Children of the Holocaust
The Imperial War Museum houses, among its many displays, an assertively reverent section devoted to the Holocaust. Of course, the photos overwhelm; the stories leave holes in us, and the shoes of children devastate. Molded to the shape of the little feet they once carried, these shoes now carry implications heavy beyond those of adult suffering.
Who Can Lift Such Weight?
Bansky, if you do not know already, is a street artist with great wit and vision. He has become a very sought-after "artist-with-stencils," and one would have to possess a packet to purchase a piece of his work. His is well-earned success [Link].
One of his bits is this:
Banksy's Holocaust: Serious or Trivializing? Read on.
I used this image in my course on "Life in Wartime," and -- in an exercise of visual rhetoric -- asked students to analyze its message. They invariably thought it trivialized the seriousness of suffering in the concentration camps and was, thus, unfit as "art" was concerned. So, perhaps, it appears.
About the time I first saw this work, I also found this account from a military official involved in the liberation of the Nazi camps:
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An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.
Source: Imperial War museum
I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.
Source: Imperial War museum
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In reading this account, my students saw into the dilemma. There is, of course, life after Holocaust for the few that survived, which meant the need to be a person, the need to reject institutionally-defined non-identity, and the need to re-establish oneself as a sovereign entity -- ultimately the need to become and to assert an individual life in the face of nameless death.
Primo Levi, a survivor of the camps, recalled this about the total erasure that the camps effected for the individual:
The students also became aware of the dilemma of the artist. Most often, the artist (in words, in paint, in performance) must express something outside the experiences of the audience. Who has experienced the Holocaust? Very few remain. And who, not having been in a camp, can communicate that experience truly?
"For the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of man.... They will even take away our name" (italics, mine).One producer of a documentary on the Holocaust said this regarding Levi's words: "It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term "extermination camp" -- that is, both body and entity, including their very names -- something that goes on still [Link].
The students also became aware of the dilemma of the artist. Most often, the artist (in words, in paint, in performance) must express something outside the experiences of the audience. Who has experienced the Holocaust? Very few remain. And who, not having been in a camp, can communicate that experience truly?
Banksy and I haven't seen one another in some years and haven't talked about this piece. Oh--right. I don't know him (or her). But the sensitivity of this piece speaks movingly about the sovereignty of human existence.
A statement in the Imperial War Museum deeply impressed me (it was posted next to a dissecting table from a concentration camp -- used to dissect and analyze mentally "unfit" children who had been killed). The statement was from a Catholic churchman in 1941:
If we allow the mentally challenged to be "euthanized" as "unfit" and essentially "unproductive," it is but a moment more and other elements of society will conveniently be deemed "unproductive" and killed. Next are simply the physically disabled who are mentally fit but costing society too much. Then the elderly. And then...? You. No one is safe.So the message has proved true in various places on the globe since the 1940s.
Equivocation and the flowing robes of state-sanctioned license have a long history of working to justify politicians' inhuman endeavors. Inhumane acts have been precipitated regularly and repeatedly within civilized societies--nearly as a standard of operation and sanctioned by shiny laws. It was illegal to hide Anne Frank in the 1940s; it was legal for her to be murdered. That is not ironic: that is literal. It is real. As the woman at Honfleur (quoted in the previous posting) said to me in exasperation regarding repeated German exploits in France, "Quand encore?!" --When again?!
Questions anyone?
A Survivor of Institutional Expedience
On our day at the Imperial War Museum, I told a couple of my students about a Holocaust survivor who spoke at one of my classes -- Peter Pintus [Link]. I told them his story, and, although they had read and had heard many other stories in the museum, they somehow fixed upon his as more -- what? -- immediate? actual? -- because I had worked with him? I don't know.
He was not only a gifted person, but a very funny man, once surprising me with his wit in a moment of bawdy humor. Before speaking in my class, a young coed with a rather large bosom came into the coffee shop in a low-cut top as he and I were talking over a cuppa. And he noticed her. Finally, when the young woman left the cafe, he turned to me and said, "That young woman had a top like a nuclear bomb." I: "What do you mean?" He: "It was 90% fallout."
About his suffering, and his life after war -- well, the students didn't want to leave the class after his talk; indeed, they wanted to take him home, he was such a gentle, funny, delightful man, respectful of any human being regardless of race, gender, religion.
But the real story: when a child, he was a blue-eyed, blond-haired little boy. Aryan by all appearances. So when his mother took him to see Hitler drive by in various parades, this short little boy stood at the front of the crowds who were spread along the street to observe.
At one parade, a black-booted SS member parked his car in front of the boy and his mother. Then the soldier saw the little boy standing there, unable to see over the car. Because the boy was blond and blue-eyed, he was picked up by the SS man and seated on the hood of the car to see the parade up close, and (as Peter said to me), "When Hitler drove by, I was as near to him as you are to me this moment." If Hitler (or the SS Ass) knew that this little blond, blue-eyed boy was half Jewish...? You know the story. And that's why -- when the Nazis in fact found out -- this boy was eventually placed in a work camp from which, after some years of hard labor on starvation rations, he escaped and survived in the woods by eating grass.
Shiny Murder
Stuff hits the fan for someone in every century of human history. But the amount of it that had hit the fan early in the last century for so many led Churchill to name it -- even before the end of its second decade -- "the terrible Twentieth." That was before the Holocaust and before the nuclear age.
Lipstick perhaps doesn't cure the ills of a society that precipitates such immense wrongs. But it can help when there's little to appease the pervasive ills of an age.
Who knew so little could do so very much?
Thanks, Banksy. Keep talking.
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