“But just look how the press treats the Israelites [sic],” said Dodo with indignation, abolishing my reverie and recalling me to the unchanging present in this respect. “We’ve never been liked, you know. I suppose I shouldn’t say it, but I think it’s because they’re jealous.” By this stage of my life I knew slightly too much to accept this ancient self-pity as the explanation of everything, but I didn’t want to have an argument with my sweet and sad old grandma so I took my leave and, turning at her little garden gate, somewhat awkwardly uttered the salute “Shalom!” She responded, “Shalom, shalom” as easily as if we’d always greeted and parted this way and, as I wrote it down at the time, I turned and trudged off to the station in the light, continuous English rain that was also my birthright.
Landscapes of Memory
“The deep, deep sleep of England,” wrote Orwell half-admiringly and half-despairingly about the eternal and unchanging charm of the southern English countryside as seen from the train between the English Channel and London itself. Being newly returned from the ever-freshening hells of the Spanish Civil War, he remembered enough to add rather severely that England might not jerk out of this slumber until it was abruptly roused by the roar and crash of bombs. (Not far from the peaceful, rural Anglican churchyard in which he lies buried are the Cotswold villages of Upper and Lower Slaughter. Upper Slaughter is almost the only village in England that does not have a war memorial to commemorate the fallen of 1914–1918. These few hamlets are known in the war-memorial literature as “blessed,” if you can imagine such a designation. What does that make the dead of the other hamlets?)
Even though I grew up in south coast naval towns where whole sleeves of streetscape had been stripped to show the scars of Nazi bombardment, I never failed to be struck by how swiftly one could slip from the city, into the woods or along the back roads and onto the downs, and be transported* into a landscape that was almost contemplative in its quietude. The off-beat names of the Hampshire and Sussex villages—Warblington was one of my favorites, with its flinted Saxon church, but East and indeed West Wittering ran it pretty close—seemed to convey a near Wodehousian and Blandings-like beatitude and serenity. There were two especially favorite places within an easy drive, one of them the renowned Selbourne, where Gilbert White had observed the ecology of just one little place in order to produce a micro-masterpiece of natural history, and then Chawton, near Alton. Some readers may already have caught their breath, I hope enviously.
It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the “prize” loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte’s navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire’s “New Forest” is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I’ll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.
This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named “myxomatosis,” into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams’s lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars…
—Sylvia Plath: “Daddy” (1962)
“If this is Upper Silesia,” observed P.G. Wodehouse after being interned in Poland by the Nazis in 1940, “what on earth must Lower Silesia be like?” He was being flippant, but with the excuse that he could have had no idea of what was about to make this region famous.
When it came time for me to make my “roots” visit, in search of my mother’s Polish and German ancestors, it was actually for the lower-lying latitudes of Silesia that I set off. The city of Wrocław, which until 1945 had been called Breslau, was the big historic melting-pot town that set the tone even for places across the Prussian border like Kempen/Kempno. When Dodo and others spoke of the place of their forebears, it was “Breslau” that they rather proudly if sadly named. And it was easy to see why. There was nothing provincial about it. In his book Microcosm, co-written with Roger Moorhouse, Norman Davies illustrates its eminence as a hub of Bohemian and Prussian life as well as the epicenter of the Silesian question, itself the trigger of the Seven Years’ War. “Wars, wars, wars”: reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was “resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers” and his massed and regimented infantry…
reminded one more of great Atlantic rollers than human formations. Clouds of cavalry, avalanches of field-guns and—at that time a novelty—squadrons of motor-cars (private and military) completed the array. For five hours the immense defilade continued. Yet this was only a twentieth of the armed strength of the regular German Army before mobilization.
Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word “roller,” in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene.
I had a ghost or two at my elbow the entire time I was on (what is now) Polish soil. These revenants were of two kinds. The first, which was the nicest, had been gently summoned by my relatives known and unknown. Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope—and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing—that I shall draw a letter that begins, “Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that…” It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with “the reader.” And there’s no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.
It doesn’t matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so. Thus I came into contact with a woman who was, or would have been if they had known of each other, and thus was anyway, my mother’s first cousin. She now lived on the coast of Norfolk. One of her Blumenthal/Dale relatives had seen one of the reprints of my original article for Ben Sonnenberg, to which I had given the additional title: “On Not Knowing the Half of It.” Cast your bread on the waters… I’ll condense the time that all this took but simply say that by the time I arrived in Poland I had a goodish oil-painting portrait of Nathan Blumenthal, a fair piece of his genealogy, and two chief questions remaining. Why had he left when he did, and were there any of his relations still around?
Jane Austen died two years after the Battle of
Waterloo, where the combined forces of the Duke of Wellington and (as some British historians remember to mention) the Prussians under Marshal Blucher put an end to the Napoleonic era. On the territories of the Prussian/Silesian frontier, the echoes of this and later events are very far from being “noises off.” In particular was this true for the Jews of Kempen/Kempno. In 1812 Napoleon had issued his emancipation decree, liberating the Jews from ancient church-mandated legal disabilities. In 1814/1815 the Kempen Jews had begun the construction of a rather magnificent synagogue in a sort of neo-Palladian style. At the time, they constituted perhaps eighty percent of the town. I found it unsettling yet confirming to think of this side of my mitochondrial DNA being replicated in this context: I have had my mother’s wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the National Geographic tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth.
I almost prefer the more rambling and indirect and journalistic investigation, which seems somehow less… deterministic. In Breslau/Wrocław, where I arrived on the day that Professor Leszek Kolakowski died, a national hero, and was honored to be invited to speak at a meeting in his memory, I was lucky to be introduced to Mr. Jerzy Kichler, the head of the local Jewish community and a veteran of the Polish-Jewish diaspora. He also helps curate the city’s Jewish cemetery, around which he guided me. It’s like a memorial to Atlantis or Lyonesse: these are the stone buoys that mark a drowned world. From this city came the parents of Edith Stein, later martyred as a convert to Catholicism (and as a nun) in Auschwitz. Max Born, the Nobel laureate in physics in 1954—and the man to whom Einstein wrote that celebrated 1926 letter about god’s refusal to play dice with the universe—was born here, to a father who hailed from Kempen. (Max’s daughter Irene moved to Cambridge and married a leader of the Enigma/Ultra disencryption team: their daughter became famous under the name Olivia Newton-John.) Born’s conversion to Lutheranism did him no more good than Edith Stein’s when the Nazis applied their own laws about who was a Jew. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another son of this place, had a twin sister who married a converted Jew. He was hanged in Flossenburg concentration camp—his murder commemorated in one of W.H. Auden’s weaker poems—on almost the last day of the war in April 1945.
One must beware of the temptation to invest everything with significance in retrospect, yet it chills the soul a bit to learn that from this great city-center of humane science and medicine, which produced the good doctor Alois Alzheimer as well as the physicist Max Born, Professor Fritz Haber moved his operations to Berlin in 1914 in order to place his chemistry skills at the service of a military government in search of weapons of mass destruction. (He oversaw the German chlorine-gas attack at Ypres and after 1918 concerned himself with the development of Zyklon-B, thus radically attenuating his own posterity.)
Mr. Kichler was an excellent guide through all this, offering information when it was requested and leaving me alone when I seemed to need that. Together we made a point of visiting the tomb of Ernst Geiger, one of the originators of Reform Judaism, and of Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of the first German Social Democratic party (who in a private letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels had been rather regrettably described as a “Jewish nigger”). He had been born on 13 April, the birthday that I share with Thomas Jefferson, Seamus Heaney, Alan Clark, Eudora Welty, and Orlando Letelier. The dates and the territory could also be made to “fit” with my own historical obsessions: when Nathan Blumenthal was born in 1844, Marx was just beginning to publish his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in the Rhineland to the west and, by the time he first turned up in English paperwork in 1871, Rosa Luxemburg was being born, in the Russian-Polish town of Zamosść far to the east.
Between these two points lay a sort of burned-over district, charred and trampled and desecrated in every direction and in every fashion. Trotsky had referred to the Hitler-Stalin pact as “the midnight of the century,” and it was across this terrain that the midnight had fallen. Wrocław/Breslau lies along the River Oder and boasts more than a hundred bridges. One of the best ways to see it is like Venice, from the various “arms” and “shoulders,” as the natives say, of the waterways. Between it and Kempen/Kempno are many rolling fields and green copses and forests, both coniferous and deciduous. But even the greenery can seem bleak at best or menacing at worst, when one recalls what was done in the shadow of those trees.
At least in Wrocław/Breslau the old “White Stork” synagogue had been restored, for a community of a few hundred, and the Jewish cemetery’s stones when possible repaired or re-lapidated. But in Kempen/Kempno there was only desolation. Trying to translate back to English landscape, one would need to be evoking Oliver Goldsmith or Thomas Gray, or John Clare, on the abandonment and emptiness. But even that would be relative, and as much to do with the loss of sheep as the loss of people. Old Mr. Kichler and I could easily have missed—and nearly did miss—the turnoff for the town. An obscure crossroads, some railway tracks intersecting, a large and illuminated McDonald’s hamburger sign: this could have been a nondescript Nowheresville in mid-prairie America. The local nickname for the eastern or Yiddish part of Kempen/Kempno was, it turned out, “Kamchatka”—the most extreme part of Siberia. Nobody quite seemed to know how such an irretrievably bare title came to be conferred, but it seemed apt enough. And the place seemed bizarrely unpeopled: when I later looked at the photographs I had taken, there wasn’t a soul to be seen. My late friend Amos Elon has written the best history of the German-Jewish relationship: it’s called The Pity of It All. I was very stirred to find, when I opened it, that he had placed on his epigraph page the opening lines of James Fenton’s poem “A German Requiem”:
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.
It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
The lines recurred to me as I heard the echo of my footsteps. The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a “furniture facility.” It had then been vandalized and perhaps accidentally set aflame by incurious and callous local “youths.” Only the well-crafted walls really stood, though a recent grant from the European Union had allowed a makeshift roof and some wooden scaffolding to hold up and enclose the shell until further notice. Adjacent were the remains of a mikvah bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts: I had to feel that it was grotesque that these obscurantist relics were the only ones to have survived. In a corner of the yard lay a pile of smashed stones on which appeared inscriptions in Hebrew and sometimes Yiddish. These were all that remained of the gravestones. There wasn’t a Jew left in the town, and there hadn’t been one, said Mr. Kichler, since 1945.
As we paged through the surviving municipal records, it actually became fairly easy to see how a once-flourishing community might have decided to start emigrating well before that, and at about the time that Nathan had. Subsequent to the 1812 Napoleonic edict abolishing anti-Jewish laws, the indigenous religious prejudices had reasserted themselves. Starting in 1833 there had been a series of Prussian measures, often associated with the name of a statesman named Wagner, increasing taxes for Jews and making them pay for the upkeep of Christian schools and institutions, as well as adding to their burden of military service. After the aspirations of 1848 had been crushed, it got worse yet: the leader of the ultraright authoritarians in the Prussian state parliament became Professor Friedrich Julius Stahl. (He’d been born Joel Golson, and it wasn’t enough for him to have converted to that bastardization of primitive Judaism known as Christianity: no, like Stalin after him he also wanted a surname of steel.) Amos Elon takes
up the story:
In the largest German state, where two-thirds of the Jewish population lived, he enunciated the “philosophical” basis for continuing discrimination against his former co-religionists. He was not a great thinker but an able propagandist, persuasively articulating the conservative demand for “authority” and the sacred union of church and throne.
1848 had been a year of revolution and liberation for much of Europe, but other people’s ardent nationalism isn’t always, as they say, “good for the Jews.” It seemed probable that the brighter members of the Blumenthal clan would have seen and felt the atmosphere thickening. In this period, also, according to the records, there had been quite a severe epidemic of cholera. Outbreaks like that aren’t always good for the Jews either: they sometimes even manage to get themselves blamed for the plague, or for the poisoning of the wells.
But had the family left anyone behind? It’s a common enough name so I wasn’t sure how I would be able to distinguish between cadet and collateral branches, but the necessity for making such a discrimination was soon enough removed from me. The editor of the local newspaper, Mr. Miroslaw Lapa, had produced an illustrated history of the Jews of Kempen/Kempno, titled in Polish Kepinscy Zydzi. Its photographs showed some of the major splendors, including the imposing temple in its high old times and the family groups gathered contentedly in front of thriving shops. There were few pictures of the later miseries, but there were some lists of names… Every Blumenthal I could find in the index had wound up on the transports to Auschwitz. So that was that.
I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to “make a new start” or to be “born again”: Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a “clean” sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov’s microcosmic miniature story “Signs and Symbols,” which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of