A Note on 'Song', a poem for Helen Suzman

I was encouraged to write this by Neil Bowen,  editors of the anthology The Art of Poetry. He said students would welcome it. So here goes, in two parts. But the poem comes first. Then the two posts.

Song

for Helen Suzman

Nothing happens until something does.

Everything remains just as it was

And all you hear is the distant buzz

Of nothing happening till something does.

A lot of small hands in a monstrous hall

can make the air vibrate

and even shake the wall;

a voice can break a plate

or glass, and one pale feather tip

the balance on a sinking ship.

It’s the very same tune that has been sung

time and again by those

whose heavy fate has hung

on the weight that they oppose,

the weight by which are crushed

the broken voices of the hushed.

But give certain people a place to stand

a lever, a fulcrum, a weight,

however small the hand,

the object however great,

it is possible to prove

that even Earth may be made to move.

Nothing happens until something does,

and hands, however small,

fill the air so the buzz

of the broken fills the hall

as levers and fulcrums shift

and the heart like a weight begins to lift.

Nothing happens until something does.

Everything remains just as it was

And all you hear is the distant buzz

Of nothing happening. Then something does.

China Journal 3

Mask by Clarissa!

Terrifying students!

Barbara and Larisa

Runar and Gudrun change genders and Barbara

Daan and Ravi as the night wears on!

1 November

Yesterday was Halloween and Barbara, the Mexican playwright, got together with Ravi (Indian-American poet) to arrange a trip into Yangshuo city to buy drinks and nibbles and prepare for a party. The trip to Yangshuo suddenly became very popular and most people went and spent the afternoon there as well as dinner in an Indian restaurant. We stayed behind with a couple of others, I to write the penultimate section of the last part of the book, Clarissa to paint and to prepare for the party by making me a vampire mask (eyes and top of head the rest rudimentary make-up combined with natural aptitude). Larissa, the German novelist continued working, as did Katherine, the American short-story writer. So those of us left walked round to the 3-minute restaurant (je the restaurant that is 3 minutes away) and ordered something quick and fast, a sandwich and a sode in my case. Then back to the house to prepare.

We were fully choreographed to make an appearance downstairs at 8pm. Clarissa wore the garland we had bought from the old woman together with a veil and with a bit of mean make-up looked like a beautiful haunted version of La Cicciolina, but with clothes (again, photos later). The turn out was terrific. Everyone was there, Runar and Gudrun in reversed genders, Daan with a sinister Good Farmer mask, Merlinda as half a pirate, Barbara as a form of Catwoman, the students as various ingenious zombies, warlords etc. After an initial awkwardness the dancing began and picked up pace, continuing solid for three and a half hours to anything from Bee Gees to Bowie to Gangnam Style, to The Ronettes. To my own astonishment I danced solid, with full energy throughout, without sitting down or resting more than once for ten minutes of conversation, Clarissa (Bride of Dracula) likewise. Everyone admired everyone's costume and make-up. It was the most fun we had had for years. We were the last to pack up and pack away.

Although I felt fine when dancing, once in bed my right hip was so stiff and painful it took a couple of hours to get to sleep. My hearty congratulations to my surgeon, Mr Ali. We're through the MOT with flying colours. Next step: hip replacement.

This morning I finished the book about my mother, now provisionally titled Time Runs Out (first draft)!!! Actually finished!!! I had given up hope of it at times but being here and simply working and thinking and working again has done it.

I am inwardly opening bottles of champagne.

Now, after checking drafts, we'll see how the world takes to it.

Domestic Science GCSE Chinese style

2 November

Yesterday four of us went to a cookery lesson in the afternoon. It was at Cloud 9 in Yangshuo where we ate after the Mountain Song festival. So we got a taxi into the city, that dropped us at an appointed spot ready to pick us up again and walked the short distance to the restaurant. Jenny, the chef and tutor, sat us down, offered us tea, then told us the first step would be to take us down to the market where we would see where the ingredients were bought. So we set off down the street to the big indoor market where she showed us the various vegetables remarking on what each was and its role in this or that dish. In the meantime people buzzed around on motorbikes conveying this or that from place to place. Along the way we pass a fish tank was jammed with fish. Later as we progressed to the meat market there were chickens and geese and rabbits in cages waiting to be slaughtered and, right at the back of the hall, cats and dogs too. I won't describe the scene here only to say that this clearly was nothing extraordinary to people. Not all of us could look at this. The sight was hard.

From there straight to cookery. Aprons and hats on. Fourteen gas rings, seven on each side, the implements and ingredients laid out. We made three dishes, one featuring aubergines, one featuring cuts of chicken (we didn't have to slaughter them ourselves) along with peanuts and onions etc, as well as some dumplings that needed to be pinched into shape. Clarissa's were very beautiful in the conventional way but mine would surely have got a prize for their conceptual references to twentieth century art, being a mixture of Picasso's early cubist work and Dali's melting clocks. There was a touch of Rachel Whiteread too in the spaces between them, but perhaps not enough because a couple of them insisted on clinging together while being steamed.

Did it taste good? I reserve judgment on that. I have enjoyed finer gastronomic treats but as conceptualists are wont to say, it is the process not the product that really matters.

Otherwise writing and, occasionally, talking. The talking most usefully about the finished book since Daan offered to read it and did so with marvellous care. I should add he was extremely positive about it too. All his suggestions were good and right. So I have more hope now and a great deal of encouragement.

*

Today's distraction was a bike ride to Moon Hill, that needs special description. I'll do that tomorrow morning. Meanwhile the arrangements for my literary prize event are becoming grander by the day. I feel myself shrinking under them as the weight grows. God help me if I ever take myself seriously. The exciting thing is the book I have just finished not the ones I have already written.

China Journal 2

Zhang Yimou's spectacular begins

24 October

Yesterday a longer walk in the morning up to the bamboo raft station. The river is shallow in places, only calf-high but the rafts can only go one way, with the stream. When they get to the their destination the rafts have to be loaded on to trucks, the tourists on to a bus and the staff onto a smaller bus and they return by road. Meanwhile the great black butterflies with blue spots of startling luminosity, and others, the coppers, the brimstones, the tiny whites, and the black and white ones like a dedicated bunch of Newcastle supporters.

We take a quick shared one course lunch at one of the three restaurants, after which I speak to my student translators who come with questions - they are all sweet pretty student girls - then return to work followed, in my case, sleep (another heavily broken night) before going with the others to Yangshuo to see the great show directed by Zhang Yimou, who orchestrated the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and won a Golden Bear for his work in film.

In the event it was a marvellous spectacle of a little over an hour, enacted on the river, to a vast Chinese audience, with a cast of hundreds, mostly local people in magnificent costumes. It was a little like watching the Olympics opening ceremony, breathtaking, beautiful, costumes in gold, in silver, in blue, a cast of a hundred peasants rowing through red silk waves, an enormous moon with a woman dancing on it, a pair of lovers meeting, countless figures perfectly choreographed to music now traditional Chinese, now very western cinema track - and all this with a range of the real illuminated sugarloaf mountains behind as backdrop. Individual figures were tiny, even from where we were, which was only some seven rows from the front. It was the individuals that carried the story - something about love and the masses and the nature of rule as I understood it - but apparently the story is hardly there anyway though there are references to stories already known in China.

I am very glad to have seen it especially in the circumstances of a hot autumn night in a crowd of spectators that looked chaotic but very quickly assembled in their numbered places.

The Picturesque

1

On Natural Beauty

The more picturesque 

the view, the more a picture

of the real picture.

2

Variation on Heaney

Here is the picture of a spade -

I'll dig with it.

26 October

Being in a hurry to finish the post before setting off on an hour and a half's bus ride to Guangxi Normal University, I forgot to add that after the Mountain Songs we all went to Cloud 9 restaurant and the singers came with us still in their full costume. We sat in groups around tables with the usual Lazy Susan in the centre while two of the female singers sat at each table. The princess and her colleague sat at ours and continued improvising, singing us welcome songs, but also with impromptu songs addressed to us individually. They toasted us by offering us a slice of orange then later by clinking tea glasses. In real life they work on farms and in shops. Merlinda, the Philippine-Australian poet sang them a song back in a beautiful low alto voice. We also said goodbye to the students who have been accompanying us and welcomed some new ones.

Back at the hotel/centre for an hour or so then the bus ride to Guangxi. A guided tour of the university, founded in the 30s, but with a lot of ongoing building. Walked through the stadium with lots of student runners and joggers, through orderly ranks engaged in group physical exercises, and another group grasping large red fans.

The reading to a very full class in a very well equipped congregation hall. Fascinating to listen to three of our fellow resident writers, Larissa, Daan and Ravi. The first time we have heard each other. I read on 6th November in Guangzhou. Afterwards a tiny girl student comes rushing up. You look like the BFG, she giggles. You all smily. I decide to take it as a compliment.

The drive back suddenly hits a wall of fog. Soon after, a truck going down the wrong side of the carriageway comes right at us, braking just in time.

27 October

In which the internet packs up for a few hours and we find that everyone has gone off to a restaurant we don't know, as a result of which the staff offer to run us out there on two battery-powered motorbikes and we ride pillion, without a helmet of course since I have not seen one helmet in China, up the dark road to the place where the others are seated round a table outside, but we are fitted in and join the food melée while making civilised conversation after which we walk back down talking and talking and getting back and having a beer and talking until a big spider appears on the ceiling when two of the party leap up in panic and scuttle spider-wise off to bed.

Otherwise quite a lot of work done during the day and a filmed interview answering two questions in the afternoon, the first about multiculturalism in my own work and the second about the place of research in writing poetry.

We both enjoyed the motorbike ride. Perhaps we should get motorbikes.

China Journal 1

View from our balcony at Yangshuo Mountain Retreat

The River Yulong right by the retreat

21 October

5pm, the first day in Yangshuo and the sun is out. Rivers, rivulets, ponds, rapids down which bamboo boats carrying tourists, dip and right themselves. A large carp in a tiny pond. A big black butterfly the size of a small bird, flittering round near the hibiscus. Above us those extraordinary limestone outcrops, karst, clothed in trees but revealing sheer rock faces, scarred and holed. It's about 25C. We are all getting acclimatised. I wrote for an hour or so this morning then lay down and fell asleep. Then we had a short walk in the heat.

Tonight the formal welcome dinner, outdoors on the terrace.

Travel Notes

Air-conditioning.

Outside, the mountains blunted

by the soft darkness.

*

We are all alone

in the spaces between words,

in breaths, in commas.

*

Before early dawn.

The vast terrain of China

as dark as the sea.

*

One bad sentence ruins

the book, he says, our young aesthete,

breathing the night air.

*

Everything passes,

says the clock but nothing does,

nothing quite passes.

22 October

Last night a walk round the city, Yangshuo County. Buzzing and crammed, the main shopping drag packed solid with shops and stalls, blaring music, often live, with some demonstrations of crafts, a VR lounge, bars, the music mostly westernised as are the clothes, a mixture of China and America (call it Chimerica) but with an air of Kuala Lumpur meeting Grafton Street. We sit in a bar and drink a beer, are photographed as amiable curiosities. Boy sings Chinese pop-ballads feelingly to a guitar.

Have sketched two poems, written a journal and added to the book about my mother. Clarissa painting.

HOMAGE TO SVETLANA BOYM*

‘The Future of Nostalgia’

The future of nostalgia was resolved.

We’d had enough of it. No more dreaming

of grandad’s underpants or mother’s bra.

It was the end, there was nothing worth redeeming.

This was Chimerica where everything was trade 

and free as air, the air of yesterday.

Nostalgia was the present remembering itself.

The present was past and wouldn’t go away.

Lord, let us live in a shower of cheap light.

Let’s trade our bodies as once we traded fur.

Let us be lost in streets without a map.

Let’s be ourselves by being who they were.

22 October

Off air much of yesterday. Took an after breakfast walk while it is relatively cool down the cycle path. Tremendous variety of butterflies from the bat-sized blacks, to smaller by still large blacks with brilliant blue flashes and still others blacks with white fine brocade edging. Also copper coloured ones with delicate patterns, some some yellow ones like Brimstones, and a few tiny whites.

Black Butterflies in Yangshuo

1

shreds of burning cloth,

smuts, flakes of soot, a black flap

studded with medals

2

if you are the ghosts

of the river, the river

must be in mourning

3

sinister as bats

in a movie, you reveal

nothing, hide nothing

4

the jewels you wear

on your black wings shimmer

before you settle

5

troubadors of night

where are your instruments. your

inaudible songs?

6

see the hibiscus

thick with black hordes. is it death

that you are bringing?

7

such variations

on one simple theme of black,

spots and striations

8

could you be the soul

torn loose of flesh, set to dance

to no clear purpose?

9

wholly enviable

condition to be alight

without pain or grief

10

a grand finale

of black butterflies, the rain

jewelled, falling.

The bamboo boats come in flotillas, essentially punts propelled by pole. They descend the miniature rapids and right themselves. Small zebra-striped fish dart and hide in the clear shallow water of the river. People pass on electric mopeds.

Work for the rest of the day with a break for lunch at the nearest restaurant, down the path, just a couple of minutes away. Interesting to hear the female writers speak in defence of boys and men. That would be counter-revolutionary talk in the U.K. But they have sons and worry about them.

More work, then dinner at the second restaurant along where they speak some English. It isn't a group arrangement but we are all there so it feels a little more formal but the conversation is very relaxed.

We walk back in the dark. Little or no reception. Maybe it's better in the morning.

from Rewind: a reinvention of my mother

Magda at the hospital in Altenburg, after recovery

It may be that in the moments, minutes and hours of extreme suffering all one’s energy and attention is devoted to survival not to what might happen after the suffering stopped. It would have taken enormous will and concentration on Magda’s part, just to keep going. That would be followed by exhaustion, then more work and suffering. Little by little the relief provided by thoughts of the past, of others, of those loved, of other people’s stories or songs or jokes, fades away. Then comes the sick bay, the hovering between life and death in a state of starved semi-consciousness.  Then the slide towards death.

Then everyone leaves. You are starving. The dying around you continue to die.

*

The Americans arrive.  There is the sensation of being lifted up and examined, of being carried by truck to a hospital, of being lowered into a clean bed -  a proper bed! - then more examinations, the examinations more careful, more tender, the voices quieter, the light sweeter, the sight of ever more healthy bodies moving around a ward, the dawning to consciousness of spring, to breeze and warmth and scent. There is food, a carefully gradated increase in diet, the return of taste and smell beyond filthy rotting flesh. The touch and feel of knife and fork and spoon and plate. The relative softness of cloth, the sheer cleanliness, followed by the slow rediscovery of the body as pleasure, the rediscovery of the propriety of one’s own self. Look! Dark hair, an emaciated face beginning to fill out, a body regaining its shape, the sense of being a woman in a world of women and men, not a walking corpse. There are unfamiliar voices, a strange language, a dramatic change in the manners of other people entailing the recovery and repossession of a social hierarchy that comradeship in suffering has modified so the relationship between professor and street-cleaner is never quite the same again.

After the sudden switching off of the suffering machine there is the sheer numbness, the haze of recovery, that suspension of time between events when you know next to nothing of one moment’s relationship to another, when it’s all present tense, a succession of present tenses without context. Then there is George’s proposal of marriage  the arrival of dresses from America.

I am inventing her again, but only to a degree. What I imagine here is not specific to her, it is only a guess, possibly a wrong one, about the process of recovery in general, albeit in a specific place, in Altenburg, Mid-Saxony, spring 1945. It is an invention I can only justify by claiming that any knowledge is partly invention, that memory is mostly invention, and that knowledge of another is invention in the highest degree. Then I must go on to claim that invention can be a form of tenderness. We address our human inventions with the same solicitude with which we address any other of our own inventions. We even invent ourselves though with far less security. We keep inventing and inventing, growing tired of our inventions. We should reinvent ourselves occasionally, we think, sometimes even drastically. But in doing so we destroy other people’s inventions of us. We have to invent everything all over again and so do they. That is a serious responsibility.

I am interested in her so I go on inventing her, inventing a truth I can believe in about her. I invent nothing factual. I don’t make it up, but the person at the core of it all still has to be constructed and understood in terms of invention.

The trick is to invent the truth.

Penig Diary 3

Chemnitz

Wednesday 24 August

We pack and have our last breakfast at the hotel. The sun is blazing outside and the river looks more beautiful than ever. At 10am Tobi, Ringo and Jakob call for us for the the trip to Chemnitz which is less than half an hour’s drive. Jakob tells us about his current course which is switching to Chemnitz from Leipzig because Leipzig was not right for some reason. He is quite a shy boy but maintains a certain cool while remaining very friendly. He is slowly becoming himself. His English is very good. 

Chemnitz was Karl-Marx-Stadt after the war till 1989 when it reverted to its earlier name. It was heavily bombed during the war and the city centre destroyed so it was entirely re-planned on the socialist, post-Bauhaus model, more with blocks than streets, the streets wide and arranged in grids. “Chemnitz is an attractive city which pleases the eye. At first sight its "face" is perhaps a little bit austere, but then it becomes more and more friendly,” says the website. In so far as austerity can possess a kind of gaiety Chemnitz has it. Large as it is it doesn’t look busy. and the marvellous Gunzenhauser collection is practically empty but for us. It is a treasure trove of mostly German artists from Impressionism, through Die Brucke, Der Blaue Reiter, the Neue Sachlichkeit and Expressionism with a comprehensive group of works by Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, but also Jawlensky, Münter, Schmidt-Rottluff, Heckel, Kirchner, Felixmüller and three by Paula Modersohn-Becker (would there were more!) Discoveries for us included Georg Schrimpf and, in the temporary exhibition, Reza Derakshani. We wandered around almost alone, starting at the top and descending the red staircase that  the banker-collector Gunzenhauser insisted on, floor by floor. 

Then we walked into what would have been and in its way still was the centre, by the old Rathaus, but the old buildings are oddments among the cubes of concrete and glass, the limited gaiety of which was down to what is probably the fabled sense of German precision.  We stopped to pay homage to the vast granite head of Karl Marx in front of his most famous words, Workers of the World Unite, engraved on the wall behind him in various languages, although the English version used a different translation.

*

The GDR wasn’t loathed by everyone, nor was it all humourlessly stern. Our friends had been socialists before the fall of the wall and they were the same socialists now, all kindness, sweetness and good humane intention. They were, after all all, our hosts. It is still possible to be socialist in that humane sense and live in hope that the world might be more equally divided and that Nazi crimes be honestly addressed.  They carry on working to that end even now, against the odds both in larger political terms and in localised conservative terms. And I must admit that when I consider Hungary, I myself sometimes prefer the Hungary of the pre-1989 period to the one currently represented by Viktor Orbán and his sub-fascist nationalist administration. I even think I preferred the people as they were then, squeezed together as they were by a common condition that was hardly affluent, somewhat chaotic and certainly not free from corruption but somehow tolerable because it was shared, to the ever more savage and hostile society that has since emerged.

It was hot, very hot where there was no shade. A party was being planned in one of the two main squares and marquees were being erected. Two human statues stood apparently suspended in mid air but they had dismantled their apparatus by the time we returned to them. 

We drove back the way we had come and on towards Leipzig and the airport, dropping Jakob off at his flat in a poorer part of the old city, something of a ghetto with boarded windows and graffiti but hardly dangerous, according to Jakob. Our farewells were long and warm. Tobi gave us a jar of home made honey that security allowed through.  The metal pins inside my chest holding my ribcage together had been picked up by X-ray at Stansted but caused no problem here. We waited a couple of hours, ate a canteen-style meal, sipped a vodka and nibbled a small piece of chocolate before settling down to read or solve puzzles. I carried on with Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, returning to it after over forty years: melodramatic prose, childish metaphysics, wilful paradox but with a mad, almost surreal streak, like Fantomas’s English catholic maiden aunt, sweetly, grandiosely barmy and inconsequently entertaining.

Then the plane arrived with the jolliest, self-consciously ragged Ryan Air crew I have yet come across and a couple of male passengers near us, possibly off-duty soldiers, harmlessly larking about, and chatting up a pretty girl I took to be Indian but who might have been Syrian. She seemed to be enjoying it. We got home about 1am. I stowed away the invaluable memory-stick, reassured the cat and fell asleep.

Jakob, Tobu, Clarissa, Ringo in Chemnitz

Tobi, Uli, Clarissa in Penig

Clarissa, Emilie in Penig (no pics of Jan and Janine, alas)

Penig Diary 2

Monday, 3:20pm   Re: Sunday

What to make of it all? I am not sure I can answer that yet, if ever. We spent the morning at the hotel with Ringo, Tobi, Uli and Emilie going through a pile of documents. First we examine a plan of the camp as it was planned but not fully executed, together with an aerial photograph taken by a US plane on 13 April, two days before the camp was occupied by US troops and the remaining prisoners, that is to say those in the sick bay, some 80 women including my mother, were liberated and taken to the nearby Luftwaffe hospital in Altenburg. The rest (620) were marched off to Theresienstadt. Some (72) escaped along the way in the chaos, some died. What records say is that 13 women had already died at the camp, their bodies being buried just outside the camp fence, and that 17 died on the march. We don’t know what happened to those that arrived at Theresienstadt, but the information will be elsewhere.

Camp as planned, but not all huts built

As for Penig itself it was one of the 136 sub-camps of Buchenwald. It was opened on 9 January 1945 and settled by seven hundred women transported from Ravensbruck by train on 10 January. The plan was standard throughout the German territories, standard huts, of standard measuremen (36.55 metres x 8 metres), each with the standard three level cribs. There seem to have been six or seven huts plus a sick bay, and a hut for the guards who comprised both local people and the SS. It was surrounded by an electric fence and had at least one watchtower. There were no washing facilities at the camp, nor was there food or heating. Food and washing were provided by the Max Gehrt aeroplane-parts factory where the women worked, perched on stools or standing, in three shifts of 06.00-14:00,14:00-22:00 and 22:00-06:00 so the factory was working 24 hours a day, seven days a week,  at full capacity.  Also at the camp, as prisoners, were three women from Leipzig as medical staff.  (There were times when ⅙ of the work force were too ill to work.) The deal seems to have been that the factory was short of workers, all the men being on the front, so it approached Ravensbruck to provide 700 prisoners as workforce and the camp was built with that purpose in mind. The women chosen were all Hungarian and mostly on the basis of skill, or whatever skill they said they had. The women were not tattooes at this stage as that took long and were simply given nubers that had to be stitched to their light uniforms. There were a few Ukrainians and Poles added from sources nearby. Among the guards there were some Hungarian Swabians.

One of the valuable documents Ringo showed was the timeline, which made it clear that the Hungarian women were deported from Budapest to Ravensbruck on the 8th and 9th November 1944, so my mother must have spent at least two months at Ravensbruck before being transferred to Penig (incidentally, pronounced by locals as Pay-niche). What did the people of Penig know about this? There were certainly some local people working alongside the prisoners  so they must have known, as would those who saw over 200 women march through the streets three times a day, seven days of the week.

Ringo made it clear I could take away as much material as I liked but we would need another suitcase for that so I made a quick selection. More was to be added to that the next day (today, as I write this).

All this is information that I note down and absorb.

After this we went to lunch. It had been sunny but it began to rain as we sat outside so moved the table under cover. Ringo, it turned out, was the manager of a village football team playing a first round cup match that day so he kept in occasional touch by phone. They ended winning 7-1.

Walking from factory to camp

First we walked to the factory, a little way inside town up quite a steep hill. We examined the site, now vacant, looked at photographs of the factory as it was in 2011 just before demolition, by which time it was unoccupied. We passed hardly anyone in the street.

Then we set out for the camp. It was well over an hour’s walk almost all uphill on the side of a highway, past fields of maize, a restaurant, a quarry. It was slow going with a heavy rain cloud, clearly alrready precipitating ahead of us to our right. We missed it. It grew hot when the sun was out and cooled as soon as it disappeared behind clouds. A solitary black cat in a field was absorbed in watching for its prey in the grass. Cars shot past us.

The camp was built a long way from the factory and off the road in order to keep its existence secret, though it couldn’t have been secret for long. The long march between camp and factory went past houses of the period and plenty would have seen it. The chief lesson of the march for me was the thought of women marching all that way up and down hill, in every seasonal condition, while suffering from hunger, fatigue and disease. It seemed impossible. While Penig was a work camp not an extermination camp the eventual aim was to exterminate all prisoners once they had served their purpose. They would have exhausted that purpose pretty soon.

It was down a lane surrounded by birch trees at the end of which there was simply a block of granite, recording the site as a sub-camp of Buchenwald. There was nothing left of it except the area itself, at the centre of which a show-jumping course was prepared. People came here for fun now. Equipment related to show-jumping was stacked one side. There was just one hut which was not original but built on the foundations of an original so of the same dimensions. It was that that took my attention, it being the only object around which some coherent feeling might form. I am not sure it did, or rather that the feeling, such as it was, was coherent, but I felt drawn back to the hut once we had passed it. I imagined sitting on the steps with my mother and talking to her but it was a faint image, nothing I could grasp.

We climbed a patch through more trees to get to the back of the site and compared what we saw there with the plan and the aerial photograph. It was easy enough to see where the buildings would have been.  We stood at the top, talking, looking around then came down. It was of course odd to see the show jumping course at the heart of it.  Once a year, said Ringo, there is a commemoration attended by some, but most people prefer not to think of it, or of the past at all. Penig was not bombed, there was no street fighting, only at the outskirts. It could continue its existence in full beauty, albeit without most of its men who were, of course, engaged in fighting doomed last ditch battles against Russians and Americans.

Path between levels in the camp.

Hard to know what to make of all this. After walking back, taking a short cut that did not exist in 1945, we drove to dinner in a fine Italian restaurant in a beautiful spot, just overlooking a beautiful small town. There we talked of what we experienced. Ringo said he felt ashamed that his grandparents should have allowed it to happen. Shame, I suggested, was not the best feeling for people of his generation, because shame leads to resentment. Rather than focusing on the guilt of the criminals it is better to remember the humanity of the prisoners, and to consider their lives before - and after, if they survived. Build the archive out of them, for them, as a memorial. Celebrate and lament a common humanity. And don’t remember the prisoners as primarily Jews or as Hungarians, though clearly they were both things and were there precisely because they were such. Better, I said, to remember them a fellow human beings with lives like ours.

I don’t know how far I thought or felt that through. I certainly didn’t want Ringo and his friends, or indeed any German of that generation to feel shame, though I did not want to spare the generation of perpetrators any shame or guilt. I  do think the Holocaust was a unique event in that it was a coldly efficient attempt to exterminate, with the maximum humiliation,  anyone ‘infected’ by up to the three generations, wherever they were, not just in one country, an entire race of people who had suffered cycle after cycle of persecution, and to wipe all memory of them from the earth so no one would know they ever existed.

Nevertheless, I am not quite sure that it is worth making that distinction as regards the fate of individual victims, whether they were Jews, or Roma or sickly or gay. The distinctions were the problem in the first place. It may be better and more useful for us think of one set of human beings inflicting terrible suffering on other human beings, to concentrate on what unites rather than divides us.

But that is easy for me to say, and it sounds a little pious as it comes out of my mouth. Just talking about it makes me suspicious of my mouth.