Haunted by the Holocaust, Haunted by Hope

This month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. Holocaust Memorial Day is always a solemn occasion to make us stop and think. This year, perhaps, especially.

I was born a mere five years later. My father was a Londoner and my mother was from Düsseldorf in the German Rhineland, the second child of assimilated middle-class Jewish parents. She had been sent to England as a teenager in 1937 when the fate of Jews in Nazi Germany had become clear. She became a nurse and married my father after the war. The year I was born, her mother, my grandmother, followed her and settled in this country. She and my grandfather had fled for safety to the Netherlands after the outbreak of war. With the German occupation they were hidden underground and looked after by a pair of Dutch Christian women. My grandfather died shortly after liberation, but my grandmother, "Omummy", lived to a great age, it was said till she was 95 though no-one was quite sure.

In my early childhood we spoke German at home as well as English. I'm told my German had a pronounced Rhineland-Westphalia accent, for Omummy was from Cologne. She sang Schubert Lieder to me, and I began to pick out some of his simpler songs on the piano. Heidenröslein was one of them - a sweet little setting of a Goethe poem about unrequited love, how a beautiful flower, a rose, draws the blood of her admiring lover. Erlkönig was another, beyond my capacity of course to make sense of the furious piano part except the hammering octaves that picture a father's desperate ride as he tries to save his child from a delirious encounter with the dreaded "Elf-King". Goethe again.

That Romantic fusion of love, pain and death. I knew it in music before I understood that it was part of my own family history. Sensibly, my parents did not trouble us young children with the traumas of the recent past. My eyes began to be opened when I went to school in 1955. At first, when my mother came to collect me at the school gate, we would speak easily in both German and English. But soon, very soon indeed, I sensed that it wouldn’t do in postwar London to speak German in public. I don’t think anything was ever said, but I distinctly felt as children do, an atmosphere, odd looks, a coolness in the air. I dropped speaking German like a stone. And although I always understood it when my mother and grandmother were talking to each other, I only ever responded in English. Later on I was seduced by classical culture and Romance languages, and heartily wished that my pedigree had been part-French rather than part-German.

It was Christianity that first awoke the sense that my family origins mattered. As a chorister I would sing the Psalms and hear the scriptures read and preached about. As a teenager in the school Christian Union, I immersed myself in the Bible, learned to love it, and found myself amazed that for so long I had been ignorant of this semitic world in which Hebrew monotheism had been forged and in which Christianity had burst upon the world and taken shape. And into which I myself had been born! This story was mine! That moment of recognition came with the force of a real and life-changing disclosure. My Jewish identity (a legal fact in Rabbinic law, since my mother was Jewish) had become not just a matter of historical origin but of lived experience that made a difference to who and what I was as a person.

I began to read about the rise of the Nazis, the growth of antisemitism, the death camps. It was shocking to learn that members of my grandmother’s family, my family, had been deported to Auschwitz. It dawned on me that my grandmother and mother were extremely lucky to be alive, for given the survival rate of Jewish people brought up in Hitler’s Germany, they would have been expected to perish. Were it not for my grandparents’ foresight and the welcome given to German-Jewish refugees by the British government, I would not be here myself. Later I began to understand the ordeals of Holocaust survivors, not only during the Nazi era but since. And my own conflicts and struggles as a “second generation” survivor. As with all forms of cruelty and abuse, the effects are lifelong. You are always a survivor, even in the best and happiest of times.

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Which is why Holocaust Memorial Day is a time when I want to revisit the past and try to understand. “Never again” is a fine aspiration, and an important one. But post-war history shows that even the so-called civilised world is far from owning it. The United Nations Convention of 1948 defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such”. Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and Darfur are just a few of the names that haunt us from well-remembered decades when we saw the images on TV and in our newspapers and were powerless to do anything other than support victims in the aftermath of massacres of innocents. 

I used the phrase haunt us deliberately. I’m aware that as I grow older, I am more and more haunted by the genocide that is imprinted on my own family memory. It’s not my direct experience, thank God. But it feels as though it has become part of my personal take on things. It has given me a world view that is inevitably coloured by dark memories that function “as if” they were my own. I’m struggling to put this into words, to describe why its legacy in me is a profound pessimism about the ability, to say nothing of the collective will of humanity to save itself from instincts and drives that, unchecked, will inevitably destroy us. I recently read a vivid account of a field surgeon who had worked in theatres of conflict such as the Congo and Syria. The capacity in human beings to be cruel seems beyond belief. But it is real and it is terrifying. You only have to look at the images of photographer Don McCullin to see that. It doesn’t take much to inculcate a sense of both helplessness and hopelessness.

So haunted as I am, do I contemplate Holocaust Memorial Day with despair? It would be easy to be gloomy about this year’s seventy-fifth anniversary falling just four days before Brexit Day. The European Union stands as a project fundamentally designed after the last war to safeguard peace in a continent that had been bitterly fought over for centuries. “Never again!” What sense does it make in an increasingly fraught global environment to walk away from such a collaboration of nations and peoples? That remains my question, and I shall always believe, I think, that this is the biggest historical mistake my country has made in my entire lifetime.

Nevertheless, I must not give in to despair. By God’s grace I will not give in to it. Keeping hope alive seems to me to be one of the greatest gifts we human beings can offer one another as so many stories from the death camps testify. People often say to us God-botherers, “You’re so lucky to have faith. I wish I did”. The implication is that we expect God somehow to intervene, deliver us from times of trial, make things all right again. I tried to explain in my last blog why I don’t believe that any more. Religion can’t resort to magical thinking. Faith must “come of age”. There is no deus ex machina to rescue us from war, genocide, natural disaster or the climate emergency.

But I do believe that faith has the capacity to inspire and energise us to bring about personal transformation that makes a difference in the places in which we live and struggle and suffer, the worlds where we find ourselves to be desperate and afraid. At least, this is what I found when I turned to Christianity as a teenager and recognised myself as a child of Abraham. As I approach my eighth decade, that faith continues to sustain me. It binds me to people in every place who stand for truth against the lie. It affirms my solidarity with those across the world who care about justice, reconciliation and the healing of memories. It strengthens my will to stand alongside victims, not least in my own community who have found themselves at the receiving end of racism, sexual abuse, homophobic attacks and other hate crimes. And of course the antisemitism whose revival holds real and sinister echoes of Europe in the 1930s and the horrors it led to.

When you grow old, you’re increasingly aware that your journey is leading you towards an unknown region. Like Abraham, indeed, in all his perplexity, in all that he did not, could not, know. In him, says Genesis, all the world will find blessing. Does blessing happen as we begin to shed self-interest, travel more lightly, learn to look beyond ourselves? Is that how tragedy begins to purify our vision and despair is turned round? Is that how hope begins to be born? Is that how our longing for a better future for humanity begins to be shaped and to lead to action that could change the world?

I won’t answer these questions in my lifetime. But the story of Abraham and yes!, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz point the way, offer a glimpse of what is life-affirming and good, reassure me that there is no shadow so dark that it cannot be penetrated by Light and Love. These are the gifts of the Christ Child that we celebrate in this season of Epiphany. They are life-giving, joyous and empowering. And that means I'm not only haunted by the Holocaust. I'm just as haunted by hope. Because it will not let me go.

Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 12: Memories of the Balkan Wars

Wednesday 5 June
At Vukovar. This is one of the few calling points on this cruise whose name is familiar. Mohacs, Vidin, Pleven, Tulcea, Novi Sad, Rousse, Cernavoda... maybe I ought to have heard of these because they are all sizeable towns but I hold my hand up to admit that I haven’t. (Yes I know, of course we’ve heard of Budapest, Bucharest and Belgrade too... but these are capital cities, so there’d be no excuse.) But Vukovar? Surely everyone who lived through the 1990s and was paying even the slightest attention to the news from beyond our shores has heard of this little place on the Croatian (south) bank of the Danube. For this was right in the front line of the Yugoslav War between Serbia and Croatia, and took a terrible hammering in the conflict in the autumn of 1991.

Our young guide is one of the best we’ve had on this voyage. She tells us she studied English and German at university, but she has an intellectual and cultural hinterland that’s impressive. She cuts straight to the chase as we form up in our group. “Over there you can see the town’s water tower, built in the 1970s. It was hit in the war of 1991. It’s a symbol of all that Vukovar suffered in that year. This city was almost completely flattened in the war. Those buildings that weren’t destroyed were riddled with bullet holes that bear witness to the ferocity of the fighting. Some of them are being restored but others have been left as they are, as a memorial to the conflict of that year.”

I was in my early forties in 1991. At Coventry Cathedral where I worked at the time, we raised money for the victims of the conflict and filled enormous skips with foodstuffs, medical supplies, blankets and children’s toys for Vukovar. But I’m ashamed to say that I had only the vaguest understanding of the political and ethnic roots of this conflict that was happening, not on the other side of the world but in our own continent of Europe. In particular, I had forgotten that the Danube was the front line of the war between Serbia and Croatia; neither had I remembered the three month Siege of Vukovar, nor one of the very worst of the atrocities, the assault on the town hospital when two hundred non-Serbian patients and staff were taken away in trucks, corralled in a remote farmhouse for three days, then slaughtered like cattle. And they were only some of the many thousands of victims (on both sides) who perished by the Danube that year.

This is the first time we’ve felt that a guide has been candid with us about the events of a quarter of a century ago. Of course, the narrative is much more complex than a tour guide can possibly present in a few minutes. But there’s no dispute that the war happened as a direct result of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milocevic’s expansionist plans for a Greater Serbia, aided by Serbian militia leaders, in particular Jaradan Karadic, This is the “secret in the family” that we’ve found it so hard to penetrate in conversation with Serbians. It is incredibly hard for them to speak about their recent shameful past. It’s always easier for the victim to tell the story than the oppressor who has been shamed before the world, as the trials for war crimes and genocide at The Hague have done.

So I ask our Croatian guide about relationships with Serbia today. “They are normalising” she says, without hesitating, but I suspect choosing her words with care. “Another generation has grown up since those days. The young think in different ways from their parents and grandparents. This country is now a member of the European Union. My generation wants to break down barriers, not erect them. So our relations with Serbia are no different from those with any other of our neighbours. Maybe she wants to add, “even if the history will still haunt us for many years to come.” The healing of memories doesn’t happen in a few short years. And as I’ve written already, the ethnic fault lines haven’t gone away. 30 per cent of Vukovar’s population is Serb. In this Catholic country, there are sizeable minorities of Orthodox believers. And although religion did not (she says) play a part in the Croatian conflict (which sets it apart from those in Bosnia and Kosovo), its temples and rituals still act as markers of identity. Peace and reconciliation are real enough here, I think. But it’s sobering to realise how hard-won they are, how fragile they must continue to be for decades to come.

She is speaking as we drive past the railway station. “We don’t have trains any more” she laments. The building is ruinous. It cuts a forlorn figure among the twenty first century industrial and commercial buildings going up all round it. I badly want to get out and photograph this poignant scene, but time is not on our side. I do my best from the coach and wonder, not for the first time on this cruise, how humanity can be so brutal to its own kind, how little our race has learned from the relentless wars and conflicts that have bloodied the soil of our continent.

We are reminded that Croatia has been a member of the EU since 2013, the second of the former Yugoslav states to join (the first was Slovenia which joined as far back as 2004 and is in the Eurozone, unlike Croatia). I ask what effect EU membership has had on the country. It’s mixed, says our guide. On the one hand the young especially value the freedom of movement they didn’t know before. On the other hand, there has not (yet) been much inward investment to show for member status, so there’s been a brain drain of young bright able professionals to Germany especially, and also (surprisingly?) Ireland. She doesn’t mention the EU funds that have helped reconstruct the country since the war and developed its transport infrastructure, particularly here in Slavonia. A long way from the national capital Zagreb and the country’s celebrated coast, East Croatia is not much visited by tourists. Which is why she thanks us for coming to this less well known part of her country. It’s sincerely meant.

40 kilometres over the level plain and along an arrow-straight road stands the city of Osijek, the fourth largest in Croatia. The name means “ebb tide” because it stands slightly above the marshlands of the Drava flood-plain that always threatened to flood the environment. Murad of antiquity, it was a colonia of the Empire in Hadrian’s time. After the Ottoman centuries it was taken by the Habsburgs in the late seventeenth century and the old city is hallmarked with Austro-Hungarian splendour. The eighteenth century town includes grand military buildings, a courthouse and a Friary with a large baroque church popularly known as Saint Antony’s. Of Padua, this one, patron saint of lost things and lost causes, depicted on a large eighteenth century painting of dubious quality but undeniable charm, and better still, in a contemporary sculpture outside, He is holding the infant Jesus seated on the book of the scriptures, a pose familiar all over Europe. “Tony, Tony, come around, / Something’s lost and must be found” quips our guide.

And indeed we seem to be back in the catholic west in this royal free city where the spirit of Empress Maria Theresa might have walked last week. You feel that Budapest and Vienna can’t be far away. Trinity Square, surely one of the most elegant piazzas in Europe, is dominated by a column dominated by a baroque sculpture of the Holy Trinity. It was put up in 1729 to give thanks for the end of the plague Osijek had suffered and that had carried off some of its most distinguished citizens. I can’t recall ever having set eyes on a full-blown sculpture of the Trinity before, certainly not in a public square. I’m uneasy about the theological propriety of this, if I’m honest, but the patron or sculptor would no doubt reply that if it’s permitted to paint the Trinity, why should a sculpture be inappropriate? But this is precisely the point. What our visits to Orthodox churches have taught us is that painting is an entirely different medium from plastic sculpture. A two-dimensional drawing or painting is a “projection” that demands to be read in a symbolic way (because that’s the only way to make sense of it). A three dimensional “representation” - a bust, a statue - risks being reified into an object in its own right as if to say, the reality is just like this, only bigger. That clearly won’t do in a monotheistic religion. Which is why the iconoclastic controversy is so important in the development of the separate artistic traditions of the churches of the east and the  west.

This old city would be the perfect imperial picture postcard except for one thing: the pockmarked buildings that remind us of a conflict much more recent than the War of the Spanish Succession or the Napoleonic campaigns. Eight hundred people were killed when the town was shelled from August 1991 to June 1992, about half the total number of citizens from Osijek killed in the Croatian War of Independence. And lest my account has seemed to be heavily tilted against the Serbian expansionism that gave rise to the conflict in the first place, its important to recall that at least five Croatian officials were indicted for war crimes against the Osijek Serbs. Here as everywhere else, conflict brutalises all its participants. In these Balkan wars, everyone was a victim in the end. As was truth, always the first casualty of war.

The complete story, inevitably much more complex and intractable than popular narrative, has yet to be told here in the lower Danube. Some historians say we are not even close to gaining a full perspective on the Great War more than a hundred years ago, let alone this one. It takes time for history to coalesce, settle down into a shape and configuration that its participants can own for themselves. Just as I’m aware, as the cruise comes to an end, that my own first impressions of it jotted down in this blog will take time to mature, become nuanced, even begin to do justice to the complexity of what I have seen and learned in this fortnight on the river. How do you take in such a tangled, such an ancient, such a contested political history from the deck of a luxury cruise ship and the window of an air-conditioned coach? What, intellectually speaking, is “responsible tourism” in these circumstances?

We wander round Osijek’s civic centre, a triangular piazza where the only wheels allowed apart from bicycles and push chairs are the trams. They have been running for 135 years, says our guide proudly. So this is a real city. It feels lively enough to qualify, even if it only has a pro-cathedral, the red brick neo-gothic church of St Peter and St Paul whose spires dominate the town. Outside, children are playing in the fountains and clambering on to a bronze sculpture depicting the citizens of Osijek. By the marina coffee shops are doing a brisk trade. There’s a holiday atmosphere here. The long summer school vacation is about to begin.

As we arrive back at the ship, a few of us notice what looks like a haphazard pile of concrete slabs on the grass by the quayside. This turns out to be a striking and eloquent sculpture. The slabs have been cut, presumably from buildings destroyed in the war, with triangular heads to resemble rough-hewn tombstones. On each is a “found” relic of the conflict - a piece of shattered glass, a graffito, pieces of twisted steel. The stones are all leaning over at crazy angles like a procession of dominoes frozen at the moment of toppling. For this is indeed “the toppling city”, a town so completely shattered by war yet with its spirit, even in the act of falling, not torn from it, not yet, not ever. It reminds me of the “Plumb Line and the City” sculpture in Coventry Cathedral where the uprightness and integrity of a community, symbolised by buildings of every shape and size, is measured against Amos’ vertical plumb line suspended above it. Here, nothing is straight, nothing is true, nothing stands upright any more.

And yet the spirit of the place, its daemon if you like, is undefeated despite the worst that the aggressor can do. Why did not our excellent guide mention it when the sculpture is clearly meant to be the first thing you see when you land in this damaged but powerfully evocative place? It’s another of those visits on this cruise that would not be on anyone’s bucket list for scenic beauty but is so well worth spending time in for all that it has to tell us about the times in which we live.

So taken am I with this sculpture that I forget to check the time. I am the last on board, only a couple of minutes late, but nonetheless chided for it (in the nicest possible way). Everyone knows that I'm the one the ship is waiting for because when we go ashore, we check ourselves out with our electronic key cards, and check back in again when we return. I'm sure this is a detail of twenty-first century cruising that readers of this blog would want to know about.

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The ship sets off on its last and longest leg back upstream to Budapest. The community resumes its dreamy existence dislocated from the historical turbulence of these troubled shores. There is afternoon tea in the lounge with cakes and conversation to enjoy. Apart from that I spend the afternoon on deck watching the miles of forest drift by, interspersed by the occasional settlement that has gathered round a white baroque church spire. I realise again how remote this landscape is, how little populated. I’ve already written about the lack of drama on this cruise compared with the Upper Danube and still more the Rhine. There is little to see other than at the high points of any Danube voyage such as the Iron Gates. But this very evenness is part of the beauty of it, this fortnight of green, ordinary time that has a mesmeric, almost retreat-like quality because of the way it distends the cycles of each day. Millions of trees, vast expanses of water, wide skies become all the more miraculous when there is nothing else to look at. This for me is the most important spiritual insight of this fortnight. As I’ve said, it makes a contemplative out of me - or has the potential to if only I will let it.

But there is one moment of drama that takes us by surprise and has us holding on to our hats - literally. We’ve all noticed how high the river is at present, flooding the banks, invading the forests, its level even swallowing up the bottom of the tree canopy. We approach a border bridge that carries a railway line. It can scarcely be higher than the height of this ship’s bridge. In fact, we would collide with it were it not for some clever technology that lowers the entire bridge, foremast and everything else protruding above deck level. One of the crew walks along and tells us to sit down as we pass underneath. You could literally touch the steel girders. If the river were a few inches higher, this stretch would be impassable to ships like ours. It’s an exciting photo opportunity we SLR brigade are not expecting.

By dinner time I’m left entirely alone on deck. I’ve loved these hours of solitude with the woods and the water and the reddening sky. It’s like being on the beach when everyone else has packed up their things and gone home. It’s a travel-writing cliché to talk about the magic of such moments. It would take a Delius to find a musical language that could do justice to this peace and tranquility of a Summer Night on the River. And a Wordsworth to do the same in poetry, given that we are sailing on his eponymous ship.

Tonight there’s a pub quiz to test our knowledge of the Danube and the places we’ve visited. Our foursome does pretty well, though we struggle to match memories and mental images to so many of these places with (to us) unpronounceable names. Two weeks of five countries with their distinctive landscapes, cities and towns, their churches and mosques, their citadels and antiquities, flow into one another. How did that great Danubian writer Patrick Leigh Fermor keep his memories distinct, unentangled, write it all down with a hindsight that was so clear, so focused?

But maybe it doesn’t matter too much. What matters is the experience of the river and its people that has touched us, maybe changed our perceptions in important ways. Could it have been transformative? Only time will tell.

The ship sails on towards Hungary.