365 Ways With Words

Auschwitz By Train

Between gleaming new high-speed trains the little train arrives – a functional vestige from the communist era – stopping midway along Krakow's newly-refurbished platform. Half-filled with people, mostly young, probably students on their way home with a bag of laundry or cheap birthday presents for a beloved sibling, its warm, Formica'd ordinariness compares starkly with the bizarre aberration of racial hatred and death that is its ultimate destination.

Not that the nearby village of Oświęcim is much of a contender for the title of Most Feared Seat of Mass-Murder: once out into the beautiful rolling southern Polish countryside, the sunlit birches shining bright against the snow-speckled frozen ground, it quickly becomes evident that this tree-filled region is anything but the desolate, bleak landscape of the war-time imaginings, and especially so on such a still and glorious mid-winter morning.

But the black tracks of 21st-century train travel, cold dark steely liquorice strings piercing the white landscape, are full of miserable 20th-century ghosts; a live-wire connection between us and the hundreds of thousands of voiceless souls that silently carry their pitiable messages in the wind and the dust. They are the eternal black cloud of rooks, jackdaws and crows that darkened the clear blue skies over Krakow, the wind-lapped wavelets upon the freezing Vistula river, the thousands of tiny snowflakelets that aimlessly spin across the empty central square of Krakow's Stare Miasto.

God, on a day like today, where the mid-morning sun alights on every golden stubby stalk in a field of cut straw, the world is suddenly eternal, life's possibilities are endless and hope grows like everygreen mistletoe along picturesque woodland rides and beside pretty village garden paths. How could such a thing as a concentration camp have ever existed? How could anyone have ever thought that the world was needful of them? What alien minds accommodated the gargantuan numbers, approved the logistics, were gladly burdened with the pursuit of a glut of pain – to proffer those final tasks of agony that ended in an ever-brutal, mechanised solution?

Now we think nothing of providing disabled access to public buildings and train stations, of ensuring full provision for equal pay and status before the law; and quite right too. Auschwitz and the mind set behind it was, after all, a derangement of the worst kind.

So the queue is joined and the entrance fee given – the irony of paying to get in to a concentration camp being lost on all the Spanish, French, Polish, Korean, German and Jewish visitors. Each member of the last group is enshrouded in blue and white Israeli flags, as much a defiant gesture as a living assurance of their ancestors' once-threatened existance and identity.

Such is the Demember cold that pierces the boots, cuts through the gloves and thins the blood, it makes desirous a warm home with dumplings, hot chocolate and the assurance of safety. Yet the words of Primo Levi's poem Shema come to mind:

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

It feels like any complaints about physical discomfort are ridiculous. The tour group shivers unmolested from barrack block to barrack block, the guides offer nothing but respect and there exists a general glum bonhomie as the awful facts are retold: the fierce nightmare of daily torture, of a 90% attrition rate, of survival time sometimes counted in minutes and of hours stood to snowbound attention whilst the guards huddled for warmth in little huts – it rings through the tour guide's headphone commentary to punch a devastating hole in the soul.

I have taught the Holocaust to kids in class for 14 years, but despite its startling content the grim reality has never been properly comprehended. It never truly is. And this trip is also nothing but a shadow, albeit a detailed and fully documented one. For we are safe. Planet Nazi seems a very long way away to us now and we have to thank the millions of soldiers, partisans, political protesters and saboteurs who also sacrificed their lives to end it. The remnants of humanity, the glasses, shoes, suit cases, testify to unimaginable sorrows, the gas canisters to the instruments of terror and murder.

Mohandas Gandhi was once asked how as a pacifist it would be possible to defeat Hitler: he apparently answered, "Not without much pain and suffering". Be that as it may, the fact of the matter is that despite the defeat of Nazi Germany the struggle continues. Even in Krakow, the city closest to this painful memorial to infamy, some walls are daubed with crude anti-Semitic slogans. It's a safe bet that the majority knows better, and that these are nothing more than moronic adolescent grabs for attention, but they're up on the walls nonetheless and still have the power to shock and provoke.

Travelling late back to Krakow on the same rickety train, nearly every seat is filled with beautiful young people – all students returning to another week's learning, trying to finish some last-minute work, their books open on their laps. They have a positive, earnest air about them and are still open-minded about the future, a very present seed of hope that all the concentration camps, with their litanies of horrors beyond hell, could not remove from the world. We travel through the darkness – stop, go forward and are shaken: we are all on the same train, one that leaves the feared arch of Auschwitz-Birkenau but leads all the way home.

Nelson Mandela is Dead! Long Live Nelson Mandela!

It can only be the most rabid of racists that is cheered by the news of Nelson Mandela's death. But enough column inches will be devoted to the one-time prisoner of Robben Island and latter President of South Africa that to offer a lifetime resumé here would seem superfluous, if not ridiculous.

But, such was his prominence, certainly in my teenage life, that it seems fitting to pay some sort of tribute to the man. In the popular media he appeared to be a modern-day political saint, a legendary figure in the fight against a nasty, semi-fascist state bent on separating people based on the amount of melanin in their skin. For years I would not buy South African fruit, and rejoiced when companies like Kodak bowed to international pressure and pulled out of the country. From my sanctimonious anti-apartheid ivory tower I knew not whether thousands of jobs were being cut; after all, the important thing was the principle, wasn't it?

The sanctity of his name also added a political hue to the humour of Only Fools and Horses, where the Trotters lived high up in Nelson Mandela House. He was of colossal importance in the UK.

That Nelson Mandela lived through such a turbulent personal life and yet extended to the nation the possibility of national reconciliation proves that the business of politics, although oft-murky, is not necessarily bereft of admirable principles or of those who use them. His tenure as president must surely be marked as a turning point on the path to national chaos. Another leader less genuine may have led the country towards a similar Zimbabwean experience – if not one much worse. The Rainbow Nation is slowly becoming a reality, even if the path to it remains a little rocky in places.

Nelson Mandela's shoes were difficult enough to fill at the time of his retirement. Thabo Mbeki's position was filled with mire, controversy and enough ill-thought opinion to fill a hideous tragi-comic library. Jacob Zuma and his ungirded loins appears to be faring little better. It's a horrible pretentious phrase, but it comes to mind; Whither South Africa!

I watched his long walk from jail – the live, slow march towards progress – with baited breath. Indeed, everyone who is anyone will want to remind the public just how close they were to the man, even if it was only through a five-minute interview and a quick snap taken beside his trademark Madiba batik shirt. For me, he remains the fickle beast that is a public figure with integrity. God knows there have been few enough of them, particularly in Africa. Long may his story inspire those with political aspirations towards a kinder stance and towards a climate of tolerance and reconciliation. Long live Nelson Mandela!

Growing Up With Racism

My mother wasn't always racist: but she inherited ideas common to many of her generation – about Hitler and Mussolini making the trains run on time and of 'pernicious Jewish influences' over the arts and sciences. At the same time the Nazis were for hating, pure and simple, and their race crimes were a damned disgrace. No, it was all a little greyer than that. At the end she would complete her arguments with a, "But you didn't know the England before the war..." as if that statement justified all of her discomfiture with foreigners and blacks and Muslims and such.

I remember her kindness to all sorts of folks, regardless of origin, colour and creed. She ran a small hotel. People often turned up on the doorstep clearly on their last legs and she would offer care and a kindly ear as well as warmth and lodging. Chinese, Sikhs, Ghanaians, West Indians: she liked their differences, enjoyed their observations – at times even admired them. She spent time helping Mrs Wren, a single parent West Indian mum with three children – they were invited back for lunch after church where there was always lots of talking (and I would help slowly dictate as she picked up her shorthand wpm). One of her joyful stories involved her midwifery nurse who, on watching her pick up her newborn baby Richard at every opportunity, called out, "Put down dat baby! You spoil dat baby!" It wasn't said with churlish resentment or irritation, but as a charming and exemplary quirk of West-Indian patois that continued to make her laugh years after the utterance. I grew up looking forward to meeting people who were not white and not English.

But for my mother things notably changed after she was mugged walking back to her sister's house in Palmers Green, London. It had to be a black youth: he helped put a personal touch to a nascent racial stereotype of 'the black criminal'. Fired by resentment, my mother changed over time from a mere advocate of Powellism into an unreserved and opinionated bigot. She had no answers, only perceived grievances. In later years I balked at some of the extraordinarily hateful racial comments, often made without thought of the ears that heard them. We fell out badly, and there were times I could barely bring myself to talk to her. She would bring it up every time – Muslims, blacks, etc, – and I would end the call. I can only attribute the intensity and hardening of the racist attitudes held in her last years as side-effects of the aggressive ovarian cancer that finally took her.

As a child I unknowingly swallowed much of this poison without realising it. Let's face it, Britain in the 70s was a place tinged with racism in many public arenas. Whilst Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis were making their names in football, on TV could still be seen the Black and White Minstrel Show and Love Thy Neighbour, Sammie Davis Junior would appear with Bruce Forsyth from time to time and in the news Indian refugee families fleeing from Uganda arrived in Britain to change the nature of many inner city communities and schools. It was a time of shifting consciousness regarding race and the nature of Britishness.

The first awareness of my acquired racism was the awful moment at age 12 or 13 when on asking out a beautiful Nigerian girl, Funmilayo, I happened to mention that ska, a music we both liked, was "black music" – I couldn't believe I'd just said those words! Needless to say, a date was not fixed. I was mortified and instantly and deeply regretted that they had passed my lips.

They stung in my mind each time I recalled them, perhaps more so because they were not my own. They were the rehearsed response – to any jazz, blues, rock n' roll, disco or anything that was not firmly classical and/or culturally 19th century European – of someone who didn't understand a new multicultural and multi-ethnic Britain. Because they were not my words, I resolved to be adopt a philosophy that would reflect the very opposite of their meaning, not merely because I was a rebellious teenager, but because I earnestly believed otherwise.

Growing up with racism left its mark, but allowed me to see belligerence at first hand. I still recoil when I see it and long for an end its end. Ever-hopeful, it may yet take a few more generations and a few more unhappy moments before the tolerant Britishness I aspire to becomes a concrete reality.