Madam, do you think we are barbarians?

I made myself watch the latest Ken Burns documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust - not that it isn't well done, but it's harrowing.  Everything touching the Holocaust is.

As bleak headlines came in about mass graves in the Ukraine and Putin's nuclear threats, I gripped the armrest and listened as author Daniel Mendelsohn recounted the ghastly stories of what happened to his great-uncle, his wife, and four daughters in Poland. As he pointed out that there were many ways of dying during the Holocaust, he looked off to one side with a hint of a shrug and the ghost of a wry, resigned smile, and I remembered Rudolf Vrba.

Vrba, who was born Walter Rosenberg in Slovakia and survived two years in Auschwitz, appeared in interviews for such documentaries as The World at War and Shoah.  He stood out, even amongst interviewees with equally horrifying stories, with his wry and articulate black humour.  In particular, I remember his description of the Nazi guards ordering the prisoners to move:  Schnell!  "They are a sporty people," Vrba observed, drily.

He also supplied the example of a distraught mother approaching a concentration camp officer, when she had been warned that her children were to be gassed. "Madam," he mirrored the officer's wolfish reply.  "Do you think we are barbarians?"

Vrba's story is remarkable in other ways.  He, along with fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler, became among the handful of people who ever escaped from Auschwitz.  The meticulous report they wrote on the workings and layout of Auschwitz, along with their desperate struggle to make the world, including their fellow European Jews, understand the enormity of the Final Solution, may have saved thousands of lives.

After the war, Vrba obtained a PhD in chemistry, and, twenty years later, emigrated to Canada, where he worked for the Medical Research Council of Canada, and became a Canadian citizen. He eventually moved to Vancouver, where he was a professor of Pharmacology at the University of British Columbia.

In the mid-eighties, he testified against Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel.  This attracted a lot of attention in in Victoria, because Doug Christie, an eccentric lawyer who had a tollbooth-sized office in the middle of a downtown parking lot near the Victoria courthouse, was acting for Zündel.  When Christie asked Vrba if he had, in fact, seen anyone gassed at Auschwitz, Vrba's reply was mordant:  he had deduced, having witnessed officers tossing canisters into the chamber, that "it was not a kitchen or a bakery".  When Christie tried to throw doubt on Vrba's story that he had escaped Auschwitz at night without food, Vrba shot back:  "Perhaps in Girl Guides or Boy Scouts in Victoria, they didn't teach you how this can be done, but it can."

More than forty years after his ordeal, he was still having to defend it -- and still would today.  I imagine he was well acquainted with despair.  He died in Vancouver in 2006.

Ken Burns was a guest on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, just as The U.S. and the Holocaust was transmitting for the first time.  Work on the documentary series began a little under a decade ago, and Burns and his co-creators watched in growing horror as the issues discussed in the documentary, the racism and refusal to help refugees in particular, became ever more pertinent.

We don't seem to learn a thing from history -- or we learn the wrong things...

Overkill

When I was writing up my review of Laurent Binet's novel/blog/series-of-unfortunate-events HHhH last night, I planned to mention my previous encounters with Reinhard Heydrich. Not personal encounters, thank goodness; Heydrich died in 1942 and was perhaps one of the most terrifying and deadly members of the Nazi administration -- which is saying something. However, I'm doing NaBloPoMo this month and I submitted my post within minutes of midnight as it was.

Binet mentions the television film Conspiracy in his book, which is indeed a memorable movie about the Wannsee Conference with a cast featuring such remarkable actors such as Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, David Threlfall, Colin Firth, plus about a dozen other actors who are familiar, not because they are famous, but because they are hardworking British (mostly) character actors.

Here is a taste of Branagh's and Tucci's interpretation of how Heydrich and Eichmann ran the meeting:

However, as chilling as Conspiracy is, the production team couldn't resist adding dramatic tension by making Threlfall's character and Firth's character more sympathetic, "good Nazis" (with some scruples, however faint) to contrast with the "more evil Nazis" (no scruples whatsoever). It's a disturbing aspect of an already disturbing reenactment.

Besides, I couldn't help comparing it with The Wannsee Conference (Die Wannseekonferenz)(1984). I stumbled upon this late one night on a PBS channel some years ago. At the time, I was bewildered, having never heard of the Wannsee Conference. I saw men, in various Nazi uniforms, chatting genially, sipping drinks, then sitting through what appeared to be a typical business meeting complete with maps and graphs. It makes the agenda all the more horrifying. No added drama is needed:

Heydrich, the "Butcher of Prague", is portrayed here by Dietrich Mattausch a busy and distinguished German actor who was born, ironically enough, in Sudetenland, now part of the Czech Republic.

A couple of years ago, I read an online review of this film by someone who had attended several business meetings in Germany. He said they were much like this one. Presumably without the swastikas and the outline for the murder of millions.

Maybe I've had enough of this kind of thing for a while. I've been having nightmares. On the other hand, just wait until you hear what else I've been reading this month...

HHhH (The brain of Himmler is Heydrich)

This may be a first. I'm not a consumer of the latest books. I'm a slow reader and a picky reader and most things I read have been published for at least two or three years, usually longer.

I first heard about HHhH about six weeks ago at Scott Pack's blog Me and My Big Mouth. He'd listed it as Number Two of his top books of 2012. It looked interesting, so I put a hold on it at the library, and it came up surprisingly quickly. I had just begun reading it when I spotted it at The Bluestalking Reader blog, this time because HHhH has made the shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2012.

So some pathetic excitement in my life: I've actually read something that's up for an award. The irony, of course, is that HHhH was published in French in 2009; it's the translation that is copyright 2012. I wonder how much of the award is for the author, and how much for the translator (a man from Nottingham named Sam Taylor who has written three novels of his own)?

This book is about Reinhard Heydrich,

head of the SS, a chief creator of the "Final Solution", and terror of Prague, where he was eventually assassinated in 1942. I first heard of him when I was in elementary school, reading a simplified Scholastic version of William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which included a brief and rather sanitized description of what the Nazis did to the village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia in reprisal after Heydrich's death. To put it simply, they killed everybody except a handful of kids who could pass for Aryans. They even shot the dogs before razing the place.

This story is also about Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, the Czech and the Slovak assigned to kill Heydrich. Apart from what Heydrich represented and the horrors he unleashed, according to Laurent Binet, the Czech government-in-exile needed a powerful act of resistance so that London would remember to revoke the Munich Agreement after the war.

To interweave the stories of the marksmen and their target, Binet writes -- not a novel exactly, but a series of impressions about writing a novel about Heydrich and Kubis and Gabčík. In 257 sort of blog posts, Binet veers from Heydrich's childhood and rise to power, to the choice of Gabčík and Kubiš for the suicide mission, from Babi Yar to a brutal and possibly mythical football match between Nazis and Ukranians, from whether Heydrich's Mercedes was black or dark green to which of the Czech families who aided Kubiš and Gabčík (the vast majority of whom were shot or gassed) will be sacrificed from the narrative for brevity's sake.

Does it work? Well, yes. It's a bit distracting at times, especially when Binet hauls us back into the present to stew over details, but the final third of the book as we hurtle toward the assassination and its horrific aftermath is engrossing -- and frankly getting jerked into the present from time to time is a relief.

Will it win the award? Heck, I don't know; I never read the latest books, so I have no idea what the competition is like. This book is worth reading though, whether it wins the award or not.

Why channel-hopping is a bad idea

I really should only watch commercial-free television, at least when I'm alone with the set. This is because I can't resist flipping through the channels with my trusty remote while I wait for whatever I'm watching to return. I've been burned as a result, on three memorable occasions which left me fighting off disturbing images in my dreams and in my waking hours for days afterward. You'd think I'd learn.

There was the time about ten years ago when I stumbled on to a particularly vicious slasher film starring that noted thespian Corbin Bernson. As it was 4:30 on a Sunday afternoon, I was startled, horrified, and traumatized to catch a glimpse of a dentist using the tools of his trade to take revenge on a straying wife.

That cured me for a while, until 2006. Having been seduced by David Tennant (quick break for wishful thinking) into watching Doctor Who, I decided to check out Christopher Eccleston's episodes which CBC was re-running after midnight on Friday evenings. I don't know about your corner of the world, but Friday night in this corner of Ontario, which is in close proximity to the, shall we say, looser province of Québec, is Porn Night. Which, as a relative newcomer to Hades, I'd forgotten. Until I started flipping through the channels at the first commercial break: Lesseee...news...talk show....infomercial...YYEEEIIIKKESS!

See, I don't see myself as a rabid anti-porn crusader. I don't care for it; I don't think it's done any favours for how women are viewed in society, but I don't embark on letter-writing campaigns. However. I don't like being ambushed. Okay, maybe I need another word. Moving on...

You may have heard that Canada is hosting the Winter Olympics this year. If you're in Britain, your intrepid reporters have apparently been telling you that these are The Worst Olympics Ever. Well, maybe so. It's been less than a week, the Summer Olympics at Atlanta are heavy competition for the title, and I'm 3000 miles and three times zones away, so I wouldn't know. I would like to just gently say to the British media: Let's just wait until you're safely shot of the 2012 Olympics in London, shall we, boys? Just sayin'...

Anyway, we all know what the Olympics mean. Commercials. There are about fifteen let's-support-our-athletes-by-buying-this-crap ads in heavy rotation and we've been treated to them since last autumn. My fingers strayed inexorably to the remote....

Bad move, Persephone. On TV5, I was confronted by a rapid sequence of images of Nazis being hanged. By Americans, by Russians, by Poles... As you can imagine, the techniques varied in their efficiency. Frozen in horror, I failed to switch the channel before the documentary-makers felt it necessary to demonstrate why these fellows were being strung up. And I don't mean the stock footage of naked people being driven to ditches and shot, dazed prisoners staggering off freight trains en route to the gas chambers, or the bulldozers burying piles of bodies at Bergen-Belsen. You may want to skip the next paragraph.

A man in a laboratory coat is dispassionately flipping a naked girl. She's, I dunno, somewhere between six and nine. He's gripping her hips, and holding her out at arm's length in front of him, makes her body flick out like a whip, her head snapping back. Crying and crying, she hangs in the air with her knees drawn up to her chest and her back curved over. I couldn't bear to see what he would do next and flipped the channel, gasping for breath, leaning over my own knees.

I imagine, or least choose to imagine, that the makers of La Traque des Nazis (a documentary on longtime Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld) meant well. Why is it, then, that I feel this is feeding into yet another kind of porn? It seems to me that there is an appetite out there for footage of executions and tortures, ranging from those who get the glad-it's-not-me frisson to those who actually like watching this stuff. Does a documentary like this educate, or does it pander to such people? Does it stop such things from happening again, or does it provide (heaven help us) inspiration?

As for me, I've been sitting on those long bus-rides to and from younger daughter's school, gazing out at the bleak landscape and trying to chase away horror and despair with music. This was probably not the best week to get that Beautiful South CD out of the library (geez, talk about "bleak"), but there are songs on my iPod to make my heart lift for a while.

Here are a couple, if your heart needs lifting too. The first is a Great Big Sea standard, and happily, there's a classic 2006 music video by Almost Angst Free Productions (since we were talking about David Tennant and Christopher Eccleston, so why not drag Paul McCann, Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy into it?): I've probably embedded this one before, but I don't care...

The other is brand new (to me). I was listening to CBC Radio Two yesterday morning while waiting at the bus stop and Bob Mackowycz said this one just makes him "melt". So he played it and I did some mean back-up singer moves in the fresh snow. Fortunately, the street was deserted. Although I did dance into the bus... Forty Days. Hmmn. Well, Lent began yesterday, so there you go. Giving up channel-hopping seems a worthy Lenten goal...

Transferral, transition, transfixion, transcendence...

Following the suggestion of Rullsenberg, I have set up a free account at Last.fm and have spent the last three days "life-boating" songs from my list at my soon-to-be-no-more station at Launchcast, the one I've been building up for over five years. This may take some time; I have over 15,000 songs rated at Launchcast, and although many are duplicated, quadruplicated and more (depending on how many albums they show up on), I don't know if I will make it through the songs I actually like by the 15th.

While I transfer, I've been slowly working out how Last.fm works. I'm not allowed to say how much I like a song, album or artist, for example. I can either "love it", simply save it to my station without comment, or ban it, whereas at Lauchcast, I had the option of rating something up to five stars (or banning it), or in my case, rating out of one hundred. Last.fm has the interesting feature of embedding YouTube videos at the individual song sites. At least, it does for some people. I tried linking several times when I saw no video available although I knew of one at YouTube. I entered the URL, a green icon came up, saying "Video added". Yet, when I checked later, still no video was there. I wonder if I have to have a paid subscription or something...

One of these was for the devastating second movement of Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. This piece has been much on my mind as I've been viewing a repeat of the documentary series Auschwitz: The Nazis & the 'Final Solution'. (I was watching the British version narrated by Samuel West; the one shown on PBS had Linda Hunt doing the narration.) Every time they launched into a heartrending description of slaughter, it was signaled either by Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel, or by the opening chords of the second movement of the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. My elder daughter, working at her homework while I sat in horror by the television set, turned and asked: "Why do they always play this music when someone is dying?" She didn't just mean the documentary. Both pieces figure in the screen version of Wit, starring Emma Thompson as a John Donne scholar succumbing to ovarian cancer. (As an aside, if you haven't seen Wit, you must. The play won a Pulitzer Prize. I've seen both the play and the movie. They're not easy viewing, but they're transcendent in every sense of the word.)

I gave elder daughter a quick and inadequate history of both pieces of music, and later discovered she had saved a YouTube video of the Gorecki piece to her account.
Here it is:
When I hear it, I find myself transfixed where I am. The opening chords are based on a Polish folk melody, but brim with the spirit of youth. Then an oppressive chord on the strings takes over, and over it the soprano starts, very low: "Mama.....don't cry...." As I understand it, Henryk Górecki heard of a prison in southern Poland where, amongst the hundreds of messages scratched on the wall by prisoners facing torture and death by the Nazis, there was a poignant message from Helena Wanda Błażusiakówna who was imprisoned there in late 1944: "O Mamo nie płacz nie—Niebios Przeczysta Królowo Ty zawsze wspieraj mnie" (Oh Mamma do not cry—Immaculate Queen of Heaven support me always)
He said that among all the messages of fear, anger, despair, this simple message from an eighteen-year-old girl really stood out, in its lack of self-concern. There seems to be evidence that Helena Wanda survived her ordeal and married a Roman Pawlik, but the vast majority of Nazi prisoners didn't. So I sit when this music begins, unable to move, thinking of the children led into the Nazi abattoirs, with and without their mothers, and of the children being exploited, tortured, murdered today. I'm really glad Helena Wanda's mum got her back.