From the UK National Archives

By chance, I was put in touch with England’s National Archives (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwKkblddKmnbHCXpXLcScwfxJNs) and found myself receiving emails on a regular basis about various aspects of British history, whether more recent or really ancient. These included, for example, an item on ‘The strange case of the Scottish aristocrat killed on the Midland Railway,’ and another on ‘Good will to all: Henry VI’s Christmas pardon of 1470-71,’ to name but a few.

To my surprise, the latest missive I received from them concerned the Holocaust. Today, the 27^th of January, marks international Holocaust Memorial Day, the date when Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet soldiers in 1945. Each year the day has a theme, and this year it is ‘how can life go on?’

It’s a big question, and though so many lives were destroyed, and many millions of others tragically ravaged forever, the fact is that people did carry on with their lives, got married, had children, and rebuilt what they could. In fact, from 1946 to 1947 there was a Jewish ‘baby boom’ in DP (Displaced Persons) camps in occupied Germany.

Under the heading ‘The situation in immediate post-war Europe’ the text describes how life did in fact go on in that period, as millions of people liberated from camps and ghettos across Nazi-occupied Europe refused to return to their countries of origin and were placed in hastily-created DP camps. The challenges facing the Allies were enormous, the most immediate being how to save the sick and dying. The initial estimate given by the 32^nd Casualty Clearing Station, one of the first units to enter Bergen-Belsen upon its liberation on 15^th April 1945, was that 80 percent of the former 60,000 inmates required hospitalization.

The need to accommodate the many displaced persons was immense, and because of the limitations of resources many former concentration camp inmates found that their first months, and sometimes years, of liberation were spent on territory where they had suffered at the hands of their Nazi captors, and where their family members had been murdered.

The Allies and the United Nations did what they could to repatriate DPs and return them to a sense of normality, as well as providing them with clothes, food and medical services. They were offered education and vocational training, nurseries and creches, as well as being provided with generous weekly rations of cigarettes and a vast array of entertainment, including dances, concerts and films.

However, repatriation and resettlement of DPs and refugees was a more difficult task than originally imagined. The representatives of the Jewish Congress met at Belsen in November 1945 on behalf of all former Jewish inmates of concentration camps in protest against the restrictions on entering Palestine, the preferred destination for Jews. While limiting the numbers entering Palestine, by 1947the British government had accepted some 300,000 persons into the UK.

The report concludes by stating that the British government’s policy of accepting many thousands of refugees and DPs enabled many of them to remain on a permanent basis, get married, have children and make a new life for themselves. And this, essentially, was the best way to counteract the attempts of the Nazis to wipe out their friends, families, neighbours and religion. The report concludes by stating: ‘The lives of those remaining survivors, unlike so many millions of others, fortunately could and did go on.”\’

Like so many others, my family and I will always be grateful to Britain for providing us with a haven and a home at that perilous time.

Image: DP_class_at_Schauenstein_camp, Wikiwand

Musical Associations

Of late I have been spending rather a lot (too much) of my time in dentists’ surgeries. Some of the time I have been too frazzled and stupefied (stupid?) to say anything, and have passively committed myself, body and soul, to the expert care of the professional in charge of first anaesthetizing then torturing me.

But now, after many months of supine acceptance, I have managed to gather up some courage, and on my latest visit to the dentist who is dealing with the latter stages of my treatment I actually asked him to change the channel playing the awful popular music that was in the background while I underwent a lengthy procedure. I must admit that I have never managed to be so bold while at the hairdresser, but that is another matter altogether.

Like me, this dentist is originally from England, though from a different (younger) generation. He told me that he, too, has to have some kind of music in the background while working, mainly to distract him from the noise of the drills he uses. I suggested that his assistant turn the dial on the radio to Israel’s classical music programme, and was even able to give her its exact location. For some unknown reason, she was unable to find it (I told her it was FM), but what she did find was Classic FM, straight from Blighty.

Relaxed and happy, I reclined in the patient’s seat as the strains of the second movement of Dvorak’s symphony no.9, ‘From the New World,’ wafted over me.

“This always reminds me of the Hovis advertisement,” the dentist said.

Hovis? Admittedly, Dvorak incorporated the strains of the spiritual ‘Going Home’ in that symphony, but luckily for me, I left the UK long before some bright advertising executive established that particular connection with industrialised bread, thereby ruining that particular piece of music forever for millions of people.

Or am I being too purist? Instead of regarding the music as something abstract and pristine in and of itself, perhaps using Dvorak’s music in a commercial has made it part and parcel of the British heritage, along with fish and chips and ‘Land of Hope and Glory.’.

And then it dawned on me that this has always been the case. Because my parents took my sisters and myself to see the Walt Disney film, ‘Fantasia’ at the Classic Cinema in Baker Street in the 1950s, whenever I hear Beethoven’s symphony no.6, known as the ‘Pastoral’ symphony, I have visions of little winged centaurs cavorting in a magical countryside, sheltering from the rain and the storm, and delighting in the rising sun at the end. The same goes for Ducas’s ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’ who was, of course, Mickey Mouse himself.

There is a segment of the music Tchaikovsky wrote for the ‘Nutcracker’ ballet that was used in a TV commercial for margarine many years ago, when I still lived in England. And although I have attended several performances of the ballet, I can never get the words ‘Treat yourself to bread and Magic/After all, you do deserve the best’ out of my head when I hear it.

There was also an advertisement for fish paste which used the March of the Toreadors from Bizet’s ‘Carmen.’ Was it sacrilege or benevolence? I still can’t decide.

To this day, whenever I hear Verdi’s Requiem, whether in live performance or on the radio, I cannot fail to remember the precise point at which the first side of the first LP had to be turned over on the record-player we had in my parents’ home, and to which my father liked to listen every Sunday while he worked at his desk in the next room. I can’t remember if the full set consisted of three or four records, but I do know that it was my job to ensure that the full recording was played to the end.

Who knows? Maybe those bright sparks devising TV commercials have done more to popularise classical music than they realise.

Infiltration (Hitganvut Yehidim) by Joshua Kenaz

The death a few months ago of Israeli author, Joshua Kenaz, led to renewed interest in his work, and impelled me to read this book (published by Am Oved in 1986). For me, reading a novel in Hebrew involves embarking on an enterprise that I know in advance will tax my patience and ability to persevere, especially as in this case the book comprises some six hundred pages of closely-printed Hebrew text. However, I decided to stick the course and acquaint myself with the writing of someone who is considered to be a bulwark of contemporary Israeli literature.

I was not disappointed. The book describes the lives and characters of a group of young conscripts, newly recruited to the Israeli army (IDF), the interaction between them, their conflicts, friendships and animosities, as well as the rigorous training regime they are obliged to undergo. In fact, the group of some thirty eighteen-year-old youngsters is a microcosm of Israeli society in the mid-1950s, the period in which the book is set, and reflects the various socio-political values and tensions that prevailed at the time (and in some respects still do).

At first I found it difficult to distinguish between the various individuals, whose differing mental and physical characteristics come to the fore only in the course of their time together as they undergo military training and the harassment, abuse and bullying they are forced to endure from one another and their officers. Gradually we become acquainted with two main groups: youngsters from established, Ashkenazi homes, some of them from Jerusalem though there is also one from a kibbutz in the north, and youngsters whose parents or they themselves have immigrated from one of the countries of North Africa and who are based in temporary housing designated for new immigrants. The efforts of each group to assert its cultural identity lead to clashes on an individual and collective basis, sometimes even deteriorating to violence.

But gradually ‘exceptions’ emerge, individuals who either by accident or design manage to bridge the gap between the two groups, forming alliances with one sub-group or another, whether on the basis of a love of classical music or an act of friendship or bravery during the training process. In some cases the reader gets a glimpse of the home environment and inner mental processes of certain individuals, while with regard to others the description is more remote (the ‘omniscient narrator’ device). At times this can be confusing, and because there is not always a typographical or textual indication of the switch from internal to external narration, I sometimes had to go back and reread a paragraph or two to get my bearing. The author also descends (ascends?) to a certain amount of general philosophizing in the course of the book, which I personally found unnecessary and less interesting. However, at various points in the book I found myself wondering whether my own children and/or grandchildren have had to endure similar experiences, and feeling pity and chagrin in case they had.

But apart from the frequent shifts in the narrative flow of the book, I found it interesting, insightful and illuminating. Kenaz has a keen ear for the speech patterns of young Israelis, whether newcomers or Sabras, and conveys them – grammatical errors and all —  in a convincing manner. I think the book would have benefited from having an editor to weed out unnecessary wordiness, but all in all I recommend it for the way it presents a portrait of Israeli society, its younger generation, their hopes and dreams, similarities and differences, while presaging the future development of that society.

Incidentally, after finishing the book, I found that it has been translated into English (by Dalia Bilu), which I’m sure was no easy task. Nevertheless, I’m glad I made the effort to read the Hebrew original, and think that it would be a good idea for all young Israelis to read it.

Unhinged

The sight of a crowd of people ascending the steps in front of the building and forcibly entering the American House of Representatives, as happened yesterday and was beamed live all around the world, must have sent shudders down the spine of every freedom-loving individual everywhere.

These things happen in less civilized parts of the world, in countries where democracy is not as deeply entrenched as it is – or purported to be – in the USA, such as countries of Latin America, Africa, and even Asia.

But the worst thing of all is that it was encouraged, if not actually instigated, by the person at the top, the person whose task it is to defend the American Constitution and uphold its institutions – the President of the USA.

Since well before the election was held, Donald Trump has been saying quite openly that if the election turned out not to be in his favor then it would evidently have been rigged by his opponents– the Democratic Party. For months, if not years, he has fabricated, cultivated, and sponsored a conspiracy theory regarding the blatant falsification of the election results. And of course, when the actual results came in, he pursued that line with renewed vigor.

Anyone with any acquaintance with modern history cannot fail to make the comparison with the – ultimately successful – attempt to overthrow democracy in Germany of the 1930s. Far be it from me to equate Trump with Hitler, but there can be no doubt that the level of demagoguery and lying is as blatant.

The strength of American democracy is being put to the test and so far it has held up powerfully. Representatives on both sides of the aisles have condemned the barefaced attempt to undermine and overthrow the democratic process. The tragedy is that large numbers of ordinary American citizens seem only too ready to pursue that line of thought and follow it through with action. It goes against the grain to give those people any credit for being loyal American citizens, and it is painful to realize that only a hair’s breadth stood between the current situation and their victory in the polls. Has half of the American nation become as unhinged as its president?

The analogy with Germany of the 1930s stops at this point, thankfully, because the representatives of the nation stood firm and pushed back at this deliberate attempt to overthrow the democratic process. Considering the value Americans attach to their Constitution, their democratic tradition, and the process by which this is achieved, it is hard to believe that people will so lightly toss all that aside.

Unless, of course, they have been fed a diet of racist lies and delusion, leading to a kind of mass madness that is akin to what happened in Germany.

My greatest fear is that others, particularly in Israel, will regard this unfortunate turn of events as an example to be followed.

File:Donald Trump August 19, 2015 …wikimedia

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