Both of these quotations link to what Hobsbawm and Levi are saying. All are fundamentally about the critical need for empathy, the vast imaginative challenge that exists to connect people in our world today, and how direct, face-to-face contact can be crucial in facilitating such a connection. I return in my mind to the men and women from the oil industry I talked to at Birkbeck. I’m not sure that any number of books or documentaries will ever convince some of them that their companies have behaved wrongly, in many countries, over many years. But, taking Levinas as inspiration, I wonder what would happen if I could introduce David from Shell to a villager from Rumuekpe, who’d seen her family killed by security forces? If they could spend some hours together, perhaps going for a walk or sharing a meal? I think about inviting Anna from Shell to meet Maria Saro-Wiwa, Ken’s widow. They could sit together in a garden on a summer’s evening, and they would discover they were almost exactly the same age. They might also talk about their shared religious faith, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, they could look at each other, eye to eye, and begin to express what cannot be expressed over a screen or a phone. I would like to attempt this one day …
But still there remains Hobsbawm’s challenge of how to transmit between different worlds. I’m keenly aware that we live in a time when we are becoming increasingly immunised against the suffering of others – those outside our immediate circle of family and friends. So what does it take to get through the invisible barriers we’ve put up around ourselves, the screens and the filters we protect ourselves with? How do we start to break through the normalisation of extreme suffering in our world – the hundreds of bodies of human beings that wash up on Mediterranean beaches every year, the thousands mutilated by British weapons used in Yemen, the hundreds of thousands killed in the war in Syria that has now lasted longer than the Second World War? This condition that nearly all of us live with, summed up by that obscene phrase – ‘compassion fatigue’.
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Koita, Tounkara, Aisha and Mordechai
In the last ten or fifteen years I can think of few examples of such transmission, certainly via the written word – perhaps film and news coverage carry a greater immediate power to communicate. I puzzle over the reason why certain written accounts nevertheless do manage to ‘get through’. You will be able to think of your own examples of being suddenly overwhelmed by something you’ve seen or read. Here are three accounts which shook me to my core. Even today, I find it difficult to read them again. To acknowledge that these events happened in the world that we inhabit. This is from a short article Stephen Bates wrote for the Guardian, 5 August 1999:
Dead stowaways left plea for Africa
Two young African stowaways who were found dead on Monday in the landing gear of a plane in Brussels left a handwritten letter explaining the hardships that caused them to pursue such a dangerous plan, the Brussels public prosecutor’s office said yesterday. The bodies of Koita Yaguine, 15, and Tounkara Fode, 16, both from Guinea, west Africa, were found in the landing gear of a Sabena plane on Monday while it was being refuelled. The plane came from Conakry, Guinea, and had stopped in Bamako, Mali.
A spokeswoman for the prosecutions office said a post-mortem examination would be made to find out whether they had died from lack of oxygen or exposure to the cold. It was not known how long they had been dead when their bodies were found, she said. The two had prepared carefully for their trip, each donning several pairs of trousers, pullovers and jackets. But that and their plastic sandals were woefully inadequate to save them in high-altitude temperatures of -55C.
It is not the boys’ death which has shocked Belguim, however, so much as the letter found wrapped in their clothing, showing that they quite expected to die in their attempt to escape and making a plea for Europe to help the young people of Africa … The letter, addressed in shaky French to the ‘Excellencies, gentlemen-members and those responsible in Europe’, is a cry for help. Apparently written last Thursday, it says:
‘It is to your solidarity and generosity that we appeal for your help in Africa. If you see that we have sacrificed ourselves and lost our lives, it is because we suffer too much in Africa and need your help to struggle against poverty and war … Please excuse us very much for daring to write this letter.’
Perhaps the only way to really understand the impact of globalisation and migration today would be to have a film, in real time, shot from the wheels of such a plane, recording the memories and thoughts of such children, with their dreams of a foreign city fading as they die.
I think of these words from Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels: ‘History is amoral; events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers.’
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Another short article from the Guardian, by Chris McGreal, Africa correspondent, 3 November 2008:
Somalian rape victim, 13, stoned to death
An Islamist rebel administration in Somalia has had a 13-year-old girl stoned to death for adultery after the child’s father reported that she was raped by three men.
Amnesty International said al-Shabab militia, which controls the southern city of Kismayo, arranged for 50 men to stone Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow in front of about 1,000 spectators. A lorry load of stones was brought to the stadium for the killing.
Amnesty said Duhulow struggled with her captors and had to be forcibly carried into the stadium.
‘At one point during the stoning, Amnesty International has been told by numerous eyewitnesses that nurses were instructed to check whether Aisha … was still alive when buried in the ground. They removed her from the ground, declared that she was, and she was replaced in the hole where she had been buried for the stoning to continue,’ the human rights group said. It continued: ‘Inside the stadium, militia members opened fire when some of the witnesses to the killing attempted to save her life, and shot dead a boy who was a bystander.’
Amnesty said Duhulow was originally reported by witnesses as being 23 years old, based on her appearance, but established from her father that she was a child. He told Amnesty that when they tried to report her rape to the militia, the child was accused of adultery and detained. None of the men accused was arrested.’
This piece I still find impossible to comprehend. It brings me to despair, and what lies even beyond that. To read it, each time, is to be assaulted again. The only words there that do not damn beyond redemption the sickness of what humans are capable of doing to other humans is that brief reference to some people attempting to save Aisha’s life. And the boy without a name who also died, perhaps trying to save her.
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And then there is the transmission of suffering which, occasionally and in some respects miraculously, can come through writing. In a short book by George Steiner – The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. – there is a single sentence that extends over three pages in a roar of pain that sears itself into your mind. An attempt at empathetic imagination unparalleled in all the writing I’ve ever read about the Holocaust. Steiner brings back to life, momentarily, an exterminated world:
The garden in Salonika, where Mordechai Zathsmar, the cantor’s youngest child, ate excrement; the Hoofstraat in Arnhem where they took Leah Burstein and made her watch while her father; the two lime trees where the road to Montrouge turns south, 8th November 1942, on which they hung the meathooks; the pantry on the third floor, Nowy Swiat xi, where Jakov Kaplan, author of the History of Algebraic Thought in Eastern Europe 1280–1655, had to dance over the body of; in White Springs, Ohio, Rahel Nadelmann who wakes each night, sweat in her mouth because thirty-one years earlier in the Mauerallee in Hanover three louts drifting home from an SS recruitment spree had tied her legs and with a truncheon; the latrine in the police station in Worgel which Doktor Ruth Levin and her niece had to clean with their hair; the fire raid on Engstaad and the Jakobsons made to kneel outside the shelter until the incendiaries; Sternowitz caught in the woods near Sibor talking to Ludmilla, an Aryan woman, and filled with water and a piano wire wound tight around his; Branka seeing them burn the dolls near the ramp and when she sought to hide hers being taken to the fire and; Elias Kornfeld, Sarah Ellbogen, Robert Heimann in front of the biology class, Neuwald Gymnasium lower Saxony, stripped to the waist, mouths wide open so that Professor Horst Küntzer could demonstrate to his pupils the obvious racial, an hour of school which Heimann remembered when at Matthausen naked again; Lilian Gourevitch given two work passes, yellow-coloured, serial numbers BJ7732781 and 2, for her three children in Tver Street and ordered to choose which of the children was to go on the next transport; the marsh six kilometres from Noverra where the dogs found Aldo Mattei and his family in hiding, only a week before the Waffen-SS retreated northward, thus completing the register of fugitives; five Jews, one Gypsy, one hydrocephalic, drawn up at the prefettura in Rovigo; the last Purim in Vilna and the man who played Haman cutting his throat, remember him, Moritz the caretaker whose beard they had torn out almost hair by hair, pasting on a false beard and after the play taking the razor in the boiler room; Dorfmann, collector of prints of the late seventeenth century, doctor and player on the viola, lying, no kneeling, no squatting in the punishment cell at Buchenwald, six feet by four and one half, the concrete cracked with ice, watching the pus break from his torn nails and whispering the catalogue numbers of the Hobbemas in the Albertina, so far as he could remember them in the raw pain of his shaven skull, until the guard took a whip; Ann Casanova, 21 rue du Chapon, Liège, called to the door, asking the two men to wait outside so that her mother would not know and the old woman falling on to the bonnet of the starting car, from the fourth-floor window, her dentures scattered in the road; Hannah, the silken-haired bitch dying of hunger in the locked apartment after the Kullmans had been taken, sinking her teeth into the master’s house shoes, custom-made to the measure of his handsome foot by Samuel Rossbach, Hagadio, who in the shoe factory at Treblinka was caught splitting leather, sabotage, and made to crawl alive into the quicklime while at the edge Reuben Cohen, aged eleven, had to proclaim ‘so shall all saboteurs and subverters of the united front’, Hagadio, Hagadio, until the neighbours, Ebert and Ilse Schmidt, today Ebert Schmidt City Engineer, broke down the door, found the dog almost dead, dropped it in the garbage pit and rifled Kullman’s closets, his wife’s dressing table, the children’s attic with its rocking horse, jack-in-the-box and chemistry set, while on the railway siding near Dornbach, Hagadio, the child, thrown from the train by its parents, with money sewn to its jacket and a note begging for water and help was found by two men coming home from seeding and laid on the tracks, a hundred yards from the north switch, gagged, feet tied, till the next train, which it heard a long way off in the still of the summer evening, the two men watching and eating and then voiding their bowels, Hagadio; the Kullmans knowing that the smell of gas was the smell of gas but thinking the child safe, which, as the thundering air blew nearer spoke into its gag, twice, the name of the silken-haired bitch Hannah, and then could not close its eyes against the rushing shadow; at Maidanek ten thousand a day; I am not mad, Ajalon calling, can you hear me; unimaginable because innumerable: in one corner of Treblinka seven hundred thousand bodies, I will count them now, Aaron, Aaronowitch, Aaronson, Abilech, Abraham, I will count seven hundred thousand names and you must listen, and watch Asher, I do not know him as well as I do you Simeon, and Eli Barach and the boy, I will say Kaddish to the end of time and when time ceases shall not have reached the millionth name; at Belzec three hundred thousand, Friedberg, Friedman, Friedmann, Friedstein, the names gone in fire and gas, ash in the wind at Chelmno, the long black wind at Chelmno, Israel Meyer, Ida Meyer, the four children in the pit at Sobibor; four hundred and eleven thousand three hundred and eighty-one in section three at Belsen, the one being Salomon Rheinfeld who left on his desk in Mainz the uncorrected proofs of the grammar of Hittite which Egon Scleicher, his assistant newly promoted Ordinarius, claimed for his own but cannot complete, the one being Belin the tanner whose face they sprinkled with acid from the vat and who was dragged through the streets of Kershon behind a dung cart but sang, the one being Georges Walter who when they called him from supper in the rue Marot, from the blanquette de veau finely seasoned, could not understand and spoke to his family of an administrative error and refused to pack more than one shirt and asked still why through his smashed teeth when the shower doors closed and the whisper started in the ceiling, the one being David Pollachek whose fingers they broke in the quarry at Leutach when they heard he had been first violin and who in the loud burning of each blow could think only of the elder bush in his yard at Slanic, each leaf of which he had tried to touch once more on the last evening in his house after the summons came, the one not being Nathaniel Steiner who was taken to America in time but goes maimed nevertheless for not having been at the roll call, the one being all because unnumbered hence unrememberable, because buried alive at Bialistok like Nathansohn, nine hours fourteen minutes under the whip (timed by Wachtmeister Ottmar Prantl now hotelier in Steyerbrück), the blood, Prantl reporting, splashing out of his hair and mouth like new wine; two million at, unspeakable because beyond imagaining, two million suffocated at, outside Cracow of the gracious towers, the signpost on the airport road pointing to it still, Oszwiecim in sight of the low hills, because we can imagine the cry of one, the hunger of two, the burning of ten, but past a hundred there is no clear imagining, he understood that, take a million and belief will not follow nor the mind contain, and if each and every one of us, Ajalon calling, were to rise before morning and speak out ten names that day, ten from the ninety-six thousand graven on the wall in Prague, ten from the thirty-one thousand in the crypt at Rome, ten from those at Matthausen Drancy Birkenau Buchenwald Theresienstadt or Babi Yar, ten out of six million, we should never finish the task, not if we spoke the night through, not till the close of time, nor bring back a single breath, not that of Isaac Lowy, Berlin, Isaac Lowy, Danzig (with the birthmark on his left shoulder), Isaac Lowy, Zagreb, Isaac Lowy, Vilna, the baker who cried of yeast when the door closed, Isaac Lowy, Toulouse, almost safe, the visa almost granted, I am not mad but the Kaddish which is like a shadow of lilac after the dust of the day is withered now, empty of remembrance, he has made ash of prayer, AND UNTIL EACH NAME is recalled and spoken again, EACH, the names of the nameless in the orphans’ house at Szeged, the name of the mute in the sewer at Katowic, the names of the unborn in the women ripped at Matthausen, the name of the girl with the yellow star seen hammering on the door of the shelter at Hamburg and of whom there is no record but a brown shadow burnt into the pavement, until each name is remembered and spoken to the LAST SYLLABLE, man will have no peace on earth, do you hear me Simeon, no place, no liberation from hatred, not until every name, for when spoken each after the other, with not a single letter omitted, do you hear me, the syllables will make up the hidden name of GOD.