is not helped by sometimes clunky, detached descriptions of her emotions. Irène being ‘touched’ by things, or her heart beating faster, happened enough times to make me want for another, more nuanced emotion.
I was similarly surprised that in a story governed by the importance of items and objects, I did not get a clear picture of how Irène interacted with the objects around her. Maybe this says much about how we perceive the important but utilitarian objects of our time — the phone, car, and computer — or Irène’s sense of detachment from her surroundings.
That said, one scene where I felt particularly embedded in her experience was when Irène and a female translator go into a house to conduct an interview. They are expecting one man and find twelve, all of them boisterous and drinking, crammed into one living room. As the women begin to ask their questions, tensions escalate, along with Irène’s impulse to escape, and mine right along with her.
The book shines in its detective-like movements. In particular, the detailed explorations and conversations among characters about the ramifications of war through generations, the brutality of forced migration and immigration policies. What determines one’s right to stay or one’s right to belong if we think outside of government regulations, borders, language, visa requirements?
When Irène is met with resistance — whether from her ex-father-in-law who refuses to own up to his own Nazi past, or descendants who are unwilling or unable to reconcile past with present — Irène understands that the disillusioned ‘wall’ built against memories is a way to maintain equilibrium. Her main struggle seems to be balancing the emotions of her characters with historical fact and a constantly shifting reality, along with her own compulsion to complete the historical puzzle.
How do we make sense of an uprising?
As I read The Bureau of Unknown Fates, I found myself thinking repeatedly about Israeli occupation and Palestinian resistance. Ghettos are described in ways that mirror if not completely resemble current living conditions in Gaza and the West Bank. Irène knows intimately the nuanced language of genocide: ‘bodies into units and murder into liquidation’. Entire blocks are burned to the ground after armed uprisings — marked by deportations; forced migration and forced labour; shrinking spaces to live and gather; a widening net of persecuted ‘undesirables’, and neighbours seizing homes.
She traces survivors to ‘Palestine’ and gleans information from organisational groups in ‘Israel’ sending her emails about Holocaust survivors. Other than that, Israeli characters and the Israeli state hover on the periphery of the book without further elaboration.
Ample attention is given to the bravery and valour of those who participated in violent uprisings against SS operatives. What I found particularly interesting were the tales of organised resistance, particularly the Polish uprisings during Nazi occupation. Time makes heroes out of revolutionaries otherwise persecuted as villains of the occupying government. Taking up arms is seen as a valiant act: ‘These men did everything they possibly could to resist their own annihilation. In a sense, they became custodians of the memory of these people they’d watched walk to their deaths. They carried this impossible burden for the rest of their lives.’
Neutral parties and modern-day reckonings
The novel invites readers to interpret the narrative through their own political lens, similar to how the ITS is viewed as a ‘neutral’ actor, funded by the ‘neutral’ Red Cross. That said, an underlying indictment surfaces when various characters discuss the importance of Irène’s work: ‘The Nazis’ genocidal expertise was even rolled out for use in other conflicts. The Holocaust victims’ ashes were swept under the carpet of new alliances and promising markets.’
After finishing the novel, I looked up the International Tracing Service online and found that it still exists under a new name: The Arolsen Archives. It is managed and supervised by an international commission, funded entirely by Germany. That such a place exists, along with Nohant’s fully-painted stories of survivors, offers hope for how state governments can acknowledge and attempt to repair atrocities. Although I do wonder what it would take for a similar reckoning to happen today.
The underlying message resonates well beyond the page: translated into English by Maren Baudet-Lackner and Sophie-Charlotte Buchan, The Bureau of Unknown Fates is currently being adapted for the screen, ensuring such compassionate acts of remembrance continue to reach new audiences.
Reviewed by Emily Unwin for BookBlast®
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