For the Time Being (25 page)

It is probably because of these standards that I have so enjoyed the three books before me. One English, two French (in splendid translations), and all about a period of time, in differing worlds, in which true standards still applied. If you detect that I am suggesting those standards have sagged like ragged bunting in the rain, you are right. They have. But in these books you will catch glowing images of them all over again – if you knew what they were in the first place. Young people have little way, apart from books, of knowing that the ‘day just before yesterday' ever existed. But it did, and it is admirably revived in Robert Liddell's
The Last Enchantments,
about a lightly disguised Oxford trundling towards war.

The writing recalls fragments of Jane Austen in the elegance of its prose and its plotting; there are shades, too, of Ivy Compton-Burnett, and echoes of Dickens and Trollope. First published in 1948, it is, in all degrees, a wonderfully evocative book reminding one of a time when there were scones for tea, of the smell of damp wool drying out before plopping gas-fires in North Oxford lodgings, of Fuller's walnut cake, and children who wore liberty bodices and indulged in nothing more harmful than skipping; of a place where it was essential to have a servant (one could manage without a lover, not a servant).

A different world? Very different, and Liddell writes with grace and elegance about this forgotten time; his clear, civilized mind shines sparklingly through every deceptively simple line, prodding one with the dry humour of a writer who spikes his wit with danger. His doting, fingerless, chittering, chattering, tragic Mrs Foyle is an extraordinary creature who remains long in the mind, as one of the oddest, and saddest, creatures in modern writing.

The excellent Marcel Pagnol is known here mainly for the filmed versions of
Jean de Florette
and
Manon des Sources. The Time of Secrets
(translated by Rita Barisse) and
The Time of Love
(translated by Eileen Ellenbogen) continue the childhood memoirs he began in
My Father's Glory
and
My Mother's Castle;
they, too, are set in his beloved Provence, an almost inexhaustible source for all his works. This is the true Provence, the land in which he was born and in which, a few years ago, he died. His overwhelming love for the place burns on every page. This is not the suburban Provence of the swimming-pool-gin-and-tonic brigade; it is stuff from the very gut of the land.

Pagnol's Provence has no motorways, no estates of tacky little Paris-Rustic houses, no swarms of sweating tourists, red of neck from over-exposure to the burning sun, no camera-freaks lugging rucksacks through the lavender in floppy shorts and dirty trainers; there are no fat property-developers converting the crumbling barns, or ripping out the orchards for patios and swimming-pools or setting up barbecues as if they had never left Pinner or Bexleyheath for a kinder climate.

Pagnol is, I suppose, to the French what H. E. Bates is now to the British, although I do not think the British ‘love' a writer as much as the French can. Nothing very much happens in these two books. They are about growing up in a lost world. His works evoke the simplicity-that-was of family life in the country, its virtues, its trivia, its minor tragedies, its great, if utterly simple, joys. They are about daily existence in a land which burns under the brilliant southern light. He brings us the heavy and comforting odours of camphor, pine-resin, lavender, red dust, drying hay, and the delicious mystery of the scents in the fat
marmite
simmering quietly on an iron stove in red-tiled kitchens. If these things give you pleasure, you will find them in abundance here.

There is no violence in these gentle books, no rape, no murder, no cannibalism, no randy plumbers in Putney, no robbery, no child abuse. It is out of time, old-fashioned. Comforting, healing stuff, far away from the frenetic world we now inhabit. You cannot fail to be lulled into complete surrender and calmness by the delicate simplicity of the world in which the child, Marcel Pagnol, lives and which as an adult he recaptures with such glowing remembrance. Never can a reader have been made so aware of senses past. Unless my Edwardian slip is showing very badly indeed.

Daily Telegraph,
20 July 1991

In the Shadow of Death: Living outside the Gates of Mauthausen
by Gordon J. Horwitz (I. B. Tauris)
Voices from the Third Reich: An Oral History
by Johannes Steinhoff,
Peter Pechel and Dennis Showalter (Grafton)
Lódź Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege,
edited by Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (Penguin)
Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary
by Avraham
Tory. Edited by Martin Gilbert.
Translated by Jerzy Michalowicz (Pimlico)

The last time I wrote about the Holocaust, I received so much ‘hate mail' that I was, I confess, greatly taken aback. Even though I had grown used to reading rubbish about myself in the tabloids for many years, I had managed, after a while, to come to terms with the business. Coming to terms with mail addressed
directly
to one is quite another matter. I had never before been called a ‘Dirty Jew Lover' nor a ‘Lying Bastard' nor a ‘Filthy Communist Jew'. But then I reaped the sour harvest. No letter ever bore a signature, or an address; some writers simply mailed me back my own article, clipped from this newspaper, heavily underlined here and there in red and green ink.

The fact that I had been a witness to Belsen, had fought through Normandy, France, Holland and Belgium and ended up in the ruins of the just-conquered Berlin seemed to make no impression. I was still branded a liar, and what I had seen in Belsen had never occurred. It might be interesting to consider that, in spite of the scrawled obscenities, these letters all came from apparently educated people and were reasonably well written.

How, I wondered, could such hatred still exist? Most especially in this land of mine, on this treasured soil, never occupied since
the Normans? The land which had given the world the terms ‘fair play' and ‘tolerance'?

After reading these four fascinating books, 1,665 pages, I was left bruised with wonder and an intense sadness. This had all happened well within my lifetime. What had the Jews done that they deserved so much loathing; that they had to be ‘exterminated like vermin'? Why so much mistrust, fear and dislike? It is no good using Christ's death as a convenient excuse for the enormity of more than six million people deliberately being destroyed in a period which lasted just less than a decade.

One fact sticks out of all the books like a snagged fingernail. No one ever poses the question which raced through my mind all the time: ‘Why?' The death and destruction is accepted simply as fact. The mindless cruelty shocks deeply; the methodical killings, the listed deaths, the book-keeping for obliteration, the loathing: all these things numb the mind. But why the Jews? No one can give me an answer, and these dreadful (that is, terrifying) books do not help me to come to terms with the attempted slaughter of a whole race.

Gordon J. Horwitz's
In the Shadow of Death
describes vividly the construction of Mauthausen, the most vicious and hideous and probably least well known of the camps for the Jews' annihilation, in a quarry three miles from a pleasant little village and a few yards from two thriving farms, set in the gentle, rolling hills of southern Austria. Everyone saw it being built, everyone knew it was there; no one it seems, dared ask why. Local people worked for it as carpenters, telephonists, secretaries, typists, plumbers and all the rest.

People knew. They heard the sounds, saw the smoke from the furnaces, smelled it as the winds carried across the woods and fields, leaving greasy deposits of soot on the hay in the meadows and on the washing on the line. No one raised a finger, no one questioned, even though latterly they watched the shuffling lines of people being marched through their streets, staring, terrified, lost. Fear ruled; fear won. It is as obscene to imagine a killing-camp set down in the fields around Cuckfield and everyone pretending it was not there.

In
Voices from the Third Reich,
an oral history of the war by survivors of the Reich's collapse, fear is the predominant feeling. There
were
‘good' people in Germany, people as appalled as those of us who knew what took place in that decade, but the great majority were ruled by terror for themselves or for their children. The Nazis had absolute power and froze any protests, or any questions, by the severest punishments. People did cry out in horror, they did protest, they did hide their friends, and they paid the most terrible price if found out. It is easy to understand, from this book, how a people could ensnare themselves trying to move towards a better life after the disasters of the Armistice in 1919.

It is important that we are reminded of the past, so we may prepare for the future. If you are young, say thirty-five and under, I recommend this book. It is salutary to discover just how similar ‘ordinary' people are, wherever they happen to live. If you are older, and feel you know all about it, let me assure you that you do not.

How, you may well ask, could all the good Germans be trapped by fear? Easy. It could happen here. The Nazis appealed to, and collected, all the yobbos and lager-louts of their day and gave them boots, badges and imposing caps to wear, which gave them a towering superiority joined to the simple fact that they were ‘recognized by the State'. The bureaucrats and yobbos made a hideous fraternity.

Control, power; with permission. Not here? You think? But we have them all ready-made: the Union-Jack-underpants fraternity who wreck Spanish bars, Channel ferries, railway carriages, football stadiums. Drunk with beer and rage, mindless, stuffed with false National Pride, they rampage everywhere. And who stops them? Who dares interfere with a rape? Or a street mugging? We dare not.
You can die that way.
So, too, in the Germany of 1934–45.

Both
Lòdź Ghetto
and the Kovno Ghetto diary,
Surviving the Holocaust,
are incredibly detailed journals of exactly where, how, and when the unbelievable became fact. The courage is amazing, the sadness overwhelming. To write about Hell may sound simple. To write about it and make it totally plausible and undramatic is
staggering. Not all the witnesses in the Lódź Ghetto survived. Their writings have, and have been remarkably edited.

In January 1940 it was announced that the Jewish quarter of Lódź was ‘a region of epidemic danger', the signal for the ghetto to become the final prison for the city's Jewry. The area was evacuated and the Jews herded into the crumbling houses and little streets. Jews who lived in the city, normally, were forced to leave their houses and flats within fifteen minutes. Those who did not were shot.

And there they existed without sanitation, and in condemned wooden buildings or rat-ridden slum houses, until they were finally pushed into the cattle-trucks and taken away to be burned or gassed. A ‘king' was appointed, a tall, cultured man, white-haired, powerful, compassionate, who was known as Chairman Rumkowski.

He managed to bring order into chaos, and by cooperating as far as possible with the Germans, by
supplying
people for the transports,
he managed to save a great majority. There was a semblance of normal life eventually, and under terrible pressures the Jews struggled on in some blind belief that they would survive.

Eventually Rumkowski himself was forced to behave like Herod. Believing that each deportation which he made for the Nazis would be the last, and that somehow, finally, the ghetto would survive the war, he bargained and fought. And lost. ‘That part that can be saved is much larger than the part that must be given away,' was his despairing, and final, appeal. He went himself, with his family, to Auschwitz as a voluntary deportee in order to accompany his brother.

There are differing accounts of what happened to him. In one he was beaten to death on his arrival, by Jews from the ghetto; in another, he and his family were taken on an apparently friendly ‘tour' of the camp and were burned to death ‘without being gassed'; another version is that he was separated from ‘those who could work' and put to death in the normal way.

He is generally considered to have been ‘deceitful and misinformed', and responsible for unimaginable deaths. But was he? If he had not persuaded so
many
to go as volunteers to the camps, would ‘so many people have boarded the trains'? An enigma.

Those who survived have written in this book, and those who did not left diaries and letters; it is mainly from them, and from the photographs (some in colour), that this dreadful story has been made available to an uncaring world. The ghetto at Kovno, in Lithuania, follows much the same pattern. But the supreme courage burns through the writing of this personal diary, hidden and retrieved many years later.

Today the Croats hate the Serbs, the Arabs hate the Jews, the Iraqis hate the Kurds … nothing changes. Is all the suffering of the past for nothing?

The other day a gigantic mass grave was unearthed in the Ukrainian pine woods. Poles murdered by Russians. I found my first mass grave just outside Hanover in 1945 when my tent peg slid into the soil-covered slime. It was like walking over a mossy custard trifle. We forced local villagers to witness the unspeakable filth: the old
people bit their lips, a few wept; the young women (there were no young men), usually with a child in hand or one on the hip, just spat.

Housing estates now cover many of the camp sites, and the week before last planning permission was finally refused for the building of a glittering supermarket on the site of Ravensbrück. Water under the bridge. Why light candles in the windows? Who cares now? The red-and-green-ink brigade will tell me that it never happened, the rest of us seem to have forgotten.

Daily Telegraph,
10 August 1991