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Relief For Belsen
Oct. 16th, 2007 12:57 pmWay back in the day when I was doing my, sadly uncompleted, doctorate, I went to Israel to interview various people. One person I was told to look up was an ex-undergraduate colleague of my tutor, who had emigrated to Israel, Hebrewized his name, and settled in Jerusalem.
Unfortunately he was out of the country for the week that I was there, but his wife kindly invited me to tea anyway. I met her and her 10-year-old daughter and we chatted away happily for an hour or so.
This was in 1978. The woman was about 34 years old and her name was Nisa. This, as some of you might be aware, is Hebrew for 'miracle'. One gets used to parents who give their daughters highly unsuitable names such as this, because every parent is convinced that their daughter is the most beautiful in the world and that no-one, ever, has gone through parenthood before like they have.
However, in this case, Nisa was a highly apposite name, because she had been born in Auschwitz. I presume that her mother and father failed to get out alive; it didn't seem right to enquire. When you come away from a meeting like that, you don't forget it.
That same trip I visited Yad Vashem and, because I was a research student, I was allowed to read the recollections of Nazi Holocaust survivors (mostly written in German). The "private" side of Yad Vashem is a different kind of "lest we forget" place from the public museum. No video footage. Just page after page, folder after folder, binder after binder, of recollections of the horrors of Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblinka (not many of those) and the ones that we don't even remember because virtually no-one got out -- Maidanek, Chelmno, Sobibor. And, yes, Belsen.
It is, I suppose, ironic, that the less ghastly (if you can have such parameters of ghastliness, which, in this kind of case, is hard) camps are the more famous, because more people survived them to tell the tale. Belsen was a concentration camp rather than a death camp. Last night's docudrama on the three weeks subsequent to the 'relief' of Belsen was unforgettable television, although perhaps youngsters of today are more inured to shock, so the images in it are less likely to be seared on their memory. If I try to describe the scale of annihilation I tend to do it in terms of football crowds -- that this camp killed about a 70,000 football crowd every week in 1944 -- everyone turning up to a Man Utd game on a Sunday would not leave the stadium ,because they would be dead — that Auschwitz was kicking in a full Wembley stadium a week at the same time. Then it has a bit more impact.
It was one of the fortunes of my life that I got to meet survivors of the Second World War (German dissidents, Jews) in the late 1970s, just over 30 years after the war had ended, but early enough that many were still in their 50s and 60s. So I guess that watching a docudrama such as this, which probably could not have been made with the same effect 30 years ago, has a greater impact on me. But it was top-quality stuff nevertheless. Doubtless it will win many awards because it is 'worthy' television, whereas in fact it should win many awards because it was damned good.
Unfortunately he was out of the country for the week that I was there, but his wife kindly invited me to tea anyway. I met her and her 10-year-old daughter and we chatted away happily for an hour or so.
This was in 1978. The woman was about 34 years old and her name was Nisa. This, as some of you might be aware, is Hebrew for 'miracle'. One gets used to parents who give their daughters highly unsuitable names such as this, because every parent is convinced that their daughter is the most beautiful in the world and that no-one, ever, has gone through parenthood before like they have.
However, in this case, Nisa was a highly apposite name, because she had been born in Auschwitz. I presume that her mother and father failed to get out alive; it didn't seem right to enquire. When you come away from a meeting like that, you don't forget it.
That same trip I visited Yad Vashem and, because I was a research student, I was allowed to read the recollections of Nazi Holocaust survivors (mostly written in German). The "private" side of Yad Vashem is a different kind of "lest we forget" place from the public museum. No video footage. Just page after page, folder after folder, binder after binder, of recollections of the horrors of Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblinka (not many of those) and the ones that we don't even remember because virtually no-one got out -- Maidanek, Chelmno, Sobibor. And, yes, Belsen.
It is, I suppose, ironic, that the less ghastly (if you can have such parameters of ghastliness, which, in this kind of case, is hard) camps are the more famous, because more people survived them to tell the tale. Belsen was a concentration camp rather than a death camp. Last night's docudrama on the three weeks subsequent to the 'relief' of Belsen was unforgettable television, although perhaps youngsters of today are more inured to shock, so the images in it are less likely to be seared on their memory. If I try to describe the scale of annihilation I tend to do it in terms of football crowds -- that this camp killed about a 70,000 football crowd every week in 1944 -- everyone turning up to a Man Utd game on a Sunday would not leave the stadium ,because they would be dead — that Auschwitz was kicking in a full Wembley stadium a week at the same time. Then it has a bit more impact.
It was one of the fortunes of my life that I got to meet survivors of the Second World War (German dissidents, Jews) in the late 1970s, just over 30 years after the war had ended, but early enough that many were still in their 50s and 60s. So I guess that watching a docudrama such as this, which probably could not have been made with the same effect 30 years ago, has a greater impact on me. But it was top-quality stuff nevertheless. Doubtless it will win many awards because it is 'worthy' television, whereas in fact it should win many awards because it was damned good.
