Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Commemoration Day

We observed yesterday Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Wellington, with music instead of speeches. Julian Baker and Xin James Jin, two students at the New Zealand School of Music played six pieces, one between each candle lighting, from Bartók's 44 Duos for Violin. They played these on the two violins that Clare Galambos Winter, a survivor of Auschwitz, bequeathed to the School of Music. The music was very appropriate. We remembered not only the approximately six million Jews killed, but an entire civilized world that was lost.. These violin duos are like a sketch book, a source book for Bartók's music, and they represent the greater Hungary that he loved, a land that was a mosaic of many ethnic communities living side by side, with mutual respect. The collection included Slovak, Vlach, Ruthenian, Rumanian, Serb, and even Arab music as well as Hungarian folk music. The people of this music were not 'tolerated', a word widely used in discussing the response to the Holocaust, they were respected. Bartók's musical world was not filled with mythical heroes, titans, supermen, grand romantic notions, but with myriad references to the music of the many people living at peace with each other. So we remembered that the Holocaust was not a huge lost just to the Jewish world but to the entire liberal, humanist Western civilization.

Loyalty

Shane Jones, one of the senior figures in the Labour Party, resigned from Parliament suddenly, Murray McCully, the National Government's Machiavellian fixer as well as minister of foreign affairs offered him newly created ambassadorial post as ambassador to the Pacific Islands with special responsibility for fisheries. This was seen by commentators as a cunning and underhand move to destabilize the Labour Party by removing one of its high profile members with supposedly special appeal to Maori and blue collar voters. McCully may feel pleased with himself, but I believe that he did the Labour Party a favour. There is no room in a political party for public display of disloyalty. Whatever is agreed on in caucus meetings or at party conferences is the accepted policy of the party. Dissenting voices can argue their case at these meetings, but once the policies are agreed on the entire party membership, and senior politicians in particular, should present a united front in support of these policies. Shane Jones, one of the three contenders for party leadership last year, could not accept his defeat, and has continuously criticized the Party's alignment with the Green Party. In the end, he accepted the National Government's blatant bribe, walked out on Labour, creating as much havoc and damage as he could. In the short term his departure is front page news, but when the dust settles it will become clear that the Labour Party is much better off without Shane Jones. The labour Party would have found it difficult to get rid of an embarrassing senior member of the caucus. Murray McCully did them a favour by removing him without the messy business of the Party having to fire him..

War is good

Anzac Day 2014

Ian Morris argues in his book WAR: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? that whereas in the Stone Age 10-20% of people died violently, in the 20th century despite its world wars, just 1-2% died violently.¹  (How he got his statistics for the Stone Age I don't know. I suppose I would have to read his book.) This suggests that war is good, that it reduces casualties because it develops stronger societies. Yet to me, a Jewish historian, seeing history through Jewish eyes, this is a hollow, even meaningless argument. (Read the book!) Between 1941 and 1945, between the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Germany. some 40% of the Jewish population of the world, 6 million out of about 14 million were killed. It is of little comfort to know that this is part of the 1-2%. And later on in the Listener article Morris says that had Hitler won the war, he  'would have faced a retreat from violence and plunder'. True, by then 'instead of killing most of Europe's Jews, he would have killed all of them.' No thank you for such benefits of war. If Jews would be some endangered bird, lizard or frog, the whole world would agitate to protect them. The whole gene pool, the whole ecological system would be threatened by their extinction. Who can even attempt to calculate the damage that the murder of such a high proportion of the Jewish world had caused to the human gene pool and the ecology of human society. 

1 NZ Listener, April 26 2014 p36-37

Hoax or provocation in Donetsk

Donetsk is an industrial city in Eastern Ukraine. On the eve of Pesach armed men handed out leaflets calling on Jews in the city to register their religion and property with the interim pro-Russian government or risk deportation and the loss of their citizenship. No one claimed responsibility for this incident and it was dismissed as a hoax or provocation. But as a hoax it was in spectacularly bad taste. Within living memory, in December 1941, Einzatzcommando-6 murdered several hundred Jews. In April 1942 the Germans took the Jews from the ghetto to the abandoned Maria mine and threw most of them down the shafts alive. They also used gas vans, throwing the bodies into the mine. Some 15,000 Jews were murdered. Provocation it might well have been. Russians have been accusing extreme right wing Ukranians of anti-Semitism. What better way of getting back at the Russians than cooking up this incident to show that the Russians are even worse anti-Semites. There is a precedent of the proposal that the Jews be registered. A Jobbik, right wing member of the Hungarian Parliament came up with such a suggestion. He backed down, he implied that he was misunderstood, but the idea might have taken wings. The Jews of Donetsk have no more involvement in the showdown between the Ukrainian government and those Russian sympathizers who occupy public buildings than other citizens of Donetsk, but yet again, as so many times in the past, Jews are used to confront issues of society that have nothing to do with Jews.

Sanity

I watched The Soloist, a powerful film based on a true, factual account of a talented cellist, Nathaniel Ayres, who had a breakdown while studying at Julliard, and ended up living rough, homeless, in Los Angeles, When Steve Lopez, a Los Angeles Times feature writer came across him. Ayres was obsessed with Beethoven. There are snippets from Beethoven's late quartets and his symphonies right through the film. Perhaps Ayres felt that the discipline imposed at the Julliard School came between him and Beethoven. With the help of Lopez, Ayres was accepted by the the LAMP Community on Skid Row in Los Angeles and there he lived among men and women with severe mental illness.

Whether the perception of mental illness presented in the film is true is something I can't comment on, but there were some interesting insights. When Lopez told David, the director of the institution to take Ayres to a doctor and make him take his medicine, David said that the last thing these people needed was to be told to see a doctor and take their medicine. They chose to live the way they lived. One of the women said that she hears voices talking to her, and these voices are very comforting. If she takes lithium the voices disappear, but to her great regret, so does the reassurance they provide. When Lopez found an apartment for Ayres, Ayres at first refused to move in. He thought that it limited his freedom. He was terrified of being institutionalized. 

Do we treat the schizophrenics and those suffering from a bipolar condition because it suit us, suits society, to make them conform, or do we treat them for their own good? There was no question about it, the mental patients suffered from a sense of insecurity, loneliness. The best thing that Lopez could do for Ayres was to befriend him without trying to change him. He had to accept that for better or worse Ayress is the way he is, would have to live with his mental condition for the rest of his life, but could still get ecstatic joy from the music of Beethoven.

Lost for words

Today, in the middle of a brief conversation, a word dropped out of my mind, the word that would have given purpose and meaning to the conversation. Names have been dropping out of my mind for some time. People have reassured me that this is common, everyone forgets names. But mine is different. I know the name when I started to say what I mean to say, but when I come to articulating the name it is not there. Today the same thing happened to a word. Dementia is a fearful, threatening thing. Losing words is, or could be the beginning of incipient dementia. I try to keep my mind alive, I try to exercise it. But there in the background is the threat that I will end up on a world with no words, with thoughts I can't express and memories I can't share. 

In every generation

We had two lovely Seders at my son's Ben's and daughter-in law's. Geraldine's place. Seders always bring back powerful memories, and this year, as we handed over the responsibility for the Seder to the next generation I thought of the Seders at my grandparents' place in the 1940s, which had a powerful influence on me and my view of my Jewish roots. I must be thinking of about 1940 or 1941, but certainly before 1942, by which time my aunt's,Marta's, first husband, was gone, had died in a military hospital on the Russian front in the wake of the battle of Voronezh where the whole Hungarian army was wiped out. 

I was thinking of the people sitting around the Seder table. They included my grandmother, grandfather and my handicapped aunt, Margitka, us, the four Czegledis, my aunt Marta and her husband Anti, my other grandmother, Matild, then friends and relations, Maca and Sari, my mother's cousins, daughters of my grandfather's sister, Roza, who moved to Budapest from Lugos, where their father, Tauszig, was a municipal officer, a rare occupation for a Jew, such occupations were usually reserved for the gentry or the Christian middle class. The girls virtually grew up with my mother and her sisters, and were like older sisters to them. Then there was the Gross family, Janka, the grandmother, a friend of my grandfather form his bachelor days, Toni, Janka's daughter and my uncle Jules's sister, her husband Kalman, killed in 1944 during the Holocaust, and their son, Andris, I am fairly certain that my grandfather's sister in law, Ella, widow of his late brother, Pali, was also there. My grandfather had such a soft spot for her that he named his daughter after her. Ella starved to death and died in the Budapest ghetto. Her daughter Erzsi was certainly there, with her son, Gyuri. Erzsi was deported in 1944,  died somewhere and, never returned. Gyuri, orphaned, was cared for by my aunt Marta, but as a university student, perhaps even a a lecturer in pharmacology, got involved in the politics of the 1956 uprising. My grandfather and Marta advised him to keep out of politics, but as a hot-headed young man, didn't listen. He was arrested, spent time in prison, and blamed my grandfather and Marta for this. My grandfather's clerk, Policer, was there; a young bachelor, my grandfather's only employee apart from my mother, perhaps the one who looked after the accounts while my grandfather was the sales and marketing man and my mother the secretary. He died somewhere serving in a Jewish labour unit. 

Among the nineteen people, and possibly more, sitting around the table, there were only four children: Jancsi and I, Andris and Gyuri. We were a family already dying out, perhaps the Jews of Hungary and indeed, Europe, were dying out even before they were murdered. 

I found the Seder interminably long. There were no concessions for children, we just sat, listened and ate. Yet the memory of the lavishly set table, the rich meal, the warm family circle left me with such an indelible memory, that there was something I could pass on to my children after all these years.