About my father

Today is my father's yahr-zeit, the anniversary of his death. He died 39 years ago, peacefully, while my mother was out of the room and I was at my son's David's piano recital. David was seven years old. Playing the piano while his grandfather was dying was very appropriate, the handing on of the baton. The piano was a large part of my father's life. He was given a piano for his bar mitzvah, his thirteenth birthday, and lived with a piano all his life. He had an uncommon flair for music, a natural musicianship. As a young man he was the boy who played the piano. Others would gather around him, sing, dance if there was room, while my father, Joska, sat at the piano and player all the current hits and a vast repertoire of Hungarian songs. In his prime, he also accompaniedin Schubert songs a family friend, General Bauer, who prided himself on his singing voice. His piano playing was curtailed when while cutting a slice of dry bread he cut the tendon of his thumb. He was in the Jewish unarmed unit of the Hungarian army. With this injury he was sent home for treatmen. This might have saved his life, but his hand was never the same again. Nor was he ever in the mood to play as he used to after surviving Mauthausen and witnessing the atrocities that he lived through, after Vadasz Miklos and his son Bandi, Reshovsky Peter, Singer Odon and others, all part of my parents group of close intimate friends were killed. 

I suppose my father had a good death. He died at the age of 75 of lung cancer. He lived to see my brother, Janos again, then had the lung-heart machine turned off and fell asleep. He thought that the years after a bullet narrowly missed him while he was marched from the main camp of Mauthaisen to the sub-camp of Gunzkirchen as bonus. He survived because he had a strong will to live and see his children, Janos and me again. Bringing us up was his life mission. When he was liberated from the camp he was a scarcely living skeleton. For weeks he lay in a hospital unconscious. Against the odds he pulled through, worked to make a precarious living, and ultimately achieved his ambition, emigrated to New Zealand where he enjoyed the stress-free life. He was an unambitious man. He didn't want to make a fortune. Yet as a laborer he worked all the overtime available, trying to set up a business he worked though half the night. Later he valued his leisurely life as a public servant. He enjoyed his garden. He also enjoyed friendship. He was someone whom people and animals loved spontaneously. Wherever he went, dogs, chickens, all animals followed him. And people from all walks of life loved him. There was something about his smile, about his laughter, and about his love of music that endeared him to all. So today I lit a candle in his memory and thought about him. When my mother and father got married my mather wanted to buy him a kittle, a burial shroud, as was customary, but my father said, should they be in such happy circumstances that he could be buried in a kittle it would be time to get one. These were prophetic words. In the end he did get buried in a kittle and despite all the hardships he lived though, he had a good life.

Then destructions of civilizations

An article in the New Yorker by John Seabrook about the problems of deciphering scrolls found in a library destroyed in the Herculaneum eruption made me think of the rise and fall of civilizations. Those who excavated the library had hoped that some of the missing volumes of the ancient world would be discovered among these scrolls. I didn't know that none of the works of Epicurus survived, that Livy's hundred and forty two volumes on the History of Rome only thirty-five survived, of the nine volumes of verse of Sapho only one complete poem remains, only a handful of the many plays of the great Greek dramatists, Euripides. Sophocles and Aeschylus remain. Civilizations come and go, they reach their prime, often for only a generation or two, then Barbarians come and irretrievable destroy them. Bernard Lewis pointed out that in Iran, a modern Islamic name for Persia, no one is called Cyrus, Darius or Nebuchadnezzar, prominent figures of the ancient Persian civilization. The great Persian, Parthian and Zoroastrian civilizations of the ancient world are forgotten. Empires that once flourished in Central and Eastern Europe, Dacians, Thacians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Vlachs, Avars, Magyars, and others are only remembered as calls to arms to restore past great glories at the expense of other local people. With terrorist attacks in the heartland of European civilization, not to mention the Middle-East and Africa, civilizations that we take for granted are in danger of going the way the Roman, Greek, Persian and Egyptian Empires went. People who destroy Palmyra have no compunction about destroying Paris, New York, or Moscow. 

Music banned by the Nazis

An interesting and challenging concert will be broadcast next Tuesday, November 24, at 8 pm on the RNZ Concert Programme. It was recorded at last years NZ School of Music Conference on Suppressed Music. The programme will feature the Cello Concerto of Myeczyslaw Weinberg, a Jewish composer, born in Warsaw, who fled to Russia, became a close friend of Shostakovich, who saved him from Stalin's terror. It will also include the Introduction and Final scene from The Emperor of Atlantis, by Victor Ullmann, a chamber opera that he wrote while in Theresienstadt. Ullmann was one of the group of composers along with Gideon Klein and Hans Kràsa who were taken from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and were killed there. But for a New Zealand audience, the most interesting work will be the world premier of Vom Jüdischen Schiksal (The Jewish Fate) by German-Jewish composer, Richard Fuchs, a successful architect and composer in Karlsruhe, who settled in New Zealand in 1939, after he was freed from Dachau. This setting of four poems by the great German Jewish poet, Karl Wolfskehl won a prestigious prize awarded by the German Kulturbund. It is written for choir, soloists and a large orchestra, Nazi authorities refused permission for its performance and its score, copied, ready for rehearsal, languished in the Turnbull Library all these years. The Nazis did not have to give reasons for their decisions, but the comments of Michael Haas, scholar of music banned by the Nazis might shed light on it. He wrote after hearing the work performed that 'Fuchs's large-scale work for chorus and orchestra entitled Vom jüdischen Schicksal – of Jewish Destiny, presented listeners with an unsettling challenge. If composers such as Zeisl, Rettich, Schoenberg, Toch and even Korngold dipped a compositional toe into the waters of ‘Jewish’ music, Fuchs offered a more disturbing dialectic. He took a Jewish setting by Karl Wolfskehl and set it to music that was defiantly German. As Prof. Tim Jackson observed in an accompanying documentary, Fuchs wrote music using the language ‘of the perpetrator’. … He wrote the most ‘German’ music he could, which he set to the most Jewish German text he could find. The result was its banning by the Nazi authorities from performance at the Jüdischer Kulturbund. No official explanation was offered, but hearing Vom jüdischen Schicksal it becomes quite clear that Fuchs’s sound-world of Schumann through a Wagnerian prism, was simply too shamelessly German and not sufficiently ‘Jewish’. Incidentally, Karl Wolfskehl also lived the last years of his life in New Zealand. His book Die Stimme spricht, which included the four poems Richard Fuchs set to music, was his response in poetry of a German Jew to the events of 1933, a document of the mood of a cultural stratum of German Jewry in the midst of its final catastrophe. [ KARL WOLFSKEHL, 1933 A Poem Sequence, New York, 1947, Introduction]

Unintended consequences

On March 13, 1881, Ignacy Hryniewiecki assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Alexander II was the most successful reformer, whose achievements, among many other measures, included the liberation of serfs. His assassination was followed by a setback of the reform movement, brutal repression, and anti-Jewish pogroms. On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot dead in Sarajevo the heir to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The assassination led directly to the outbreak of the First World War. On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish student in Paris, shot dead the Third Secretary of the German Embassy, Ernst von Rath. This was used by the Nazis as the ostensible reason for their already prepared pogrom, Kristallnacht, to intimidate German Jews as well as German people in general. Abdelhamid Abaaoud masterminded the six simultaneous terrorist attacks in Paris this week. It is too early to know what the unintended consequences of this attack will be. So far in retaliation, French fighters bombed the Syrian city of Raqqa, the stronghold and de facto capital of ISIS in Syria, just as Americans attacked Afghanistan after the 9 November 2001 terrorist attack on the twin towers in New York. A few individual;s can set in motion vast events with unimaginable consequences. Perhaps one of the hopeful consequences of the Paris atrocity will be that the Russians, Americans, European powers, and even the Chinese, will agree on a common strategy to eliminate terrorism. Perhaps this will lead to ISIS and its affiliates being wiped out. But don't hold your breath. As long as there are people who believe in the absolute correctness of their beliefs, beliefs that they are prepared to sacrifice their own life for, beliefs for which they are prepared to commit unspeakable acts, for which they will be rewarded in a nebulous afterlife, terrorism cannot be eliminated. Treasure and protect doubt. You may be right, you believe that you are right, but perhaps there lurks a tiny amount of doubt in your mind, which makes you respect other people's beliefs.

The incomprehensible attacks on Paris

The simultaneous attacks in Paris this week are hard to comprehend. It is hard to get inside the minds of the perpetrators, the suicide bombers and assassins, who go in to kill people unknown to them, for no clear reasons, with no objectives or benefits in mind. At present we don't know who these perpetrators were. The media blames ISIS, but they were individuals, most likely young men who grew up in France, who were educated in France, and enjoyed the tolerant liberal culture of France. How could they decide to sacrifice their lives for a vague cause like establishing the Caliphate in Europe? I am looking for parallels in recent European history. In the 1970s the Red Army faction, also popularly know as the Baader – Meinhof Gang even after the death of both Baader and Meinhof, terrorized Europe. They were held responsible for 34 deaths, numerous kidnappings and 296 bomb attacks. Their target was predominantly Germany that covered up its Nazi past, where former highly placed Nazis continued to hold public office and wield power, and supported American policy that they considered imperialist, including the Vietnam war, the support for the Shah of Persia and support for many African and Latin American dictators. Some of the members of the Red Army Faction were trained by Palestinian groups and identified with the fate of Palestinians. One of their leader, Horst Mahler, is a vocal Neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier to this day. The Red Army Faction was a movement hard to understand in its time, and it was impossible to get inside the minds of the perpetrators of their crimes, but at least people had an inkling of their objectives. The terrorism of the the decades between early 1970s and late 1990s in Europe created mayhem, but the perpetrators were clearly identified, their cause, however misguided, was fairly clear. The current attacks on Paris by unknown individuals, belonging to no movement that claims responsibility for the atrocity, with no clear objectives is beyond comprehension.

Recreating the world

I bought a thrown out copy of Diana Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife in the library. Our librarian, the head honcho, has a passion for throwing out books. There is now a whole floor without books. Forget stack rooms, storage, floor to ceiling library shelves. Our librarian decided that apart from some light fiction, books don't belong to publicly funded libraries in this electronic age. Whole sections of the library disappeared. I happened to know a little about the The Zookeeper's Wife, a friend talked about it a while ago, so I had to save it from oblivion. It is a fascinating account of the wife of the keeper of the Warsaw zoo, who used the zoo and its cages to save people escaping from the Warsaw ghetto. But it is also the story of Poland, annihilated by the Germans during the war, the destruction of first the Warsaw ghetto, and later by the whole city. But I was particularly interested in the idea of recreating the world in an idealized way fuelled by the romantic Nazi imagination. Underpinning the Nazi rationale for waging war on Slavs, Jews, races they considered inferior, was a false analogy with the animal kingdom. Slaughtering or enslaving the entire population of vast regions was justified by the need for lebensraum for a superior dominant race. The fact that Germans were far from superior or dominant in European history, that until a millennium ago they were scattered primitive tribes on the fringes of civilization, did not enter into consideration. What the Nazis dreamed about was the recreation of an Arcadian German world, with wild animals that roamed the primeval forests that the German tribes had inhabited way back. Some of these animals had become extinct, but using the theories of of the pseudo-science of eugenics, the otherwise sane and educated but sadistic zoologist, Lutz Heck, attempted to breed from existing animals animals that had disappeared. That in the course of recreating the dead he had to destroy the living was of no concern to him. To recreate the idealized Germanic world, the Nazis had to destroy the existing real world. They were amazingly successful. Within five years the whole of Poland and much of the Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, as well as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and much of the Balkan lands was destroyed. But so was Germany. The crazy romantic dream ended up with the reality of heaps of rubble an ruins throughout Europe. How could this happen? How could so many be swayed by the semi-literate rants of a half educated failed painter is something that is still not really understood.

Films that asked questions about life and history

Over the last week I saw two films, Tito's Glasses (Titos Brille) made by Regina Schilling, and Farewell Herr Schwarz, made by Yael Reuveny.These were part of the Since 1945; Image, Memory, Testimony, series of films put on by the Goethe Institute in association with the Holocaust Centre of NZ, with the German and the Israeli Embassies. Both of these films were autobiographical. Neither of these lives were remarkable. The only reason for making the films is that they said something about the age, about the world since the Second World War. Tito's Glasses is a charming, delightful road movie. Regina Schilling traces the lives of her family, in particular, her father, an eminent doctor, a radiologist, and at one time Tito's personal physician and fellow partisan. She makes great use of old 8 mm films that her father made about the family. Like many families that survived the years since the war, her family had a colourful story. Her parents were both Yugoslav partisans and devoted communists. He was a doctor, she and architect. Then through the capricious fortune of people living in a totalitarian world, he was thrown into prison, the rest of the family escaped and ended up in Germany. Upon his release, he too made it to Germany, where he had a successful career. But they left communism behind. She, Regina Schilling's mother, took up Jewish causes, while her father enjoyed philandering. Tracing her family story takes Regina Schilling though some spectacular scenery in Croatia. She meets her aunt in Italy, who would never set foot in Croatia again, her uncle, who stayed in Split all his life and never wanted to live anywhere else. If there are profound questions about Jews, partisans, bravery and resistance, communism in Yugoslavia, and the failure of the successors of Tito to hold the disparate parts of Yugoslavia together after Tito's death Regina Schilling doesn't ask them. This is where she came from, she implies, with all its unsolved conundrums remaining unsolved. Incidentally Tito didn't wear glasses, her father's claim to have mended them was typical of his unreliable make-believe claims. Farewell Herr Schwarz tackled the burden of the Holocaust on the second and third generations. Yael Reuveny's grandmother survived the Holocaust, moved to Israel, but always harboured the memory of her suffering, but in particular, the memory of her brother, who survived and was supposed to meet her after the war at the Lodz railway station and didn't turn up. She assumed that he died in a fire, but didn't try to trace him. Her brother ended up marrying a German woman in the small town where he was liberated from the concentration camp in which he was an inmate. We meet the second generation, Yael's mother, and the son of her mother's brother, and ultimately, the grandson of her mother's brother, who developed an interest in his grandfather's Jewish roots. The story is not exceptional, there must be many instances of people surviving the camps and leaving the burden of their Jewish heritage behind. There are also many instances of people who define themselves as survivors of the Holocaust. What the film lacked is empathy, an insight to really understand these survivors. The grandmother didn't bother to trace her brother, because she, a devout orthodox Jew from Vilna, was not prepared to accept that her brother married a German woman who was not Jewish and one of the people who perpetrated the destruction of the Jews of Europe. Her brother didn't bother to trace his sister, because he knew that being married to a woman who was not Jewish, having children by her, would not be acceptable to his sister. But there are unexplored questions about both brother and sister. The sister was never completely adjusted to her life in Israel, a secular world so far from the world of Vilna that she grew up in, her children sabras, unable to comprehend the terrible experiences she had had. The brother married a woman from the small town that was the site of the concentration camp where he was incarcerated. What did he see in her? What did she see in him, a prisoner, a member of a downtrodden race? And how did the children reconcile the irreconcilable worlds of their parents? They coped with these issues in silence. They never talked about the past. The past was a forbidden territory.