I have to write something for Holocaust Memorial Day, said Danka, can you help me? Danka was a rather shy, elderly student in a writing workshop of mine in Cambridge and I agreed. Over a coffee, Danka read out what she had written. It was all about the fragility of civilisation and the need to build bridges between communities, peoples.
This is all very worthy, I suggested, but could you be a little more specific? You were a child at the time. What in particular do you remember about the war? Where were you? Danka thought for a while and then she said: I was at the Gates of Auschwitz. Or was it Auschwitz? I can’t remember. Oh dear.
I dropped my coffee cup. Danka, I said, trying to recover from my astonishment, you can’t remember whether or not you were at the Gates of Auschwitz? Nobody else in the world is ever going to say those particular words. What’s the story?
It transpired that Danka had been transported to Auschwitz but was kept there for only a few days before being transferred to Dachau. By great good fortune, she had survived – as her parents had not – but her memory now confused the gateways of the two equally horrific extermination camps.
When I got home from listening to Danka, there was a large workman outside in the street unblocking a sewer. I offered him a coffee and still utterly gobsmacked by Danka’s remark, foolishly babbled out what I had just heard to someone who could have no interest in it.
The large workman gave me a long, strange stare. I felt foolish. Then he said – and again I was astonished: I lost many of my relatives in Auschwitz and Treblinka. I myself came out on the kindertransport – trains and other transport that allowed Jewish children to escape with their lives.
The sight of the man in the sewer reminded me of another story from those terrible times. It was through a sewer a twin sister of a friend of ours, Włodka, had escaped as a child from the doomed Warsaw Ghetto. This was shortly before the Nazi SS, infuriated by desperate acts of resistance by the corralled inmates, set the whole district ablaze, turning it into a gigantic funeral pyre.
Włodka herself narrowly escaped over the wall of the ghetto after a Ukrainian guard had been bribed. What could she remember of her experience? Only that she had lost her shoes scrambling out over the wall. She spent the rest of the war, hidden by Polish families, fretting over the loss of her shoes. When her father who, unlike her mother, had survived and found her, she told him about her lost shoes.
Do such child’s visions in any small way mitigate or redeem the truly horrific events that have been visited upon them by man’s age-old inhumanity to man?
Holocausts have not been confined to Europe. Another of my writing workshop students, this time in India, Lakshika, was shy of asking her grandfather about his experience as a child crossing out of Pakistan at the time of Partition, another devastation so telling of the fragility of civilisation we prefer not to speak about it.
What did Lakshika’s dadaji say when one day she overcame her shyness enough to ask him about it? Much to her surprise, he replied: It was wonderful. Wonderful? For me it was. Wherever we went from place to place, people came out and gave us laddoos. I never had so many laddoos in my life.
Is there a place for such songs of innocence? Or shall we have only songs of experience?
John Drew’s latest book, Bangla File: essays and verses, is published and directly available from ULAB Press in Dhaka.
