For those that have no voice
…The best At Murder Are Those
Who Preach Against It
AND The Best At Hate Are Those
Who Preach LOVE
AND THE BEST AT WAR
FINALLY ARE THOSE WHO PREACH
PEACE
Charles Bukowski - The Genuis of The Crowd
Sometimes no matter how much we try to control ourselves, our emotions get the better of us. They flood our brain with scarlet lake and there is nothing - no justification, no rationalisation that will restore our equilibrium. There’s a part of me that hates this feeling - and a part that loves it. For two weeks now I’ve been in a terrible rage. It started at about quarter to nine every morning last week and intensified daily until, by last Saturday I was incandescent. Rationalisation, justification, controlled breathing, nothing worked. I tried so many ways to get this anger out until at last I picked up paints and paper and began to lash out colour. What came out instead was the following, scrawled across several sheets of A3. I’ve spent the past two weeks deliberating and debating about whether or not to post this. I wrote it in rage borne of frustration and hopelessness and desperation and sadness. I freely admit that it will annoy and upset a great many people. But if I’m not honest about what I feel and what I think then I am worthless. I claim no superiority, I claim the right to post this for one man who said nothing and endured and survived. I claim the right for the people who have had no reparation or remembrance, I claim the right based on the experiences that make me who and what I am because what that is, is coloured by the blood of those I come from and if I annoy people and upset people then so be it. But I hope and pray that I make you think.
Did you know that there was once (and still may be) a farmhouse in a far away land? It does exist, I’ve seen the photographs, a little faded, a little crumpled, captioned on the back in the letters of an alphabet I don’t understand. It was a pretty farmhouse, a neat farmhouse, the sort of farmhouse that figures largely in the beginnings of fairy tales. It had a crooked chimney and the gables were carved in wonderful swirls. It had woods on one side and fields on the other and a river not too far away. It was just a house. It wasn’t just a house. It was way more special, way more magical than that. It was a home. And, as anyone who has ever been without one knows - there is a world of difference between a house and a home.
The family who lived in this house weren’t that special. They had no rich relatives, no powerful connections, no magical powers, no special gifts whatsoever. Just a mother and father and three boys. There may have been a couple of girls too, I’m not so sure. What I know of this family I know from half-remembered remembrances. But the one thing I’m quite sure of is that they weren’t special in any way. They were just a family. A bit boring in these days of instant gratification, no fault divorce, pension plans, rising house prices, keeping up and running off with the Jones’s, serial monogamy, swinging, flinging, steps, half steps and oops I’ve missed a step call the CSA but they were happy.
So here we have it. The perfect start to a fairy tale. A house with a crooked chimney and swirly wooden gables painted a spotless white. A house with woods on one side and fields on the other and a river not too far away. A house with a poor but happy family where the father was firm but fair and a mother who sounds like the sort of mother who would win prizes, she cooked and cleaned and kept house and did all the things that would have her hanged by feminists but make for well balanced and happy children. We even have the perfect hero for our story. The middle son. It’s always the middle son. The eldest is always at work and the youngest too young to be a hero.
He was a normal boy - that’s to say he was wicked but with a good and loving heart. He was quite clever although he went to school begrudgingly. It was a seven mile round trip over the fields and in the winter he had to ski there but that wasn’t the reason he didn’t care for school although it did mean he won a prize for cross country skiing. It was just that he was a normal boy and like most boys he didn’t see the point of school when he could fill his pockets with food and take to the fields to do whatever it is that boys do when given enough room to have a childhood. One thing I know he learnt from his childhood was this. He could make flutes from green willow wands by stripping out the heartwood and boring holes in the bark. He could make rope swings too and imitate bird calls so perfectly that they would answer him back.
Did you know that in this magical cottage was a painted stove with a shelf above it? A large wide shelf just big enough for a small boy and his dog to curl up on. From there he could watch his mother baking in the kitchen below. The smell of the fresh baked bread would rise up with the heat until he could taste it without even eating
Did you know that this fairy tale house had a vegetable garden. Of course it did. Shops don’t feature largely in fairy tales. Did you think the three bears bought their oats from the local supermarket? Why do you think that Snow White bought her apple from the wicked stepmother? Had there been a Tesco’s nearby she wouldn’t have needed to rely on a pedlar would she? So this house, with the crooked chimney and the painted stove had a vegetable garden. And in this vegetable garden the cabbages had silver sand around them to stop the eels from eating them. Did you know that eels will leave a river to sliver and squirm their way through the wet grass to eat cabbages?
Sturgeon and pike lived in the river too. Big, dark dangerous fish. One night his father caught one and brought it home and it lay on the kitchen table, breathing its last before it was roasted for supper. Across the river was the church and the night before Easter his mother would ask him to row her across the river so she could spent the whole night in vigil before Christ rose. The church was lit by candles and her long hair, tight bound in its complicated patterns of plaits and knots glinted in the soft light.
Do you know that sometimes, when work was done they would sit at night and tell stories. That’s what people did before they had television. They told stories. The most terrifying were the tales of the Tsars who would hunt them down and shoot them from trees with guns. For fun. Did you know that the mother would look up at the boy where he lay on the shelf above the stove and tell him not to be frightened because these things didn’t happen any more, they were a free country now.
One day, for that is how all good fairy stories start, one day our boy went out to play. He was fourteen. It wasn’t a school day and he wasn’t avoiding his chores, he was at perfect liberty to go out and play. The sky was a brilliant blue and the grass in the fields so green it was as if mother nature herself had delivered an invitation to explore. So he took his dog and went into the fields, looking for adventures. They shot his dog in front of him and dragged him to the railway station.
He had the presence of mind to shout out to a neighbour as he passed and as soon as his mother heard what happened to him she ran, ran, ran as fast as she could after him. Her apron still on, still floury from baking. She waved him goodbye. She couldn’t do anything else because soldiers with guns stood between all the mothers and their children.
Do you know about the fourteen year old boy who was herded into a cattle truck and taken across Europe? It was a long journey. It was a cold journey. It was a hungry journey. There were hundreds of them on the train and they were crammed so tight into the trucks that there wasn’t room to sit down. He cried. Most fourteen year old boys would die rather than cry. Most fourteen year old boys have more than those two choices.
Do you know how it feels to be stripped of your clothes? to have your head shaved and to be deloused? Men, women and children all together. Standing naked in the cold. Intimately examined by a doctor. Separated into two groups. Dressed in striped suits, too thin for the cold weather. Did you know the delouser looked like green jelly?
Do you know about the fourteen year old boy who stole a turnip?. It was snowing that day and all you could see for miles around was the patchy white and black of frozen earth. Behind them was the railway line It was so cold and he was so hungry. Fourteen year old boys are always hungry - ask any parent. Especially when they’re only fed half a slice of bread in the morning and bowl of thin “don’t look too closely just eat it soup” in the evening. Especially when they spend the rest of the day shifting railway sleepers under the eye of armed guards who hit them when they don’t work hard enough. But sometimes the guards looked away and when they did he seized his chance. Slipping and sliding down the railway siding he got to the field and with icicle fingers scrabbled at the iron hard earth and uncovered a turnip. After another second he’d grabbed another. He hid them inside his shirt and slid his way back to the track. The guards saw him. They kicked him until the turnips inside his shirt fell out and then they kept on kicking. They left him by the track as the prisoners worked on and soon the snow covered his body.
Did you know how to play Russian Roulette- German style? There aren’t many rules. Hold a roll call every morning and shoot every tenth person in the line up. If you get bored, vary the number, or make them run round the compound and see if you can hit them. Continue playing until you run out of bullets.
Did you know the best way to pull out your own wisdom tooth when it becomes infected? You can try string and a door, but sometimes they’re in short supply. A nail and most of the night does it. The last thing you want to do is to go to the camp dentist. They extract your tooth with a bullet.
Did you know happens when you put copper filings inside an open wound? You saw at your skin with a file to make a cut and then sprinkle them inside. It makes an abscess and an abscess wins you a day off work. Only one day though, those who can’t work don’t eat. Did you know it leaves a blue mark on your skin for the rest of your life? Did you know that his grandchildren don’t know if granddad’s blue arm was the result of that or whether a teenager had the presence of mind to self tattoo over his numbers - just in case it happened again.
Do you know how it feels to be liberated? There are no more bullets but there are no warm blankets either. There is a bombed out city and the will to live whatever the cost. Do you know what it takes for a fourteen year old to survive 4 years in a concentration camp? Do you know what it takes for an eighteen year old to survive in a post war city?
Do you want to know how to sell meths as whiskey? It’s very easy. Burn some sugar on top of a piece of bread. When it starts to go brown and starts to melt, scrape it into the into the bottle It will look like whisky. It won’t smell or taste like whiskey so you better be able to sell the bottle and run like the wind as soon as the deals been struck.
Do you know the best way to stuff a cigarette with sawdust? A seasoned joint roller couldn’t do it better. Tease out the tobacco slowly. Be careful not break the skins. Slide the sawdust back inside. Show the goods quickly. Strike a deal. Scarper.
Do you know how it feels to be told that you can go to Canada or Australia or England? Do you know how it feels to choose England only to discover that you are not wanted there? That throughout your entire life you will be judged by people who have never gone through one tenth of what you went through? By people who will consider you as foreign until the day you die? By people who will belittle you because your accent is not the same as theirs?
Do you know how it feels to choose England because it was closer to home and then to discover that the borders are sealed and you can never go back? That the news of your parents death is telegraphed to you some twenty years later.
Do you know how to rebuild your life? To build a family when you have had none. To take on the language and customs of a foreign land - not through choice, but because you have no choice.
You don’t know and despite your protestations to the contrary you don’t care. You don’t care, because you walk past beggars in the street. After all, as I heard this week from a couple of warm well fed woman who think that buying a Big Issue qualifies them from beatification - beggars can make up to thirty thousand pounds a year and most of them hide their designer clothes in dustbins while they beg . You don’t care because you’ll take to the street to ban fox hunting but you wouldn’t march to have the homeless housed. You don’t care because you don’t approve of asylum seekers or if you do you don’t want them in your back yard. You don’t care because you cannot tolerate the concept of tolerance zones You don’t care, because genocide is happening now - this instant, in a hundred different places in the world and we’re doing fuck all to stop it. You don’t care because you’ll vilify and crucify those who you don’t agree with. You don’t care because you automatically assume that those who speak with an accent think with one and don’t tell me you don’t, I live with a Frenchman who has a better vocabulary in English than any other person I know and I see the patronising “better humour him” look in peoples eyes when they pretend to listen to him speak. You’ll put your hands in your pocket and give when suffering is blazed at you on the TV screen but you won’t search it out and offer succour. You don’t care because you haven’t been there. You don’t know and you don’t care and all the TV series and remembrance days aren’t going to make you or I anything other than selfish, self centred, “I’m all right Jack” people we are.
And I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before. A million times on the History Channel and now on Breakfast TV and BBC 2. But you haven’t heard these stories. No one will ever hear these stories. They are the stories of a man without a voice told to a child who can only half remember them now. Because by the time we were old enough to understand, he would not speak of them. Because he did not speak of them except with a laugh in his voice - stories of grandpa and the Germans. Except for once.
Do you want to know the best bit of this fairy tale? The bit that will stop you nodding and thinking that you’re hearing this from the horses mouth? Another true to life experience of the camps. Another made for TV special we can watch and then switch off. He wasn’t Jewish. That one fact, in the eyes of world, makes everything he went through meaningless. We do not know why he was taken, only that he was. He was not persecuted for his beliefs. There is no world wide day of mourning, no Schindlers list, no media frenzy to hear his story, no Dermot and Natasha to cue him in with hushed deference. There is no remembrance day for my grandfather, no reparation, no gifting of a homeland, no government subsidies, no world-wide ransom. As we have none for the Russians, the gypsies, the Catholics, the homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled. As we have none for all those throughout history who’s faces didn’t fit, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no race or religion that has the monopoly on suffering, on genocide, on persecution. There are more stories than those of Auschwitz. Yet we must remember that it is not a numbers game. Because the way we do it now is that the race or religion who had the most dead or the best media coverage are those that will be remembered. Right now we must remember that my grandfather did not exist, his comrades, the children shipped out with him are worth less than nothing because as they die and they are dying now, there are only the half remembered stories told by people like me. And when the grandchildren die - when I am dead and my brother is dead, he will not be remembered. There are millions of people who do not even have that. These are the people we should not forget.
Do you know how I remember my grandfathers voice? Half devoured by Alzheimers with the heavily accented Geordie English he spoke? grabbing my arm unable to remember that I was the child he made flutes from willow wands for. Words spilling out in a half teared flurry like snowflakes over a body. The only memory left to him by a disease that if there was a God should have taken away all memory.
“…and he said don’t look, don’t look outside the train. But I looked and the ground was moving… from all the bodies underneath, the ground was moving.”