A Jew Must Die by Jacques Chessex

‘When novels, films and television shows claim to be based on a true story, it’s often because their plots would otherwise strike readers and viewers as so far fetched they would be unable to suspend disbelief. After all, we demand that fiction make logical sense or, at the very least, be plausible. Yet, often what happens in the real world isn’t logical; events occur that shock or puzzle us, especially those involving violence. We don’t want to believe that people can do horrific things. Surely, we think, they must have understood what they were doing was wrong. Often, though, these people justify their actions in a way that challenges our beliefs in the basic goodness of humanity.
In his slender novel "A Jew Must Die" (Bitter Lemon Press), Jacques Chessex describes an incident that took place in Switzerland during World War II. In 1942, the Swiss economy is still suffering the aftereffects of the Great Depression. In the country town of Payerne, the unemployed are unhappy and looking for someone to blame. And "who is to blame? The filthy rich. The well-to-do. The Jews and freemasons. They know how to line their pockets, especially the Jews, when factories are closing."
The Swiss Nazis take advantage of the situation, particularly one member of the clergy who encourages group members to do something practical about the Jewish menace. The leader of the Payerne Nazis, Fernand Ischi, decides that in honor of Hitler’s upcoming birthday, they will murder someone Jewish. The small group debates which Jew should be chosen, looking for "one highly guilty of filthy Jewishness," and settle on the cattle merchant Arthur Bloch.
In clear, easy-to-read prose, Chessex shows how the Nazi plot develops and the reaction that occurs after Bloch disappears. At first, the non-Jewish Swiss community is callous and uncaring. It is only after Bloch’s body is found and the horrific details of his death and dismemberment are released that these upright citizens become dismayed and demand justice. The evil they were unable to see – which, in fact, they dismissed with jokes and innuendos – now comes to haunt them.
"A Jew Must Die" is an unusual conglomerate. Some sections read so dispassionately that they might be a newspaper account. At other times, the novel becomes an ethical commentary on the crime. Particularly moving were the sections written in the first person, when Chessex acknowledges that "I am telling a loathsome story, and feel ashamed to write a word of it. I am ashamed to report what was said: words, a tone of voice, deeds that are not mine but that I make mine, like it or not, when I write." Yet, he feels compelled to tell the story, to describe what happened in his hometown when he was 8 years old. It’s an integral part of his personal history that marks him forever.
The last chapter blends both types of storytelling: Chessex not only describes the burial of Bloch’s body, but his own personal cry for redemption. This 92-page novel is a heart-rending and moving look at the horror and evil we inflict on each other. Unfortunately, the author’s call for pity still remains unheard in heaven and on earth.’ - Reporter Group

‘Chessex, a prominent Swiss writer, died in 2009 at age 75. He was the first non-French citizen to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. American readers of this particular novel, which is one of Chessex’s many, will quickly understand why he was so honored. It is a swift and stunning narrative based on a true incident. In the Swiss town of Payenne (the author’s hometown), in 1942, a group of Swiss Nazis kill a successful Jewish cattle trader. It was nothing “personal,” as it were, but rather an act of intimidation aimed at the Jewish community of Switzerland at large. This spare but heart-piercing novel illustrates the dementedness of Nazism (“such a thing as total depravity, pure in its filth”) and also captures the European mind-set of the 1930s and 1940s as people looked for scapegoats to blame for the hard economic times, which in turn made anti-Semitism and thus Nazism appealing. The writing is elegant, in provocative contrast to the human crudity and cruelty it depicts. (This quote captures the atmosphere of the town: “Dark currents flow unseen beneath the assurance and business bustle. Complexions are rosy or ruddy, the soil is rich, but covert dangers lurk.”) Read this novel for the history it captures and for the sheer beauty of its prose’. - Booklist

‘Haunting. Disturbing. Very nearly true. A Jew Must Die, by Jacques Chessex, is a fictionalized account of the horrific murder of Arthur Bloch, a Jewish livestock dealer in the Swiss village of Payerne.
When Bloch is coaxed from Market Square to a quiet shed, he does not suspect that he has been selected for slaughter much as he selects animals for butchering. Bloch is well known, successful, and a devout Jew. The Nazis in Payerne have been urged to make an example of just such a person by the inflammatory diatribes of the Reverend Lugrin, a cold-blooded instigator. The murderers intend Bloch’s death to be a birthday tribute to Hitler. The reaction of Payerne’s citizens is as disturbing as the method his killers use to dispose of Bloch’s remains. The townspeople react to the disappearance of this well-liked individual with “sniggering, coarse jokes, and loaded comments.”
The straightforward narrative style of A Jew Must Die contributes to its powerful effect. The facts do not need much elaboration. Readers familiar with Elie Wiesel’s Night will recognize the drama of individual experience in the shadow of global events. Personal experience can be more revealing than a volume of statistics in understanding the social history of the 1930s and 1940s. Readers who hope to understand that time and glimpse the darkness of the human heart will find this brief book worthwhile. Translator W. Donald Wilson has accomplished a natural-sounding English translation from the French.
Jacques Chessex was eight years old, living in Payerne, Switzerland, in 1942, at the time of the real events that underlie this story. His father, the president of a local anti-Nazi club, was on the list of future victims compiled by Fernand Ischi, leader of the “garage gang” responsible for Arthur Bloch’s murder.
Mr. Chessex, who died in October 2009 at age seventy-five, was a poet, essayist, and painter as well as a novelist. He was the first non-French citizen to receive the prestigious Prix Goncourt for his novel, L’Ogre. In 2007 he was awarded the Prix Jean Giorno for his life’s work. According to the obituary published in London’s Guardian, his work focused on “revealing the darkly uncomfortable truths beneath the pristine surface of Swiss society.” A Jew Must Die does just that.’ 
- ForeWord Reviews

‘The publication of A Jew Must Die, a novel based on a true story about a murder in his small town of Payerne by the Swiss Goncourt Prize winner Jacques Chessex (Bitter Lemon Press), underscores the Holocaust as a frontier of perspectives on what it means to be human. Now 65 years after World War II's end, the door does not close on the Holocaust, a subject that only continues to resonate, fascinate, and perplex.’  - Huffington Post

‘Those interested in Nazi activity in neutral Switzerland during WWII will best appreciate this slight novella from Prix Goncourt winner Chessex (The Vampire of Ropraz). In April 1942, in the small market town of Payerne, an anti-Semitic pastor incites a band of local Nazis “to set an example for Switzerland and for the Jewish parasites on its soil.” National Movement leader Fernand Ischi and his thugs target a representative Jew, cattle dealer Arthur Bloch, whose murder will make a fine birthday present for Adolf Hitler. While this book generated controversy in Switzerland, where the country’s role in WWII is still a sensitive issue, U.S. readers will find that it falls short of, say, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and other works that view the Holocaust through isolated instances of violence. Chessex (1934–2009), who was born in Payerne, was also an essayist, poet, and painter.’ - Publishers Weekly

‘This short novel is one of the most powerful accounts of the horrors of anti-Semitism as it descended into mass Jew-killing. It is set not in a Nazi death camp but in peaceful, neutral Switzerland. The Swiss asked the Germans to put the infamous “J” for Jude (Jew) on the front of German passports so that Swiss frontier guards could know who were German tourists and who might be Jewish asylum-seekers. In the 1930s Davos was home to the biggest section of the Nazi party outside Germany.
The Goncourt prize¬winner Jacques Chessex is one of the best-known Swiss novelists writing in French. The story is a true one. He grew up in the small French-Swiss town of Payerne. There, a group of xenophobic Swiss, egged on by a Jew-hating pastor, Philippe Lugrin, decided to anticipate the final victory of Nazism by killing a Jew just before Hitler’s birthday in April 1942. They chose a cattle dealer, Arthur Bloch, who came from Berne to the Payerne cattle market. The killing was sadistic and prompted by Bloch’s Jewishness and nothing else.
Well-translated by W Donald Wilson, the prose is taut, verbs and nouns in short bare sentences driving the story forward to its gruesome end. Chessex went to school with the children of the killers and met Pastor Lugrin by chance in Lausanne in the 1960s where the priest was still ranting about Jews.
Bloch’s grave stone carries the inscription Gott weiss warum: God knows why. This is Chessex’s only concession to the familiar trope of Holocaust literature: why a Jewish or Christian deity allowed it to happen. In fact, politics allowed it to happen...' - Financial Times

‘Told in spare and sober prose, Prix Goncourt-winner Chessex's final novel, based on a true story, is a masterpiece. Set in 1942, in the picture-postcard Swiss town of Payerne, it's an account of how the local Nazi cell set out to murder a Jewish man in order, in the words of their leader, "to set an example for Switzerland and for the Jewish parasites on its soil". The chosen victim, local cattle merchant Arthur Bloch, is bludgeoned to death with an iron bar. He is then dismembered, the body parts being stuffed into milk churns and sunk in Lake Neuchâtel, where they soon resurface. There are no plot twists here and no sensationalism either, just a harrowing and thought-provoking picture of fear and prejudice that will stay with you long after you finish this small but intensely powerful book.’ - Guardian

‘IT'S 1942, a few days before Hitler's birthday and a group of Nazi sympathisers in a small Swiss town decide to murder a local Jew - for no real reason other than that they can. They lure him into a stable, bash him over the head with an iron bar, then cut up his body and dump it in a lake. A Jew Must Die (£6.99, Bitter Lemon) is another novella from the pen of Jacques Chessex, one of Switzerland's greatest writers. It may be a novel, but it is also a true story, and Chessex should know - as a child, he knew the killers and sat next to the children of one of them at school. Like The Vampire of Ropraz, also available from Bitter Lemon, the book brilliantly evokes the evil of the central deed - all the more horrific in that it really happened - while seeing, with a poet's eye, the beauty of the surrounding countryside. Chessex writes sparingly, the book is just 92 pages and can be read in one sitting. Much of it is written in the present tense, making the nightmarish incident all the more immediate. Europe is in flames and Switzerland, while not directly involved in the war, is suffering from high unemployment. The rural market town of Payerne suffers a number of bankruptcies, the locals are out of work and money, and looking for someone to blame. Fernand Ischi, leader of the local Nazi cell, blames everything on the Jews and the murder is to be an example, a foretaste of what is to come once the Nazis take over Switzerland. He figures the killing will put him in favour with Hitler's men when they arrive and he will get an important post in the local Third Reich regime.’ - Newham Recorder

‘Like The Vampire Of Ropraz, Jacques Chessex's previous novel (see my review here) published in English translation by Bitter Lemon Press, A Jew Must Die is based on an historical crime, and like the first book it raised questions Swiss society did not necessarily want raised. But where Vampire was more concerned with the way society reacted to a crime, A Jew Must Die is more concerned first with the crime itself, the murder, in Payerne, of a Jewish cattle-merchant by Swiss Nazis, and by the lack of reaction from Swiss society to this crime. The beauty of the work, if beauty is the right word, is the way Chessex expands that lack of reaction into a wider indictment, an analysis using the Swiss microcosm of the awful phenomenon that was the Third Reich.
He does this in prose that is consciously bare, factual, its emotions controlled. Chessex grew up in the area where the murder took place; he was at school with the son of one of the killers, and there is something very Swiss about the cold rationality with which he presents his story. It is a tone which survives the translation by W. Donald Wilson, and since Wilson translated Vampire as well it is telling that he's able to convey Chessex's different voices so well.
There is also a fairy-tale, brothers Grimm feel to the story, particularly as the gang of ne'er do wells who make up the local Nazi party try to lure Arthur Bloch to his death on the pretext of buying a cow, and one for which he appears to offer them a good deal. That they then butcher Bloch as they would an animal only heightens the monstrosity of the crime, but it is the relative lack of reaction from the locals which makes clear the parallel with the larger monstrosity that was the Holocaust, and the way the good burghers of Austria, Germany and more countries conspired with their silence and indifference to help it happen.
In the character of Fernand Ischi, the local gauleiter, Chessex both sets him apart and fits him into his community. Swiss authorities handed out severe sentences to the murderers, but the reaction of the locals was to ignore it, as if it had never happened. Yet when Chessex moves to the present, and himself, he discovers that in some ways nothing has changed in his small world.
Arthur Bloch's tombstone read Gott Weiss Warum. God Knows Why. It is a telling and perfect amibiguity that lies at the heart, just beneath the perfect surface, of this novella. Chessex died last October, my obituary was published in the Guardian two months later, you can link to that here, and to my IT posting here. The Last Skull Of M. DeSade, his last novel, is scheduled to appear from Bitter Lemon next year.’  - Crime Time II

‘A Jew Must Die -- as the stronger English title has it (the French original has it as a Jew being made an example of) -- is a very slim work that is as much documentary as fiction. Chessex was born in Payerne in Switzerland -- the small-town setting of the episode --, and he was eight years old when the events he describes took place in 1942; his classmates were the sons and daughters of some of the principals in the story. Chessex is moved to write the story because when he was a child it was clear that: Arthur Bloch is not spoken of. Arthur Bloch, that was before. An old story. A dead story.
But the adult Chessex recognizes that not that much has changed, and that this is an incident -- like too many others -- that was never properly dealt with. Chessex describes early 1940s Payerne, where there are characters that believe a Nazi takeover is imminent and desirable. Overall, the war is far off, but times are difficult and many have suffered. Here, as elsewhere, Jews are convenient scapegoats:

In these remote countrysides the hatred of the Jews has a taste of soil mulled over in bitterness, turned over and ruminated, with the glister of pig's blood and the isolated cemeteries from where the bones of the dead still speak, of misappropriated inheritances, suicides, bankruptcies and embittered, frustrated bodies a hundred times humiliated.

Those responsible in town for maintaining order turn a blind eye towards the hate-mongering:
They'd rather cut out their tongues, rupture their eyes and ears, than admit that they know what is being plotted in the garage. In the back rooms of certain cafés. In the woods. At Pastor Lugrin's. What the local Nazi wannabes decide is that:

The time is ripe for the band to set an example for Switzerland and for the Jewish parasites on its soil. So a really representative Jew must be chosen without delay, one highly guilty of filthy Jewishness, and disposed of in spectacular manner. Threats and warnings. A good house-cleaning. Purification. A means to hasten the final solution. Sieg heil !

Berne cattle-dealer Arthur Bloch fits the bill. And he's due in town later in the month, to attend a livestock fair. And so he is made an example of. Bloch is a decent, successful man; what happens to him is almost ridiculous in its savagery and ineptness. The thugs that attack him -- and the puppetmasters that orchestrate the crime -- are caught up in such blinding hatred that they can't see the pointlessness of their actions. Needless to say, it neither helps their pathetic cause nor serves as any sort of example -- except to demonstrate how easily poisonous thoughts can take hold even in what is considered a safe and civil society. Years later Chessex encounters ideological ringleader Pastor Lugrin: the church-man is unrepentant, even after serving some fourteen years in prison, coming out: "more ardent than ever, virulent in the density of his hatred " (and telling Chessex that his only regret is: "that I didn't bring others to my friends' attention", i.e. that just the one Jew was made an example of). Chessex describes what happened, what led up to it, and then the aftermath in relatively quick and simple terms. He does have a tendency to wax lyrical at times: this is not the straightforward prose favored by most Holocaust authors, as, for example, he writes:
But evil is astir. A powerful poison is seeping in. O Germany, the abominable Hitler's Reich ! O Nibelungen, Wotan, Valkyries, brilliant, headstrong Friedrich .
Yet he pulls back when need be -- and, most effectively, steps to the fore when the time comes:
I am telling a loathsome story, and feel ashamed to write a word of it. I feel ashamed to report what was said: words, a tone of voice, deeds that are not mine but that I make mine, like it or not, when I write.
But he recognizes the need for speaking out, for writing about it -- despite (or: especially because of) the deep-rooted shame which still has hold over Payerne. And, though it goes unmentioned, and though the focus is only on this single act of terrible, pure evil, it obviously is meant to be a reminder that all claims of tolerance and functioning social order rest on very shaky foundations. The hatred and irrationality described in this book are not that far removed from what led to Switzerland's recent vote banning minarets, or similarly intolerant behavior and attitudes found all across the world. Civil society, Chessex suggests, is separated from barbarism by only the smallest of distances -- and not confronting it, immediately and forcefully, when it is first glimpsed makes us all complicit in the spread of barbarism.
A powerful, small work.’ - The Complete Review

‘A novel more frightening because it is based on a true story, Chessex’s chilling tale set in the early 1940s portraits the brutal murder of a Jewish businessman. As the inhabitants of a small Swiss town face economic hardship and the uncertainty of war, a handful of Nazis supporters fan the flames of hatred and hatch a token murder. At first, townspeople view the disappearance of Arthur Bloch with mild interest but when body parts begin appearing they are forced to face the fact that members of their community have perpetrated a heinous crime.
Spare prose and a taut writing style carry this horror story while conveying the feel of living in an isolated mountain community during turbulent times. The economic hardships faced then eerily parallel the challenges faces by society today and provide a grim if timely reminder of what can happen when normally decent people seek a scapegoat.’ - Monsters and Critics

‘Based on a real event in 1942, this is a novella of immense power. Jacques Chessex, who died last year, was preoccupied by problems of evil. At school in the tiny Swiss town of Payerne, he sat next to the daughter of a Nazi murderer who, with several accomplices, killed a Jewish merchant who came to their town to buy cattle. They lured him to a byre, felled him, cut up his body and hid the pieces in milk cans which they sunk in Lake Neuchâtel.
The language in which Chessex describes this is pared to an absolute minimum of sensationalism. Yet his descriptions are so close and precise that the contrast between the human butchers and the rich kindness of the natural world takes on a metaphysical intensity. How can we make sense of such a world, and who is to blame?
When this book was first published, the people of Payerne were apparently offended at this record of a crime perpetrated in their midst. They need not have felt unjustly singled out, for Chessex makes the murder of a single Jew a parable of larger events. If it is true, as Edmund Burke suggested, that the only necessity for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, then the folk of Payerne were no worse than those everywhere who had some complicity in the Holocaust.
Chessex has commented that the victim of our time is the Senegalese asylum-seeker. But in this, his last work, he grapples with the statement of the philosopher Jankélévitch, who declared the Holocaust 'imprescriptible'. This was formerly an archaic legality, used neutrally to mean concepts which could not be bound by legislation. Post-Jankélévitch, it has taken on fearsome meanings such as an act of absolute evil for which there is no redemption.
However, as Chessex interprets it, there are particular connotations for the writer, such as the possibility that the "imprescriptible" Holocaust cannot be written about: because it was of such magnitude in its horror that there is a moral complicity even in the fiction writer's imaginative participation in describing "deeds that are not mine, but that I make mine, like it or not, when I write". Is fiction about the Holocaust therefore an acquiescence?
Chessex's answer is to describe the martyrdom of a single individual and convey the monstrosity endured by a whole race. In its imagined evocation of historical fact, A Jew Must Die is in itself a justification of the power of art. This brief, disturbing masterpiece goes to the heart of the creative process.’ - Independent

‘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.’ - Crime Time