I’ve been thinking how to continue this. Every morning after breakfast I settle with a mug of coffee and try to read, or research on-line, but the shutters have been down for days. Nor can I watch Generation War or any of the programmes I’ve recorded over the last few months. I never feel I know enough, get frustrated with my slow, tired processes. Still, I do feel overwhelmed. Adrift in a sea of words and images, with icy waves lapping in my chest, behind my forehead, I realise I must pay attention to my state of mind.
My posts may appear like neat little bundles, but I have great doubts if what I’m doing here is anyway near (good) enough. Casting careful sideways glances at history necessarily (?) blocks out so much. And yet it takes me to my limit.
How can I do justice to different sides? Last week’s image of those young, laughing soldiers-to-be and the moments of compassion towards them continue to plague me. They are set
against (but/and not over)
the other faces I cannot show.
To attain a (false) sense of balance I searched my shelf for a book I bought twenty years ago: Gesichter der Juden in Auschwitz. Lili Meiers Album. Lili Meier, a Hungarian Jew who survived Auschwitz, found a photo-album when the camp was liberated, which one of the fleeing SS-men had left behind. It contained photographs of Jewish prisoners, documenting the transport from Hungary to the camp, and the process of selection, showing in separate sections those deemed able to do forced labour and allowed to live a little longer, and those condemned to the gas chamber right away. Step left, step right. Left, right. Young, old, men, women, boys, girls, one moment in their own clothes, and then, just turn a few pages, with their heads shorn and wearing what we know as ‘striped pyjamas’. It became a kind of terrible family-album for Lily Meier, as here she had last and lasting glimpses of loved ones who were murdered.
I could only look at these photographs for brief instants and found myself (not for the first time) asking questions which may well be specific to someone from a post-memory generation: Shouldn’t I be able to? Don’t I have an obligation?
The faces haunt. Words fail. The terror, the cruelty exercised is beyond comprehension. The fact that the SS-man took ‘snaps’ and glued them in an album just about throws me over the edge. He wanted to remember everything. Did he envisage taking the album home when war was over (fantasizing a German victory), to show to his family, his loved ones?
This is where the idea of last week’s laughing faces becomes almost unbearable. How do I take measure? Neither heart nor mind can build a bridge.
Writing here sustains and challenges me. Spurned on by you, my readers (thank you for staying with me) and the knowledge that what I’m doing is of interest, maybe even of importance beyond my own self-absorbed, angst-ridden impulsion, I flourish and flounder. Trying to make sense of my notes early this morning (I write lying on bed – not in, mind) I came to points where said chill spread through me and got up to sit in the sun for a few minutes, propped up against the house-wall. It had rained over night and initially leaves and blossoms glittered with huge, perfectly round drops. Beautiful. Moments of respite, but I couldn’t/can’t stop thinking. Nor focus on much else. What I really want to do is dig up the garden or walk for hours and hours on a coastal path. Get out of my head, walk off what I can’t shake, this sense of dread at what people are capable of. The people I stem from. And the knowledge that, whatever I do, nothing can be resolved. Grief for those who were murdered will remain inconsolable, and I am implicated.
I am imbued with a sense of urgency, the need to engage with living memory while I can, but will allow myself time without research – to process, through writing (here) and making work, slowly, steadily, at my own pace. If I had a studio I would lay out my things – objects, photographs, real and imaginary heirlooms, crochet, notes, embroidery, in long lines. I wouldn’t want them on the wall, but on the ground, like fallen pillars.
