In the camp as well, Erwin's fellow prisoners bring with them the full complexity of their unique personalities. Although The Ice Mine never flinches from the extremities of hunger, physical pain, and psychological torment suffered by its characters, nonetheless, like all of Appelfeld's fiction, it eschews sensationalism. And it is the job of fiction, as of life, to conjure in its full humanness, just that reality the Holocaust would deny. In a sense the opening lines of the novel say it all. The day slowly separates out into minutes and seconds, but even such tiny fragments of time as these do not pass on their own.
Time stands still here.
It drizzles and seeps into you, a single hour as swollen as a year of life. This savage defamiliarization of reality as we know, which gives us a world more human than we might perhaps want to admit, also shadows Appelfeld's autobiography, The Story of a Life. The title might more accurately be translated Life Story , since this is not the story of a life in any conventional sense, but, rather, a defiant and ofttimes lyrical yoking together of the fragments of a life and a story, where the extermination of both and the severing of the bond between them is exactly the objective of the Final Solution. The Story of a Life is no discursive narrative, intent on providing facts and figures. Therefore, I will not tell about the camp.