But the greater reason was the testimony of Grojanowski. I know that it is among the most important of all accounts of the Holocaust, the Holocaust which exterminated Roma as well as Jews, as Grojanowski details here. And that what he describes is the end product (quite literally, as the SS would have seen it) of the industrialised killing carried out in the vans manufactured by Saurer in the lakeside town of Arbon where we began this last part of our journey. It would have been perverse not to include Grojanowski’s account. The full testimony, which I first came across in Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust many years ago, runs to twenty-six pages and is, even for people who expose themselves to such material, gruelling to read. I’m not sure I can read such things any longer.
Yesterday, in a gap from writing, and knowing I was about to embark on the last part of this chapter, I took the book with me on a walk to the west side of the peninsula, to reread the section and to try and catch the last of the afternoon’s sun. I found a sheltered spot and propped myself up on a rock, between the incoming tide making its calming repetitions on a deserted beach below me, and a dozen or so sheep grazing above me. I start the chapter (all of what I quote above is from the first two days of Grojanowski’s ordeal), and I notice something in the language: on the third day he starts to use the phrase ‘when we drove to work’, by the fourth day he’s talking about ‘our place of work’ and ‘we consumed our lunch’ and ‘after the evening meal’; interspersed with the barbarism he’s describing are these words of every day banality – the routine of work – which shock deeply in the context. But maybe this speaks strongly of the human need to adapt, even in the most terrifying circumstances, to attempt to find approximations of normality amidst the nightmare?
I realise reading it that I want rage and despair and madness as a response, but Grojanowski writes with a level-headed factualness that is pushed to such extremes of blunt statement (often without any detectable emotion) that it borders on mirroring the psychotic behaviour of his guards. On the eighth day he relates: ‘a small baby wrapped in a pillow was thrown out of the lorry. It began to cry. The SS men laughed. They machine-gunned the baby and tossed it into the ditch.’ That’s it. Nothing else said. So we have the obscenity of the act, and then the obscenity of silence in the face of the act. Two days later he records: ‘At midday I received the sad news that my brother and parents had just been buried. At one o’clock we were already back at work. I tried to get closer to the corpses to take a last look at my nearest and dearest.’ That’s all. The experience of reading such things is to make you rage, to make you almost as savage as the SS – you just want one of the men to attack a guard wildly, to kill one of them even though they’ll be shot instantly. That unforgettable passage from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope comes into my mind:
When a bull is being led to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd. But in human society there is a continuous exchange of experience. I have never heard of a man who broke away and fled while being led to his execution. It is even thought to be a special form of courage if a man about to be executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open. But I would rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesn’t weigh his chances of survival with the prudent dull-wittedness of man, and doesn’t know the despicable feeling of despair.
Later I often wondered whether it is right to scream when you are being beaten and trampled underfoot. Isn’t it better to face one’s tormentors in a stance of satanic pride, answering them with contemptuous silence? I decided that it is better to scream. This pitiful sound, which sometimes, goodness knows how, reaches into the remotest prison cell, is a concentrated expression of the last vestige of human dignity. It is a man’s way of leaving a trace, of telling people how he lived and died. By his screams he asserts his right to live, sends a message to the outside world demanding help and calling for resistance. If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.
Perhaps this is what Mandelstam thought she would do in extremis. It is part of our human condition to express rage and despair. But, it slowly dawned on me reading yesterday, that what Grojanowski is describing is a kind of paralysing numbness which can only shut down the body’s normal responses when confronted with the unimaginable. And, in this context, to make a judgement of the human being going through this inhuman experience is simply impossible. We have no right.
But, however you navigate around the subject, these pages are shattering to the human spirit. As I close the book I suddenly realise four sheep have come so close to me I can put out my hand to touch them. They’ve been as absorbed by their grazing as I’ve been by my reading. But it’s chilly now, I get up with a shiver, and climb back up to the cliff path. As I get there, a single, madly enthusiastic skylark hovers above me, singing wildly into the blue of the evening. For ten minutes or so he alternates between this position and riding the top of a bushy stem about three yards away, undulating in the wind and continuing to sound his burbling glory. I have never been more in need of that song.
BOOK TWO
SILENCE AND SPEAKING
Preface
To the West
St David’s Day, 1 March 2012, Hackney to Pembrokeshire
Suddenly the valley opens before me. The last sun on a spring day, glimpse of the River Wye snaking silver through trees, the green of the fields luminescently green, almost glowing in this early-evening light. And my spirits racing as I sense the border, just beyond the next hill, the country I’ve loved from childhood. My foot easing off the pedal, the road emptying as I move westwards, no rush now. Past the hill, the way sweeps down to the valley below, the red dragon approaches on its green background – ‘CROESO I GYMRU’, ‘Welcome to Wales’ – which I always hear with an exclamation mark even if it isn’t there on the sign. I sing the words, just as we did as kids, crossing the border in the back of our old Renault 4 – the moment of no return, leaving the flatlands behind. Summer, the wild promise of weeks by the water and the trees and the mountains, days of Cnicht and Cadair Idris and the Island and Llyn Hywel and the Pennant valley and the Llanfrothen rockslide … an ocean of time before we’d have to think about school again. And today, crossing the border, a similar sense of exhilaration – not holidays now, but the prospect of a full week’s writing ahead.
Over the last year or so I’ve discovered a rhythm, a way of working, which has been intensely liberating. Every three or four weeks, I load up my little car in Hackney and head to the west, to a house balancing on the very edge of Wales, by the sea. I’ve found that I can do seven or eight days’ writing before the isolation starts to unnerve me. An immersion of intensity, a kind of temporary hermit state, before I feel the pull of the city again. Almost a year lived like this. Hit-and-run raids on chapters. Seven days, 11,000, 12,000 words. Each time another twenty-five pages, another chapter, completed. Then back to London. And finding an inexplicable power in these darting journeys to the west. It was just an instinct, as primal as a migrating bird, that I needed to go in that direction, that I needed a different energy, far away from the North Sea and the east-coast shingle where I began this writing six years ago. Now the rhythms of the tides in Wales, together with the rapidly changing skies and light, the coastal paths and marshes, the estuaries and inlets, the curlews and peregrines, the mossed oak woods and rivers, have become my companions, and I look forward to seeing them again with an urgency that amazes me, because, up to now, I’ve always thought of myself as a city boy, the word ‘Londoner’ imprinted on my DNA.