Hazel McHaffie

Jews

A Gypsy in Auschwitz

We know so much about the massacre of Jews by the Nazis but rarely hear of the murder of 500,000 Sinti and Roma people in the same frenzy of racial hatred. A Gypsy in Auschwitz by Otto Rosenberg is the story of one of the few survivors, a tale told with remarkable simplicity, made the more real by photos of the author’s family members.

Otto Rosenberg was born in East Prussia in 1927 to a German Sinti family. His parents separated shortly after his birth, and at the age of 2-3 months he was sent to live with his grandmother in Berlin, followed shortly afterwards by his older sister and brother. Though they lived in a caravan and moved from site to site, they did not travel in the way most Sinti families did.
The women made a living peddling goods and telling fortunes, while the men wove baskets, crafted tables and chairs from root timber and decorated cabinets.

Most Sinti men worked busking or selling goods from panniers or in hard construction jobs. Many were gifted musicians – singing, playing guitars, violins, double bass, accordions, zithers, and Otto grew up revelling in the wonderful stories told around the camp fire. His mother’s family were highly respected among their kind, avid readers who could write beautifully  – the go-to experts if anyone needed information or documentation.

It was genuinely a very peaceful existence.

They moved into an apartment in Sandbacher Weg in the Altglienicke-Bonsdorf district, retaining their covered wagon, and for the first time the children went to school. Otto experienced his share of discrimination as ‘dirty gypsy scum’ (though in reality they were always clean and clad albeit in darned and mended clothes and rough-hewn clogs) but he fought back valiantly. Even as a youngster he appreciated kindness – handouts by the Quakers or better-off children or local nuns. And for his part he always tried to be industrious and helpful – which reaped its own rewards.

Then in 1936, the Nazis began to tear the travelling people from their homes.
Morning after morning, they went to certain huts or caravans and took people away, never to be seen again.
Otto was just 9 when Stormtroopers and police loaded his family into trucks and carted them off to Berlin-Marzahn concentration camp on a scorched site surrounded by a sewage farm which stank permanently.

More and more people arrived constantly and were crowded together in hastily assembled shacks with corrugated iron roofs, Infections and diseases were rife. Severe limits were placed on their freedoms, police guarded the entrance, and Otto was obliged to help with basic chores of subsistence, though the local people got to know them and did what they could to offer small extras.

Then came the race researchers. They went systematically from hut to hut, caravan to caravan, interviewing as to background, family pedigree and provenance. Otto was selected as a research subject for tests and experiments.

In 1938 the young men were transported to other camps; few returned. Otto himself seemed to be popular as a lad and applied himself to the hard work demanded of him, but at the age of 15 he was sent to prison for ‘theft of Wehrmacht property‘ and ‘sabotage‘. He spent 4 months in solitary confinement – 16 weeks all alone at age 15! On his release he was immediately re-arrested and sent to Auschwitz.

Ill health and an appeal saw him transferred to the gypsy camp where his beloved grandmother was, and he worked there until July 1944, when he was transferred to Buchenwald. There he discovered a few hitherto unknown relatives, none of whom subsequently survived the incarceration. Otto though, had a distinct advantage over those inmates who were newly off the trains – he knew exactly what was going on and was able to take preventative action. At one point he even managed to bring his skeletal weight up to near-normal by dint of eating dog food.

He was moved once more, this time to Bergen-Belsen, and it was from there that he was eventually rescued by allied forces.

In the book, he repeatedly laments the loss of humanity in the camps – not just the brutality of the Nazis but perhaps harder to bear, the self-serving behaviour of the victims incarcerated in the camps.
The camp stripped us of any sense of right and wrong. Our minds were destroyed and our nerves so tattered that we stopped seeing anyone else at all. If an inmate saw an opportunity to strike someone dead, they would seize it; there was no longer any inner voice stopping them … We’re not talking about humans any more.

Occasional acts of kindness fill him with joy – it’s like the sun coming out from behind clouds. But the biggest question that haunts him is: Why did I survive?
I keep coming back to a single question: why did I survive? And I simply don’t have the answer. Out of my whole family, including all my siblings and everyone dear to me, not a single one stood a chance of survival. And that’s in spite of the fact that my brothers were much bigger and stronger than me – I was the smallest of the lot! I can’t get my head around it … all I can think about is my brothers and sisters, and how they were taken, and even now it’s hard to find joy in this world.

As the years since this atrocity go on, the thousands of persecuted Roma and Sinti must not be allowed to be forgotten or overlooked.

 

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Charlotte Gray

Oh the joy of sinking into beautifully written fiction and gripping narrative! Particularly so as I’ve been wading through a couple of texts on moral philosophy, and started a novel that was so uninspiring and ‘so-what-ish’ that I abandoned it half way through – a rare thing for me. I shan’t bore you with references to the former, or name and shame the latter, but I will share the magnificent work which has brightened my week.

It’s Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks. I loved the delicacy and skill of his Birdsong, so it comes as no surprise that in Charlotte Gray Faulks evokes the same emotions. A tender, tentative, love story between two flawed people in wartime – urgent because of the uncertainty of life; enduring because of the desire to find anchors and permanence in the face of imminent extinction.

The year is 1942. Peter Gregory, fighter pilot/airman, secret agent, is used to feeling vulnerable, flying in ‘nothing more than a few pieces of airborne metal and wood  … a few inches from his eyes was a fuel tank waiting to explode‘. He knows all too well that on his low-level raids there are anti-aircraft guns waiting to blast him out of the sky, he is haunted by the premature deaths of so many young colleagues, and yet he seeks further danger, perhaps even to die himself.

Charlotte Gray, a child of the war years, is from the Highlands originally, more recently living in Edinburgh.  She’s fluent in French, with a degree in French and Italian. During her formative years she spent time in the country, both on exchange visits and with her father going to visit the war graves occupied by his old comrades. Charlotte is only dimly aware of how damaged by his experiences her father is, but the hovering sensation of betrayal and violation is partially resurrected by the psychiatric evaluation she undergoes before going to France again.

Instant mutual attraction brings Peter aka Greg and Charlotte together when they meet at a literary party in London, but it’s a fragile relationship, laden with baggage from the past, the urgency of the present, and the uncertainties of the future. Both are determined to contribute meaningfully to the war effort, knowing each parting may be their last.

And then Greg goes missing on a secret mission. Information is hard to come by.

Charlotte redoubles her efforts to get to occupied France on military business, where she can employ her own fluency with the language to find out what has happened to him. The process of preparing to be a courier is rigorous but she passes with distinction. She’s given a new French identity, a new cover story. The attention to detail in transforming her is impressive – not only hair style and colour altered radically, every shred of clothing French, but dust from the right area of France lining her pockets. Even her fillings are drilled out and replaced by a heavy gold French mixture. Only one tiny detail is overlooked … pubic hair!!

Being active liberates her, and gives value to her life, but she is still driven by her desire to find Greg. So, having successfully completed her first mission, she takes an unauthorised extension to start the search. But life in the country with which she has always felt such an affinity is very different under enemy occupation. Suspicion and fear are everywhere. Who can be trusted?

She finds shelter with a young man, Julien Levade, aka Octave, also working as part of the resistance movement. But an aura of danger surrounds Julien, himself three eighths Jewish, who has already rescued two young Jewish boys whose parents have been deported. However, his eccentric father needs a housekeeper, so Charlotte, under an assumed name, takes on this post to give her additional cover and credibility.

In places the story is so harrowing I had to go away and do something mundane – as when someone betrays the whereabouts of those two little French boys and we watch them being transported in cattle trucks to Poland, and then accompany them to the very door of the gas chamber – two tiny naked figures, heads shorn, clutching a tin soldier in one clenched fist. The weight of sadness feels unbearable.

Without drama, without hyperbole, Faulks somehow maintains suspense subtly but effectively, whether it’s the tension of parachuting into a foreign country, moving around under an assumed identity, making contact with unknown people, navigating unknown towns, delivering people and packages, keeping secret assignations, facing betrayal. He captures the incongruities of things people will do under extreme stress or duress. He writes with such delicacy of the emotions of those snatching at passing opportunities, all too aware of the fleeting nature of life.

Charlotte Gray is a powerful backdrop to some of the most heinous crimes committed against humanity whilst gently exploring the power of love to transcend such blackness. A brilliantly written book.

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Holocaust Child

Having recently been thinking about the Holocaust in association with International Holocaust Memorial Day, I was drawn to another book in my tbr pile: Holocaust Child: Lalechka, by Amira Keidar. It’s based on a journal written by a Jewish mother, Zippa Jablon-Zonsheim, recording the horrors which befell Poland when the Germans invaded, authenticated by interviews with key figures from the time, rare documents, photographs and actual letters exchanged.

Even before the war, tensions existed between Poles and Jews, but Zippa as a schoolgirl made firm friendships with girls from both cultures, particularly two Polish Christian girls, Sophia and Irena. University, marriage and the isolation caused by the polarisation of the Jews drove distance between them as the years went by, hardships and inequalities exacerbated their differences, and they rarely met. In 1941, forced out of their home and into a vastly overcrowded, disease-ridden, derelict ghetto, Zippa despairs for the baby she is expecting, due to be born into a world devoid of hope. Wouldn’t it be better never to exist? But even though the restrictions and hardships imposed by the Nazis grow ever more harsh, on the day a wire fence is erected around the ghetto to further limit movement and supplies, she gives birth to a daughter, Rachel aka Lalechka – ‘a drop of happiness in an ocean of despair‘. Zippa is absolutely and fiercely determined to do whatever it takes to keep this precious baby alive and safe, and it’s to her old school-friends she turns.

Just before Lalechka’s first birthday, the Nazis begin the liquidation of the ghetto,  systematically murdering everyone in it, and Zippa smuggles the child, a letter of explanation and three photos, outside the boundary of the Jewish quarter to a waiting Irena and Sophia. Sophia has arranged a safe place for Zippa too but, after a few days there, she returns to the ghetto to look for her husband and parents, wracked with guilt for having left them. Outside, Sophia and Irena too face grave danger and summary execution for pretending the little girl is part of their family. They live in a state of constant terror – for themselves and their families as well as Rachel.
Anyone willfully sheltering Jews or aiding them in other ways will incur the death penalty …Henceforth this rule will be executed severely and without mercy.

The outcome was never going to be a happy one, and the barbarism and cruelty which determined the fate of so many thousands of human beings are hard to hear.  But in the midst of the blackness, the story of devotion and bravery and loyalty between these Polish and Jewish girls transcends the divides, and the survival of Zippa’s baby feels like a triumph of love over hate. Which makes the post-war behaviour of many Poles towards Jews who survived – continuing hostility, abuse and even murder – the harder to understand and bear. I’ve read and written about this before but it never ceases to appall me. Imagine surviving the unspeakable horrors of Nazi brutality, concentration camps, starvation in war time, only to be vilified and hounded by one’s neighbours in peace time too.

But Zippa had left her own instructions for her daughter:
I ask you that after the end of the war you’ll look for my brother who immigrated to Palestine and give him this small child.
And between them Sophia and Irena do just that. Shimon has his own burdens though, having survived a very different kind of war as a POW for years. Even in the new homeland of Israel there is precious little stability or security for Rachel.

It’s a harrowing premise for a story, and the alternating accounts from Zippa, Sophia and Irena (and later two other voices, Rachel herself and her uncle Shimon) give a window onto the lived experience of persecution, bombings, deprivation, and all-pervasive fear as they see their beloved country destroyed, their culture desecrated, and they face appalling choices.

Somehow the literary deficiencies in the telling add authenticity to this account of life in another country at a time of unprecedented horror.

Zippa’s diary: Will people who didn’t live near these events ever believe it? Can anyone believe that what I write here is the truth and nothing but the truth?

It’s certainly painful to absorb this incomprehensible truth.

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Survivlng the War

The current situation in Ukraine, with the graphic images we’re seeing on our screens, is reminding us so much of the horrors perpetrated during the Second World War, isn’t it? And the thought of so many families running from, or hiding from the Russian onslaught, taking refuge in neighbouring countries like Poland, takes me to a book I read some months ago – events in the 1940s resonating strongly with what’s happening in 2022.

Though I’ve read many many accounts of the persecution of the Jews, Surviving the War is the first about that faction in Poland who sought refuge in the vast forests and swamplands where the organised army would have trouble reaching them. It may not be as familiar as stories of the concentration camps, but it makes sobering reading, with its tales of betrayal and persecution by fellow countrymen as well as the Nazis.

WARNING: This post contains spoilers

Basing her material on a composite of real-life stories, Adiva Geffen, paints an idyllic picture of simple rural life in Poland before the war, with Jews and Gentiles living in harmony in a small village, joining in each other’s religious festivals, caring, sharing and supporting each other. As Avraham says in the book: ... we are one people, their language is our language and their culture is our culture … [and] we have God … the Poles are our brothers – we are united in this.

In her youth, Shurka Shidlovsky grows up both fascinated by, and fearful of, the dark and dangerous Parczew Forest, shrouded in myth and legend. But she lives in a happy family, joyfully observing all the Jewish festivals and holidays, completely oblivious to the horrors to come.

By the age of 15, Shurka is already beautiful and ready to leave school. She and her mother hold out for her to train in a profession/trade and she leaves home for one year to study sewing. City life is a revelation, but she keeps an anchor in the familiar by travelling home for the weekends. It’s during her wedding to the son of a prosperous merchant family, Avraham Orlitzky, that the first hint of trouble casts its long shadow: a young refugee couple appear who have escaped from Berlin as Hitler begins his terrible regime. The year is 1937.

But the innocents in Eastern Poland refuse to believe the stories; it’s nothing more than a ‘passing posturing’. Until, that is, the Germans invade Poland. This time the danger is impossible to ignore. Avraham has no choice but to wear the yellow star, but still he’s reluctant to move his pregnant wife, naively confident that their Polish friends will look after them. And even world leaders choose to ignore the signs of terror that have begun to form a crack in the world – the looting, confiscations, expulsions, eliminations. The year is 1939.

It’s only when, in 1941, Avraham is sent to a labour camp, that he begins to lose hope, and the realisation spurs him into action. The family begin a nomadic life, fleeing from one place of refuge to another, with two children in tow: Irena, and a frail little boy, Yitzhak.

As they move from her parents’ house, to an abandoned pavilion, to a vastly overcrowded Jewish ghetto, experience teaches them that, far from all being brothers, nobody is to be trusted. Brutality and lawlessness are rife. It’s the end of all security, all connections with their past. It’s the beginning of 1942.

And then the Final solution swings into action. News of the crematoria and death showers reaches the Orlitzky family: Horrors not even the devil could have imagined, and they realise that the ghettos have become not just ‘natural death’ chambers through starvation, but now also transfer stations to the concentration camps, extermination camps and forced labour camps. The Parczew Forest is the only place of safety left to them, and they must flee while the ghetto gates remain open. It is August 1942 – just one month before all the Jews left in the ghetto are sent to Treblinka and certain death.

Life in the vast forest is precarious in a different way. And indeed, more people perished there than survived. Shurka and her family camp alongside resistance fighters, Jewish partisans. They are forced to dig their own underground bunkers, camouflage them with branches, scavenge for food, be ready to move immediately if the Germans gain intelligence of their whereabouts, leaving no trace of their presence, only to start again from scratch.

Life even inside the bunkers is fraught with peril. The Jews are huddled together, forbidden to utter a sound, not even to cough. The Germans periodically approach with their weapons and dogs. On one occasion, baby Yitzhak starts crying, refusing any comfort, endangering the whole camp. What is Shurka to do? The account is too tragic and poignant to recount; you have to read it through her eyes.

As winter clenches its frozen fists on the forest, they are again on the move, this time to an old granary, courtesy of a sympathetic peasant, where they live in complete silence for nine weeks and five days. Suspicious neighbours eventually drive them back into the forest. Though Avraham is the king of plenty, obtaining basic provisions under cover of darkness, nevertheless disease, death, constant deprivation, unremitting fear, take their toll. It is 1943.

The threat grows ever closer. The Germans set fire to the forest to drive the hidden Jews out. Then with more precise information from informants, they throw grenades directly  into the bunkers. Shurka and her daughter survive because they have crawled onto a high shelf; but almost all her family are killed in that terrible raid. Alone now, they must once again flee, this time to a series of old granaries or barns during the harsh winter months, imperilling the farmers who grant them shelter, using silverware and jewellery to pay for their silence, capitalising on friendships and allegiances from Avraham’s successful business days. But with spring comes a return to the forest. It is March 1943.

By that September, the Third Reich begins to crumble, but the forest families are by no means safe. They spend another frozen winter hidden in a spacious barn belonging to an avaricious couple of Poles, in a remote village surrounded by swamps. Always silent, constantly vigilant. Irena by now is six years old. It’s while they are there, as the war draws to a close, that tragically, Avraham is killed while out on one of his night-time scavenges. Shurka decides she must return to the forest to seek out those she knows, unaware that the Germans have retreated, the battle over.

Just twenty-two days later, on Sunday 23 July 1944, the people of the Parczew Forest are liberated, marched away, leaving behind the graves of their loved ones. They are free to return to look for the Poland they had lost, but carrying a terrible burden of pain for the rest of their days. And it would take time to fully trust these Russian men who had come with the offer of release. Was it all a trap? After all, their compatriots in the concentration camps in the west are still being sent to their deaths.

Sadly, the reception that awaits them in Poland is one of outright hostility, revealing a hidden anti-Semitism that hurts deeply from supposed brothers. New persecutions follow. And once again the Jews are in hiding, as murderous men rampage through the streets and houses. After losing so much, however, the few forest survivors crave connection, love and intimacy. Suddenly men are in hot pursuit of Shurka. She soon finds new love with a man who lost his own wife and children in Treblinka, and together they resolve to set their sights on the future, not to look back. They marry in November and a son Yaakov is born in August 1945. They eventually begin the slow process of leaving Poland behind, to seek a new life with their fellow Jews in the new State of Israel. The year is 1948.

Shurka’s story challenges me as so many levels:
Would I have the courage to endure such hardship?
Would I endanger my family to protect strangers?
Would I sacrifice my son to save the wider community?
Would I retain faith in God in the face of such horror?

Unanswerable. Uncomfortable. Unimaginable.

 

 

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The seeds of peace

I’ve lost track of the number of books I’ve read about the persecution of the Jews, and the Holocaust, but the horror never fails to move me deeply.

One which has haunted me is The Twins of Auschwitz, first published in 2009. I read it ages ago, but it has remained with me.

It’s a first person story told by Eva Mozes Kor, with the assistance of Lisa Rojani Buccieri. Eva was one of those twins who arrived at the gates of horror, clutching the hand of her identical twin … and survived. One pair of around 3000 children chosen for experimentation.

Every protective instinct in my being is stirred listening, through the perceptions of a six-year-old child, to how innocent Jewish families were taunted and victimised by the locals in Romania, how hatred was infused into their minds, even before the concentration camps began their unspeakable work. And I’m so many steps removed. What must it have been like to be parents, helpless in the face of such ugly harassment, hounded out of their home, forced into ghettos, powerless to resist or reassure their children, haunted by guilt about their failure to escape from their country while they could?

The utter terror that consumes the twins, Eva and Miriam, when they are deported, separated from their families, is heart-breaking. On the Auschwitz selection platform, Eva’s memory is of …
Crying, crying, crying. The crying of children for parents. The crying of parents for their babies. The crying of people confused and bewildered. The crying of people who saw with certainty that their nightmares had come true. All together, the cries resounded with the ultimate and most unimaginable pain of human loss. emotional grief, and suffering.

Their parents and older sisters are sent one way – the way leading to the gas chambers; they are directed in the other. It was the biological accident of being twins that gave the girls access to ‘privileged treatment’. Privilege? A relative term. They find themselves in a filthy stinking barn with a few hundred other twins aged 2 to 16. Auschwitz.

The old photos of Auschwitz in Kor’s book make the whole thing even more gut wrenching – the emaciated bodies, the shaved heads, the aloneness of small children, a smiling and handsome Dr Josef Mengele. Even the family shots hurt – they so much resemble the ones of my own family taken in the same era; same poses, same fashions, same required smiles. But a world apart.

Mengele is there on the selection platform, he’s there in the packed dormitories, he’s there in Birkenau, carrying out his dastardly experiments, obsessed with finding the secrets of genetics in order to create a master race of blond blue-eyed Aryans. The Jewish twins are his guinea pigs.

Though acutely aware that they’re alive because of an accident of nature, the twins have no option but to do as they are told. To sit completely naked for up to 8 hours amongst hundreds of twins – both boys and girls – leered at by SS guards, feeling dehumanised and excruciatingly embarrassed. To undergo hours of measurements and comparisons and blood taking and injections of pathological products and X-rays. Very little is known about exactly what Mengele did in these experiments, apart from damaging one twin in order to compare the effects between the two, sometimes even killing both in order to obtain autopsy results. Beyond evil and barbaric.

Back at Auschwitz, inhaling the putrid stench of a combination of Zyklon B with hydrogen cyanide and diatomite – the chemical mix for the mass murder in the gas chambers – mixed with burning flesh and bones:
It is not a smell a human can ever forget.
Scavenging any morsel of food and water they can. Forced to observe hangings, dead bodies being trundled by in carts, naked bodies left lying in the latrine.

At Auschwitz, dying was easy. Surviving was a full-time job.

After the Nazis have fled the camp, when Eva eventually sees someone on the outside, clean, smartly dressed, going to school, she’s consumed by anger and incomprehension.  How could the world know what was going on and do nothing? How indeed?

And then the Soviet troops arrive to release them. The girls are 11 years old. Their only ambition is to go home and be reunited with their parents and sisters, of whom they’ve heard nothing. But, not only is the family no more, the house wrecked and empty, but the neighbours want nothing to do with them. Even when they go to the protection of an aunt, life under the communists in this war-ravaged Romania is harsh. Once more food and possessions are confiscated, people disappear. Anti-Semitism is still rife.

They plan to leave for Palestine as their father had urged them to do, but it takes over two years to obtain exit visas. They are 16 when they finally set sail for their new home: the land of freedom; the new nation of Israel. Now at last, there will surely be no more anti-Semitism, only encouragement to celebrate their Jewish heritage. Surely.

But the harassment starts up again when Eva marries in haste and moves to the USA; it lasts a further 11 years.

She eventually finds her niche when she forms an organisation CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors) and tracks down 122 survivors, helping them to deal with the issues they’ve carried from that time. When Miriam dies in 1993 from the effects of those horrific experiments, Eva opens the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Indiana, showing the world what was done, preserving the evidence for generations to come.

After years of bitterness and anger, she finally feels powerful when she finds it within her to personally forgive the Nazis for what they did, her parents for not protecting her, herself for hating them. After 50 years, a burden of pain is lifted from her shoulders. She is no longer a victim of her tragic past.

Anger and hate are seeds that germinate war. Forgiveness is a seed for peace. It is the ultimate act of self-healing … self liberation, and self empowerment.

She spends the rest of her life teaching young people the life lessons learned through her pain, trying to bring transformative peace and kindness to the world. In her words:
I hope, in some small way, to send the world a message of forgiveness; a message of peace, a message of hope, a message of healing.
Let there be no more wars, no more experiments without informed consent, no more gas chambers, no more bombs, no more hatred, no more killing, no more Auschwitzes.

Eva Mozes Kor died unexpectedly and suddenly in 2019.

It’s a troubling book, a challenging message. Perhaps even more so given the horrors of the recent conflict in the Middle East – only a matter of four months ago.

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Esther: Star of Persia

Last year and this, before, during, and after both lockdowns, a number of reports appeared which drew attention to the customs of Hasidic Jews in this country who were flouting the regulations about social distancing and mask-wearing and meeting in large groups, and the consequences in terms of the high incidence of Covid infection. Two jumped out at me: mass gatherings for weddings, and for the Feast of Purim. Reports also came in that in Israel, a curfew had been imposed and strict limits set for the number of people allowed to gather in closed spaces during that festival time.

Mention of the Feast of Purim made me think of its origins: the story of Queen Esther in the Bible; the casting of lots (pur) to decide what date the extermination of the Jews should take place, and how the nation was saved through the bravery of the young queen risking her life for her people, and the feast established to commemorate it.

Also during lockdown, I did a storytelling course, where we were asked to take stories from the Bible and bring them alive. It was then I realised how much careful research and work is needed to do this convincingly and with integrity. Authenticity comes in the detail.

These two things encouraged me to buy two more books for my growing collection of biblical stories told through fiction. Star of Persia by one of my favourite authors, Jill Eileen Smith, and Hadassah: One Night with the King, by Tommy Tenney. And I was impressed by the attention to detail which gives both a ring of authenticity and makes them into page-turners even when we know the basic story and the outcome.

Both are eminently readable, both stick pretty much to the story in the Bible, both create sub plots and additional characters which appear entirely sympathetic to the original. The book of Esther is the only one of the 66 books that make up the Bible not to mention God, and yet the hand of God and reliance on prayer to the Hebrew God pervades the account. Modern scholarship has it that the story is not historical but weaves a moral tale into a period of time where the Jews were scattered, and this particular group were settled in Persia at the time of Xerxes (rule: 486–465 bce).

At its core, is the pagan king – tyrannical, brutal, impetuous, capricious, paranoid for his own safety and sovereignty. He treats women as objects and has an insatiable sexual appetite. In a drunken state he sends for his queen, Vashti, to flaunt her exceptional beauty before all the important men in his land. She refuses to come and is instantly banished from court lest she sets a bad example to wives everywhere.

Who will succeed her? The king is advised to summon all the beautiful virgins to the palace and spend a night with each of them to find a new queen. They are all given a year undergoing extravagant beauty treatments to prepare them to a standard he will find acceptable. Among them is a young Jew, an orphan girl, called Hadassah – Persian name, Esther. She is the one Xerxes eventually favours, and it is she who goes on to save her people from the selfish and ambitious machinations of the king’s advisor, Haman, an Agagite, and long time enemy of the Jews. She is seen to have been placed in that position for just that purpose – as her guardian, Mordecai, says: Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for just such a time as this?

There are a few issues about historical accuracy both in the original and these fictitious works, but they don’t detract from the overall merit of the stories told. And I learned a lot about the customs and thinking of those times – in a most palatable form! They made me check up on facts; they stirred my imagination; they challenged my preconceived ideas. And they gave me ideas for my own fiction! All good.

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People of the Book

I love discovering a new-to-me author who inspires me. This time it’s Geraldine Brooks. With nearly 400 pages of quite densely printed text, People of the Book needed time and mental space, so I waited for some downtime between assorted deadlines to open it. Once I did, I was hooked!

It’s a work of fiction but inspired by the true story of a Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. This, one of the earliest illustrated medieval Hebrew books, first came to the attention of scholars in Sarajevo in 1894, when it was offered for sale by an indigent Jewish family. All that could be ascertained was that it had been made in Spain, possibly in the mid-fourteenth century. By 1609 the haggadah had found its way to Venice where the signature of a Catholic priest saved it from the  book burnings of the Pope’s Inquisition. Not a lot to go on, you might think! But the clever juxtaposition of known facts and imagined back-stories makes the whole history come alive and feel authentic. Add to that the authority of the author – a foreign correspondent who covered the Bosnian war from Sarajevo for The Wall Street Journal; who witnessed the destruction of museums and libraries holding priceless manuscripts – and you have a winning combination.

At the time of the Bosnian conflict, the fate of the precious Sarajevo Haggadah, the jewel in the collection, was unknown, but the subject of much journalistic speculation. However, reporter Geraldine Brooks was granted permission to actually see the real thing being restored under heavy guard in 2001 at the European Union Bank. In tracing a fictional journey across countries, and centuries, through wars and persecutions, against different cultures and religions, it’s small wonder she became overwhelmed by the task she’d taken on, and needed to take a couple of years out. It would represent a life’s work for most people, I suspect! My precis here will be inadequate, but hopefully it will tempt you to read it for yourself, and be amazed in your turn.

Dr Hanna Heath is an extremely meticulous conservator of medieval manuscripts who lives in Sydney, Australia. She comes with a stream of qualifications: double honours in chemistry and ancient Near Eastern languages, masters in chemistry, PhD in fine art conservation … oh, and she’s passionate about her job.

When she’s invited to Bosnia to work with a very rare and beautiful object, the Sarajevo Haggadah, a lavishly and exquisitely illuminated Hebrew manuscript, she goes to the length of creating vellum herself by scouring the fat off a meter of calf intestine with a pumice stone, and making gold leaf from scratch, in order to understand how books were created 600 years ago, such is her need to be both accurate and true.

The precious manuscript needs some stabilisation work before it’s exhibited. No conservator has touched it for a hundred years, but it has been mishandled by non experts for years, and now the trick is to work so well that there’s no sign anyone has worked on it at all. But as well as conserving the parchment physically, it’s Hanna’s job to learn its history  Every shred of dust, every sliver, every fragment, every stain, offers a clue, tells a story. The veining on a piece of insect wing shows it comes from a particular species of butterfly only found high up in the Alps; a stain of kosher wine proves to be contaminated with someone’s blood; crystals indicate a splash by seawater; a hair from the throat area of a Persian long-haired cat tracks to a special kind of paintbrush … They throw up endless questions:
… why would an illuminator working in Spain, for a Jewish client, in the manner of a European Christian, have used an Iranian paintbrush?

With so much information, structure is vitally important. Dr Hanna Heath is at the centre – working on the manuscript in the 21st century, but uncovering clues to the past as she goes. Interspersed between each new discovery is the story of how these things came about; the lives entwined with the ancient parchment, unravelling backwards in time.

There’s Lola, a young Jewish laundress, who escapes from the round up of Jews in Sarajevo and flees to the mountains where she joins an order of resistance fighters until she’s abandoned, cold, hungry and despairing, and returns to the city. There she’s rescued by a wealthy and learned Muslim, Serif Kamal and his wife, Stela. Serif is the librarian at the museum who’s entrusted to take care of the haggadah to preserve it from the destruction and looting overtaking their city. But once he has this priceless artefact in his possession, none of them are safe. So Serif takes it high into the mountains to a devout Muslim who squirrels it away in the library of his mosque, between volumes of Islamic law – the last place anyone would go looking for an ancient Jewish manuscript!

Before this, a dying bookbinder, Florien Mittl, ravaged by end-stage syphilis, already suffering from paranoid delusions, is commissioned to rebind the haggadah in ‘Vienna, although these days he can hardly recall the sequence of steps in the process. However, he’s desperate for money for a cure for his disease, so he’s prepared to desecrate the priceless book in order to gain generous remuneration: he removes the exquisitely wrought silver clasps in exchange for experimental treatment.

Further back again, in Venice, a trembling alcoholic priest, Father Giovanni Domenico Vistorini, is living a double life in several directions. He’s a lover of books and language, and yet, as censor for the Inquisition, destined to consign beautiful works, ‘blasphemous’ texts, to the flames. His old acquaintance, the Jewish rabbi, Judah Aryeh, is in possession of the Sarajevo haggadah, and because of his addictions, the fate of this beautiful object comes to rest on a gamble. It’s Vistorini’s wine and blood that stains the ancient parchment.

Back we go to the actual formation of the book. A sofer, David Ben Shoushan, sees the potential of a set of glorious gold leaf paintings, and has the stamina to painstakingly inscribe the Hebrew text to go with them – we watch his hand trembling as he moves from ink bottle to parchment, crafting those precise letters, willing him not to blot the parchment. The pages and paintings are placed in the greasy hands of a double-dealing bookbinder, Micha, along with Shoushan’s wife’s silver which will be crafted into beautiful clasps to make the finished product a bridal gift fit for a king.  But before David Ben Shoushan can even see the end result, the Spanish Inquisition close their murderous claws around his family, and the precious haggadah is smuggled out and into new dangers. It’s when a Gentile baby is being ritually baptised in the sea to welcome him into the Jewish faith, that a few drops of saltwater splash on the manuscript leaving a residue of crystals that will last for hundreds of years.

The life of a black Jewess, Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek, is abruptly changed each time she’s moved on … from her home in Infriqiya where she learned to illustrate her father’s medical texts … into captivity … from thence to living in an emir’s palace as a fine painter of his wife’s likeness … and then to work for a Jewish doctor who had admired her medical illustrations for years. One major loss after another deepens her awareness of herself and the dark side of life. Having been entranced by an exquisite Christian Book of Hours filled with luminous illustrations for each prayer which the emira Isabella used for her devotions, Zahra sets about creating a story of the world as the Jews understand it to have come to be, for the doctor’s deaf-mute son, Benjamin. With no higher motive than to make the boy want to look at each picture and understand what it conveys, she concentrates on making the pictures as vibrant and appealing as she can. Indeed, so determined is she to project the right sense that sometimes she’s profoundly disturbed by the representations herself. The fine paint brushes she uses are made of cat fur and it’s one such hair marked with saffron dye that Dr Heath finds hundreds of years later.

The beautiful and intricate story of the creation and preservation and survival of this amazing book, is well matched by the meticulous research of the author. Whether it’s history across the ages, ethnic cleansing, ancient language and literature, the geography of cities around the world, different religions and their customs, diseases and their treatments, gambling in the seventeenth century, music, art, architecture, food, laboratory techniques or the structure of hair, you feel to be in safe hands with Geraldine Brooks.

Rather like the Sarajevo haggadah, a book to savour and treasure indeed.

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Light in the darkness

‘Be the light in the darkness’

That’s the theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2021 (yesterday: 27 January), encouraging everyone to reflect on the depths to which humanity can sink, remembering especially the six million Jews, and thousands of other minority peoples, who were killed under Nazi persecutions, as well as those who’ve lost their lives in subsequent genocides. But importantly, to also consider ways in which we can individually and as a community shine a light in the darkness and resist hatred, persecution, injustice, prejudice and misinformation.

It’s 76 years since the gates of Auschwitz swung open on 27 January 1945, and the remaining prisoners were liberated, the unimaginable slaughter revealed. The world today is much changed in so many ways, but still riven with huge inequalities and cruelty. Even in our own relatively civilised society, what a grim milestone we passed this very week: 100,000 deaths from Covid-19; disproportionately high amongst the poor and disadvantaged. What chance for the refugees huddled in camps, those in war-torn countries, or caught up in brutal and repressive dictatorships? I’m deep in a book about the oppressive regime in Iran which makes me ask some very difficult questions of myself.

There is still much to ponder and to protest. A candle in the window last night is a mere token.

Let’s not forget the lessons of the past; let’s not pass by on the other side today.

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Unsung heroism; disturbing challenges

I guess a lot of us have had more time for reflection and introspection during the last six months. I certainly have. So this was exactly the right time for me to read the kind of book that challenges me to think about my own moral compass and motivation and limits.

Under what circumstances would I, as a wife and mother, risk my life, or more importantly, my child’s life, to save a stranger? Would I let my young daughter starve to prove my loyalty to my country? Would I endure terrible deprivation, face imminent execution, to uphold my ideals? Would my faith in God survive seeing men, women and children being massacred needlessly; a whole race systematically eradicated? Could I live a life which meant I must lie to everyone I love, and always be afraid, never feel safe?

My kind of questions, you might think. But actually this was the kind of thinking that prompted Kristin Hannah to write her novel, The Nightingale.

She was researching World War II stories, and became fascinated by the women who had put themselves in harm’s way in order to save Jewish children, or downed airmen, some of whom paid a terrible, unimaginable price for their heroism. She simply couldn’t look away, and felt the underlying questions to be as relevant today as they were 70 years ago. As indeed they are.

Vianne and Isabelle Rossignol lose their mother to TB when 14 and 4 respectively. Consumed by his own grief, their father abandons them to the care of others. Outspoken Isabelle rebels everywhere she goes, is expelled from several schools, refusing to be either contained or controlled, and aged just 19, joins the resistance movement, initially delivering propaganda, then risking her life over and over again, escorting British and American downed airmen out of France across the Pyrenees to safety. Her code name is The Nightingale. Quieter Vianne marries her childhood sweetheart, Antoine, and after three miscarriages, gives birth to her daughter Sophie. She becomes a schoolteacher, and in the face of an ugly war and occupation of her beloved town in France, finds a courage of her own, rescuing Jewish children even whilst billeting German officers in her home.

We’ve all heard so much about the atrocities committed by the Nazis; much less of the heroism of the women of France. This book sees the 1940s through the prism of one family – totally harrowing, profoundly moving, reducing me to tears. And by homing in on the intensely personal, it seems somehow to shine a spotlight on the enormity of the whole monstrous period in history. It captures poignantly the contrast between the pain and suffering and barbarity, and the bravery and compassion, loyalty and selflessness of these courageous women, so often unseen and unsung.

The war forced people to look deep inside themselves; to examine who they were and what sacrifices they were prepared to make, what would break them. Asking ourselves those same questions 70+ years on is a challenging exercise. Even drinking a delicious cup of real coffee, knowing these women were enduring a vile brew made from acorns, made me feel chastened. Smiling and chatting to people I met out in the street felt like a luxury, when these women could trust no one – not even relatives and friends. Would I have had the courage to do the honourable thing? Or would I have found a way to argue that I had a greater duty to protect my own? I don’t know.

What I do know is that this book is a compelling read, though certainly not a comfortable one. At no stage can we have any confidence that there will be happy endings. Children die, women kill, men betray, families are ripped apart, suspicion is rife, humans behave barbarically. ‘Grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.’

The Nightingale is superbly written, and I loved the occasional flashes forward to the present when one of the sisters is returning to Paris for a reunion of her compatriots who worked for the resistance, accompanied by her son who knows nothing of her past. We don’t know which one has survived, so this nicely preserves the tension. Whatever the outcome, these valiant women and those they represent, have my profound admiration and respect.

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The Midwife of Venice

‘At midnight, the dogs, cats and rats rule Venice. The Ponte di Ghetto Nuovo, the bridge that leads to the ghetto, trembles under the weight of sacks of rotting vegetables, rancid fat, and vermin … It was on such a night that the men came for Hannah.’

How about that for an opening hook?

And this for a delightfully evocative spooky cover …

The Midwife of Venice by Roberta Rich is an ambitious debut novel set in the sixteenth century. (Echoes of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice are, I presume, deliberate.) Hannah Levi is a Jewish midwife famed throughout Venice for her exceptional skills. However, the law forbids her to attend a Christian woman, the penalties being severe, endangering not only Hannah personally, but the entire Jewish ghetto. It’s a time when anti-Semitism is rife: ‘if a sparrow falls from the sky in Venice, it is considered the fault of the Jews.’ So when a Christian nobleman, Conte di Padovani, appears at the door of her hovel in the Jewish ghetto in the dead of night, demanding her services for his wife, she is torn between a natural compassion and a fear of retribution. He offers her a handsome reward – sufficient money indeed to ransom back her husband, Isaac, who has been captured and held as a slave by the Knights in Malta.

Both the Contessa Lucia and her unborn son are near death by the time Hannah is summoned. If she were to fail to save them she would be in terrible jeopardy. But by some miracle and the application of her special instruments, the child is delivered. Alive. Just. Thwarting the machinations of the Conte’s greedy and feckless brothers who are poised to inherit everything if the child dies; leaving several people bent on revenge.

Hannah’s story in Venice is interspersed with Isaac’s experiences trying to escape his captors in Malta. Having been to both places, I found the scenes evocative, mesmerising and convincing. For me, the suspense in Venice feels more compelling than that in Malta, but there is the added tension of wondering whether this couple will ever see each other again. Hannah and Isaac parted after an argument. Desperately seeking to be reunited, to make reparation, they are thwarted at every turn. Will their joint disappointments and sadnesses ever end? As they both set sail towards each other on broiling seas we are held in suspense … even now will their paths cross cruelly as their respective ships plough on through turbulent waters?

Love, blackmail, murder, plague, intercultural tension, rescue … it’s a tale which rollocks along, weaving a tapestry of pictures of Renaissance Italy, and religious and cultural bigotry, and family rivalries.

The rigid discipline of ancient laws and entrenched customs forms an immovable spine for this book. Even when lives and happiness are a stake, the Jews fear disobeying their ancient codes and commandments. The Rabbi has been urging Isaac for years to divorce Hannah  because of her barrenness; now the Society for the Release of Captives is ready to release private funds to pay his ransom … if, and only if, he signs the divorce papers. Such inflexibility is a complete mystery to gentiles – as a Maltese man says to Isaac:  ‘Your laws are designed to create unhappiness.’ But they too have their own strong prejudices and suspicions.

For the most part the pace, the language, the style of writing, is entirely apposite for the period, and the glossary and biography at the back are testament to the care Rich has taken to ensure authenticity. However, I must confess I harboured a sneaky feeling that a few of the more modern expression or pithy insults might have been doctored for our more twenty-first century ears. But I might be entirely wrong.

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