Bergen-Belsen

I recently watched the BBC4 film about Jewish survivors from the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany. 

 

Between 1943 and 1945 52,000 inmates perished there and 20,000 Russian POWs. It was where Anne Frank died.

 

We heard from Peter Lantos, Zdenka Fatlova, Maurice Blik, Mala Tribich, Anita Lasker-Walfisch, Geria Turgeb. It seems to me important to name the few still living since we cannot name the many who died.

 

The camp was liberated by British - Canadian troops and I watched the film. wondering if I would see my father. He was one of the British army doctors who arrived there on 15 April 1945. I remember he told me that thousands died after they arrived, many from typhus, TB and dysentry, then many more from being fed high calorie rations too quickly. As a physician, he felt a guilt and responsibility for this terrible failure.

 

When he was an old man I asked him what had happened to the photos he had kept of the emaciated survivors. He told me that he had thrown them away. I was shocked because he had documented the reality of fascism, but knowing the man, perhaps he wanted to remove the memory altogether. When I was a small boy I used to take them from the bottom drawer of his his desk, spread them on the floor and stare at these skeletal humans in horror.

 

I have spent my life affected by those photographs of bones breaking through parchment skin, eyes bulging from their sockets, a pleading despair. 

 

I have never thrown away any of that and have honoured their memory as an active socialist and anti-racist.

 

It is popular to say ‘Never Again’, but this is just a hope and genocides have continued in one form or another throughout my life. To those two words we must add two more that demand our action. Taken from the fight against fascism in Franco's Spain they are, No Pasarán.

 

www.davidwilson.org.uk

The Madonna of the Mountains

I have just finished Elise Valmorbida's ‘The Madonna of the Mountains', set in the Veneto region of north east Italy at the time of Mussolini and Italian fascism.

Elise is a close friend of Anne Aylor and co-founder of the weekly writing group they both attend. I have loved her writing ever since I read 'The Book of Happy Endings'. About unusual couples, I am pleased to have introduced her to my Iraqi friends, Haifa Zangana and Mundher al-Adhami, who have their own chapter.

I read 'Madonna ... ' straight through in two days. It gripped me to such an extent I found myself re-reading sentences because of their content and structure. In fact I realised I was reading an astonishing prose poem.

Characters and place were tangible. I could see them and felt their presence.

And the food and its centrality to life and survival in this community? Its primacy, its value, its origins, its preparation held more important that the actual taste. I found that interesting.

As a ‘political’ being I wanted to know more as to why X was a fascist, Y anti-fascist and the main character, Maria and her family just trying to survive. Towards the end I realised that the content and rhythm of this book is much more political than the Political. And will therefore stand the test of time.

If readers want to know what life was like in Mussolini's Italy they should turn to this book and keep Gramsci for later!

('The Madonna of the Mountains' is available on Amazon, in Watersones and other good bookshops. Published by Faber, it is already winner of The Times 'book of the month'.)