According to most conventional views of history the Swiss remained neutral during World War Two. However, even in this land of great natural beauty and idyllic scenery the evil ideology of Nazism gained ardent supporters.
Amongst a small group of Swiss Nazis in the small town of Payerne a plan is hatched to kill a prominent local Jewish businessman. The murder is intended to send out a warning to the Jews of Switzerland of the future they face when the country becomes part of Hitler's Reich. On the 16th of April 1942 just a few days before the Fuhrer's birthday Arthur Bloch a local Jewish cattle merchant is lured into a stable where he is killed with an iron bar by the fanatics.
His body is gruesomely hacked to pieces and then placed in three milk cans and sunk in a local lake. His killers act with coldness and brutality and appear to show no regret about murdering a respected, innocent and well-liked local man of sixty.
Based on real life events, A Jew Must Die is a haunting and searing portrait of anti-Semitic hatred during the Second World War and its horrific consequences. Author Jacques Chessex grew up in Payerne and knew the murderers that he describes and attended the local school with their children.
Chessex brings a painters eye to his descriptions of the Swiss countryside whose beauty he contrasts to great effect with the sickening, festering ideals that it secretly sheltered. His sharp clinical prose is both precise and poetic and his austere wintry tone matches his subject matter perfectly.
Sadly, Chessex, who won the Prix Goncourt in 1973, died recently on the
9th of October 2009. He was a celebrated but controversial literary figure in Switzerland who often explored the darker less palatable aspects of Swiss history. Vivid and beautifully crafted A Jew Must Die is at times shocking in its depiction of the ordinariness of evil. Chessex often asks difficult questions in his work and this sobering rumination on the worst aspects of human depravity is no exception. A horrifying masterpiece.
Giles Morgan
A Jew Must Die
Jacques Chessex
Bitter Lemon Press, £6.99, 9781904738510
