Remembrance: by Sue Purkiss

It's that time of year again.

Remembrance. Remembering. As I've written before on this blog, my father, like most of his generation, fought in the war. Well, he didn't do all that much fighting; he was taken prisoner on the way to Dunkirk. Years later, he would watch Remembrance Day parades, the Royal Military Tattoo and suchlike with a slightly sardonic glint in his eye, shake his head, and say: "Why do they want to remember it? Why can't we just forget ?" It was understandable. He'd had what he called 'a bad war'. His memories didn't link up with the smart uniforms, the well-phrased speeches.

He was not alone. It's a well-known phenomenon that many soldiers don't wish to speak of their experiences. As far as possible, they want to forget. But they can't. They can suppress them, but often the memories rise to the surface in old age; this happened with Harry Patch, the 'last surviving Tommy', who only began to speak of his experiences in the trenches when he was over a 100. It happened with Felix Weinberg, who only recently wrote a memoir, Boy 30529, (which I reviewed here last month) about his experiences in the concentration camps; he saw no reason to speak about what had happened to him till he was an old man - he was determined not to be defined by what had happened to him. It happened with Eric Lomax, who was a prisoner of the Japanese. His suppression of his memories caused him great emotional difficulty, and it was only when he faced up to them with the help of Amnesty International, and even went to meet one of his former guards, that he found a measure of peace. (He wrote about this in The Railway Man.)

Earlier this year I went to visit the battlefields and cemeteries of Flanders. We were based in Ypres, and we went a couple of times to the Menin Gate to hear the last post. If I'm honest, I found the experience a little disappointing. I had imagined the gate looking out over a plain, with a few observers standing in a circle round the trumpeter - I think I must have seen this painting, by Will Longstaff, with its drifts of ghostly soldiers, and based my expectation on that. Instead, the archway is in the centre of the town, with a busy road running through it. This is closed off for the ceremony, and the space under the arch is crammed with people, so that all you can really see is other people's heads. But when you look at the names inscribed on the archway afterwards, and take in the fact that there are 54,896, and these are only the names of those British soldiers with no known grave who were killed between 1914 and 15th August 1917: then something of the scale and nature of the slaughter begins to reveal itself, and the experience is both sobering and moving.

Siegfried Sassoon, with the anger of the survivor, did not respond to the gate in that way. This from his poem, On Passing The New Menin Gate:

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

But of course these reminders are not principally for the participants. They're for the rest of us. And they're so important. Surely, the more of us they bring to see the horror of war, the more chance there is that we will do everything we can to avoid war in the future - or that's the hope, even if it sometimes seems a vain one. 

Flanders is littered with cemeteries - all beautifully kept by the War Graves Commission - and with museums that tell the story of those days incredibly well - particularly the recently re-done Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres itself. Here are just a few pictures.

A small cemetery in Ypres; a little later in the summer, these flowers must have been beautiful.

I hope you can read these words, from the museum at Tyne Cot Cemetery.

These figures were in one of the few German cemeteries; the Belgians were less generous with their grants of land to the vanquished, and so here there were far fewer individual graves. The stonework was dark grey, as opposed to the white stone of the Allied graves. 

Finally, a personal remembrance. During the war, my father palled up with a softly spoken Hampshire lad called Eric Shepherd. Shep, as Dad called him, had an astonishing way with animals - even the fiercest dog could be gentled by him, a gift that must have come in very handy when the prisoners had the chance to 'liberate' food! He was a lovely man, and he died last week, aged 93. Rest in peace, Shep.

Boy 30529, by Felix Weinberg: reviewed by Sue Purkiss

I had a birthday recently, and was lucky enough to be given some excellent books. One, however, I already had, so I exchanged it for a memoir: Boy 30529, by Felix Weinberg.

This is, by its very nature, an unusual book, because it’s written by a Holocaust survivor, and as Weinberg says: ‘The typical camp history of the millions ended in death, and could therefore never be told in the first person.’ Weinberg was just fifteen in 1942 when he was sent to Theresienstadt, not far from Prague, along with his mother and younger brother. His father had gone to England to try and arrange to get his family out of Czechoslovakia, but there were too many obstacles and he didn’t manage it.

Theresienstadt was a holding camp. Originally been built as an army garrison for 7,000 soldiers, it now held ten times that number of Jews. In such conditions disease was rife and spread quickly; thousands died. But you could keep your own clothes, there was an element of self-government, the prisoners organised education for the children and shows and concerts, and if you could manage to find ‘protected’ employment, you could, for a while at least, stave off transportation to the east. Although the prisoners feared the prospect, no-one knew exactly what awaited them in the east; Weinberg heard grown-ups say, ‘It couldn’t possibly be much worse than here!’ As he comments, ‘How ludicrous that sounds in retrospect.’

After a few months, Felix and his family could no longer avoid the journey east. His subsequent travels are a roll-call of names that signify utter horror: Auschwitz, Blechhammer, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald. Partly through luck, partly because of his age – old enough to avoid the fate of the children, like his little brother, who were not useful as workers, but young enough to be strong – and partly, perhaps, due to his upbringing and innate resilience, he survived. His brother and mother did not. His brother was sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz: ‘It does not do to dwell on these thoughts if one wants to live the semblance of a normal life,’ Weinberg writes with telling restraint, ‘but I invite anyone who wishes to share my nightmares to picture that group of children, including my terrified little brother, being herded into the gas chambers.’ He never managed to find out how, where or when his dearly loved mother died.  After the end of the war, he arrived in Britain and was reunited with his father. Despite an almost complete lack of formal education as a child, he eventually became a professor of physics at Imperial College.

Like so many people of that generation, he seldom spoke of his experiences. As far as possible he wanted to forget them – he had no wish to be defined ‘merely’ as a survivor. But in the late 1990s, Suzanne Bardgett at the Imperial War Museum was putting together a Holocaust Exhibition. Weinberg sent in a shabby, odd looking leather jacket. He had ‘liberated’ it from a Buchenwald guard, after the latter’s death, and had worn it since to keep him warm while flying round London on his motorbike. (Had you been writing his story in a novel, would you have predicted that? I don’t think I would. I’d probably have had him ceremonially setting fire to it, or cutting it up and using the pieces to clean shoes.)

A few years after that, he got in touch with Suzanne again. He had decided to write a memoir of his early life, for his grandchildren, he said; would she be interested in reading it? Of course she would.

There are so many interesting things in this book. How, indeed, could an account by somebody who experienced the horror first-hand fail to be anything but gripping? I read it in an afternoon. One thing that strikes me is that the narrative of the camps takes up less than half of the book. It is easy to see that though he remembers life in the camps with a terrible clarity, he has no wish to dwell on it. The first part, and I’m sure the part he most enjoyed writing, is about his childhood; the mother and father he loved and who gave him a wonderful childhood, providing him with a raft of memories which he dreamed about in the camps. As he says, it was terrible indeed to wake from the dream to the reality; but still, such memories must have provided a wellspring on which he could draw to remind him that there had once been a different kind of life. 

At the beginning of the section about the camps, Weinberg includes a chapter entitled Holocaust Literature and Reality. He says: ‘I have always tended to avoid Holocaust literature, and find some of the recent fictional accounts masquerading as true stories profoundly disturbing… To us (Holocaust survivors) it is tantamount to desecrating war graves.’ When I first read this, I took it to mean novels; on reading it though again, I see that he qualifies it by saying: ‘…so long as the result is presented as fiction there is no harm.’ (And a little research reveals that, astonishingly, there have indeed been falsified accounts which masqueraded as truthful ones.) So are novelists who write about the Holocaust off the hook? I’m not sure. I suspect that many of us can immediately think of certain very successful novels about the Holocaust which could be said to sentimentalise it, if such a thing could ever be possible. And yet… and yet: even those books keep the memory alive, and introduce new generations to the appalling truth that such a thing can actually have happened, and not so very long ago. 

We often write on this blog, about the efforts we make to ensure factual accuracy in depicting our chosen historical period. But perhaps we need to consider, with the utmost humility, whether it is not even more important to strive for emotional truth: and to accept that we can never be sure that we are right when we believe that, in a particular situation, these characters will behave in such and such a way for those reasons. Weinberg’s memoir shows over and over again that it is very difficult to predict how people will feel and behave in extreme conditions. Of course that’s what we do, what all novelists do, but - forgive me if this sounds portentous and obvious - we must do it with tremendous care.

My father was a prisoner of war for five years. I’m sure he would agree that he did not experience a fraction of the horror of life and death in a concentration camp. But still it was tough. He rarely talked about it, and then only told us the funny stories. But I do remember how dark his face was once, when he stared into his whisky glass – and into the past –  and said, “Nobody knows what they’re capable of. Not till they’re really up against it.”

I’ve written about his experiences – fictionalised them – but, particularly after reading Weinberg’s memoir, I’m not sure I should have. I can imagine what it would have felt like to be in some of those situations he was thinking of, but did I get it right? How can I possibly know? But maybe attempting to walk in his shoes is a reasonable endeavour. I’d like to think so, but I’m really not too sure.