October 1, 2021

Instead of a lecture this morning we watched Rex Bloomstein's KZ.

I found it on YouTube (with Portuguese subtitles), the link is here. 

There is nothing more to say about today. All else paled into insignificance after that.

Never forget.

Snapshot From A Morning Drive To Work: Flood

 

[Thinking about the film made me want to revisit my 2019 diary, when I cruised around a tiny bit of north-west Europe in my van. On my first full day in Germany I visited Bergen-Belsen which was not, in hindsight, the best introduction to a country.

An extract:

Friday 16/8 (10.35am)

...A bit reluctant for my plan for today – Bergen-Belsen. Seems a bit weird to go (think Ruth Kluger) but something compels me. I feel uncomfortable so far in Germany. Where in NL people passing by would smile and say hello, here they just stare.  

Charlie said I should report what I see so I am reporting a lot of pensioners on bikes, bad fashions in shops, a penchant for bossy signage, no evidence thus far of fun or frivolity (apart from the brass rehearsal last night which was touchingly sweet); I see no evidence of a master race. I shouldn't've come here with a headful of Ruth Kluger and Gita Sereny and Anne Frank but I have. 

(6pm) Well that was harrowing. Felt like corpse porn by the end and I had to walk away. Raging headache treated with a quick cup of tea in the back of the van in the car park, which felt very disrespectful, but I felt sick and shaky.

Walking down the sandy track out of the main camp to where they buried the thousands of Soviet POWs, it came true – the 'no birds singing' thing. Astonishingly eerie – the air even went cold. An utterly silent forest, just for that brief stretch. Happened both ways, same place, there and back. Imprints of something – the earth remembering. I held my hands out as I walked through the second time to brush fingertips with the dead, to whisper to them how sorry I am that this happened, that I can't heal their pain or stop it from happening again anywhere else, but they must know that they will never be forgotten, that people will always come here and remember them. 

Mounds and mounds and mounds of bodies, now in neat, low, flat-topped sandy barrows with purple heather and grasses and wildflowers growing on top. Hier ruhen 1000, 2000, 5000 tote. You couldn't really get your head round what you were seeing. Or what it meant or what actually happened here. In the end only a handful of people were prosecuted – about 30. They did this thing and got away with it. It's always someone else's fault, isn't it? People were so starved they ate the corpses. 

People living nearby used to wander up to stare through the fence at the “prisoners”. They'd be marched past their houses. They knew. A recording of an old man, saying how, as a young boy, his mum gave him some bread to throw over the fence; the people inside instantly rioting over this scrap, fighting each other. The boy saying to his mother, how come we have enough to eat and these people have nothing? His mum saying, well, that's just how it goes. 

Watching the footage of the SS men being made to move bodies to the pits after liberation and wondering if Anne or Margot Frank was one of those bodies. They didn't even do that respectfully – dragging them through the dirt like a sack of shit. These men walked free. 

How the hell did anyone survive it? What memories did they had to bury in order to go on living? My god. How do you carry on when you know exactly what the worst of humanity is capable of? What you're capable of, to stay alive? In the end I was looking at survivors thinking, what did you do, to get through? Did you just get lucky, or what? Or were you forced to crush another human soul in order to make it? This is getting worse the more I think about it. I will change the subject by saying rarely have I been so moved or impressed by architecture – this place is formidable by design. It's a stunning building, all concrete and metal and glass and vanishing points, vast heavy doors that blend into the walls; you feel swallowed, imprisoned, oppressed, before you even get inside. Ok, I've got to get on – it's getting late and I can't spend the night here nor would I want to on account of all the ghosts. The sorrow lays very heavy on the forest here, I want to be far away before I stop for the night.

(9.05pm) Well, a few miles up the road was something almost worse – the end of the railway line where the 'passengers' disembarked. The concrete ramp, a cattle truck off to one side, an info board. Nobody there except me.

It was the cattle truck that made me cry. Up at the camp, all those numbers, those piles of earth, all abstract, but here you could climb up some wooden steps into a horrifying reality. They were forced to march from here to the camp – 6km. The most barbarous cruelty. January to April 1945 “at least” 85,000 people walked down that cobbled track (Anne Frank among them). Eighty five thousand pairs of terrified, frozen, emaciated feet in three months yet apparently nobody living nearby knew a thing.

I have stopped for the night at Bispingen Snow Dome resort, next to a go-kart track and a McDonalds, as far away from KZ-BB as I could get in every respect. Hamburg tomorrow and I am wanting to jump into the Elbe to wash away this stain. What a revolting thing, I am sick at heart from it.]