Grim and gripping, a heroic Holocaust tale

In spite of - or rather because of - its unadorned, artless voice, this grim story of horror and courage is relentlessly gripping. And it features the most unlikely of heroes: Valentin Beck, the manipulative, reckless, ethnically German Pole locally famous for his drunkenness, philandering, and anti-Semitism, who repeatedly risks his life to succor the family secreted in a makeshift bunker beneath his house. Simultaneously, he puts his charges in danger by carrying on an affair with one of the Jews and socializing almost nightly with the most dangerous of Nazis. His wild valor alone is reason enough to read this book.

When Hitler broke his nonaggression pact with Stalin in June 1941 and invaded the Soviet Union, the Holocaust began for 15-year-old Clara Schwartz (now Kramer), her family, and the other Jews in Zolkiew, in eastern Poland. “Clara’s War,’’ which draws largely from a diary kept by Clara, describes how she and her family and a few other Jews are taken in by the Becks, the family’s former housekeeper and her husband.

Told from a child’s point of view, the ravaging of Zolkiew is both familiar and freshly horrifying:

When the synagogue was burned but the walls remained standing, “the SS officer became furious and ordered his men to throw the lamenting Jews on the embers to feed the fire.’’

“My dear friend, Helena Freymann, was killed one day as she walked out of her door and down the street. A Pole . . . who had known her family for years, pointed her out to a soldier who was not even SS. He simply took out his pistol and shot her as if he were lighting a cigarette.’’

“Carriages loaded with dead bodies were taken to the cemetery. . . . [F]amily members . . . had been killed while trying to run. Or else they had been shot trying to get up when told to kneel in the centre of town. Or they had been shot while jumping off the trains.’’

In the bunker below Herr Beck’s house, there is just enough space to squat and lie down in the dark, sometimes freezing, sometimes roasting hole. They endure near starvation, prickly heat, diarrhea, and countless intrusions of terror, including a house fire and frequent social visits by the Nazis, who drink with their “friend’’ Beck. During the fire, Clara’s sister Mania runs from the house. She is identified as a Jew by a boy she knows. He receives a reward of a few quarts of vodka. Mania is shot dead.

One of the most poignant things about the book is its absence of analysis. Clara and her family, ordinary people, throw up their hands like Job and cry: How could God let this happen? Why did gentile Poles who lived peacefully with their Jewish neighbors cheerfully betray them? How could so many Germans kill and then later go to the opera?

Numberless scholars have attempted to get at the roots of this ancient hatred. But the reign of irrationality that periodically performs a coup d’etat on passive populations is still and always impossible to fathom. “Clara’s War’’ doesn’t attempt to ponder the imponderable. “Clara’s War’’ is about Jews who hide the Torah when they themselves go into hiding and bring it back into the light when they can. It’s about getting on and trusting in God, not understanding.

Alec Solomita is a writer living in Somerville.