The above image is me at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
I hesitated, but must share this old poem …
The pendulum was lost,
A pivot gone,
No point of trust,
No sense of home.
Aged ten, I looked down
At my hands for signs of crime;
We were shown into the dock
Of men’s trial in monochrome.
Not Schindler’s feat,
Then aged ten,
We watched mute scenes,
Laced with rage
In a teacher’s voice,
That tied our dreams
Fixed our eyes –
“We are all to blame
For this,” – her stick
Tapped the screen.
Its slim shadow flits across
The mass of corpses,
The mass of spectacles,
Neat mounds of objects,
Equal in size,
Edited side by side.
“The smell of burning –
Will haunt you,” she said.
I held my breath to the scent
Of her perfume in the room.
In the concave lens of time,
A distillation lodged –
The fluid image of a scream
That has no sound.
I don’t know if it was German educational policy in the 1950s to introduce Holocaust images to primary school children, or whether it was the mission of an enraged teacher. Well, it happened. I was traumatised and cried many nights. The scenes went under my skin, into my muscles, and got stuck there. I asked myself, what right did I have, as a distant, generation removed witness, what right did I have to be traumatised?
Questioning my parents, I realised they, too, had been traumatised, once the full truths about the Holocaust emerged.
I urgently wanted to understand how insane ideologies could become political weapons, and result in inhuman atrocities to happen right in front of the world.
Recently I read a novel, ‘Alone in Berlin,’ by Hans Fallada, which took many decades to be translated. In a very mundane setting it shows how tyranny invokes not just hatred, but fear, intense fear for your life, and more, fear for the life of you family and friends.
My heart received healing through meeting some exceptional Jewish and Muslim people, who became friends for life (that’s for another post,) and, some years ago, through an unexpected encounter.
A friend of mine brought an old friend of hers to my home, Rosemary Harris, a children book author, and a daughter of Bomber Harris. She shared memories of her father … and how torn she felt imagining her father in his plane, carpet-bombing German cities, ever after Germany’s defeat.
We sobbed around the table.
The present Middle Eastern conflict re-invoked a storm in my heart. This ongoing pattern of – an eye for an eye – makes collective humanity blind to the utter futility of revenge.
Killing a paralyzed people for their tyrannical regime, as it happens now in Gaza, is bound to sows more seeds of sorrow and anger for generations to come.
The challenge, humanity must raise above the ricocheting round of the psychological drama triangle of victim, persecutor and rescuer.
Course of Mirrors 