“The three of them were brought by train to the concentration camp from all over Europe: Benjamin from Paris, Mama from Warsaw, Papa from here, from Venice; all musicians, all Jewish, and all bound for the gas chamber and extermination like so many millions. They survived only because they were all able to say yes to one question put to them by an SS officer on arrival at the camp. ‘Is there anyone amongst you who can play an orchestral instrument, who is a professional musician?’ They did not know when they stepped forward that they would at once be separated from their families, would have to watch them being herded off towards those hellish chimneys, never to be seen again.
“There were auditions, of course, and by now they knew they were playing for their lives. There were rehearsals then, and it was during these rehearsals that the three of them first met. Benjamin was a good thirty years older than Mama and Papa, who were very much the babies of the orchestra, both of them just twenty. Why the orchestra was rehearsing, who they would be playing for, they did not know and they did not ask. To ask was to draw attention to oneself. This they knew was not the way to survive, and in the camp to survive was everything. They played Mozart, a lot of Mozart. The repertoire was for the most part light and happy – Eine kleine Nachtmusick, the Clarinet Concerto in A major, minuets, dances, marches. And Strauss was popular too, waltzes, always waltzes. Playing was very hard because their fingers were so cold that sometimes they could hardly feel them, because they were weak with hunger and frequently sick. Sickness had to be hidden, because sickness once discovered would mean death. The SS were always there watching, and everyone knew what awaited them if they did not play well enough.
“At first they gave concerts only for the SS officers. Papa said you just had to pretend they were not there. You simply lost yourself in the music – it was the only way. Even when they applauded you did not look up. You never looked them in the eye. You played with total commitment. Every performance was your best performance, not to please them, but to show them what you could do, to prove to them how good you were despite all they were doing to humiliate you, to destroy you in body and soul. ‘We fought back with our music,’ Papa said. ‘It was our only weapon.’
“Papa could speak no Polish, Mama no Italian, but their eyes met as they were playing – as often as possible, Mama said. To begin with, it might have been their shared joy in music-making, but very soon they knew they loved one another. The whole orchestra knew it, even before they did, Benjamin told me. ‘Our little lovebirds’ they were called. For everyone else in the orchestra, he said, they represented a symbol of hope for the future; and so they were much loved, much protected. For Mama and Papa their love numbed the pain and was a blessed refuge from the constant fear they were living through, from the horror of all that was going on around them.
“But there was amongst them a shared shame. They were being fed when others were not. They were being kept alive while others went to the gas chamber. Many were consumed by guilt, and this guilt was multiplied a thousand times when they discovered the real reason the orchestra had been assembled, why they had been rehearsing all this time. The concerts for the SS officers turned out to be sinister dress rehearsals for something a great deal worse.
“One cold morning with snow on the ground, they were made to assemble out in the compound with their instruments and ordered to sit down and play close to the camp gates. Then the train arrived, the wagons packed with new prisoners. Once they were all out they were lined up and then divided. The old and young and the frail were herded past the orchestra on their way, they were told, to the shower block; the ablebodied, those fit for work, were taken off towards the huts. And all the while Mama and Papa and Benjamin and the others played their Mozart. They all understood soon enough what it was for – to calm the terror, to beguile each new trainload into a false sense of security. They were part of a deadly sham. They knew well enough that the shower block was a gas chamber.
“Week after week they played, month after month, train after train. And twenty-four hours a day the chimneys of the crematorium spewed out their fire and their smoke and their stench. Until there were no more trains; until the day the camps were liberated. This was the last day Benjamin ever remembered seeing Mama and Papa. They were all terribly emaciated by now, he said, and looked unlikely to survive. But they had. Mama and Papa had walked together out of the camp. They had played duets for bread and shelter, all across Europe. They were still playing to survive.
“When at last they got home to Venice, Papa smashed his violin and burned it, vowing never to play music again. But Mama kept hers. She thought of it as her talisman, her saviour and her friend, and she would neither sell it nor abandon it. She said it had brought her through all the horrors of the camp, brought them safely across Europe, back to Papa’s home in Venice. It had saved their lives.
“Papa kept his vow. He never played a note of music again. After all that had happened he could hardly bear to hear it, which is why Mama had not played her violin either in all these years. But she would not be parted from it and had kept it safe at the top of their bedroom cupboard, hoping against hope, she said, that one day Papa might change his mind and be able to love music again and even play it. He never had. But they had survived and they were in time blessed with a child, a boy they called Paolo – a happy ending, Benjamin said. And I was the one who had brought the three of them together again, he said. So two happy endings.
“As for Benjamin, he had found his way back to Paris after a while, and played again in his old orchestra. He had married a French girl, Françoise, a cellist who had died only recently. He had come to Venice because he had always loved visiting the city and always longed to live looking out over water, and because Vivaldi was born here – he had always loved Vivaldi above all other composers. He played in the streets not just for the money, though that was a help, but because he could not bear not to play his violin. And he loved playing solo violin at last. He was more like Mama, he said. It was music that had kept him alive in the camp, and music had been his constant companion ever since. He could not imagine living a single day of his life without it, which was why, he said, he would dearly like to go on teaching me, if Mama and Papa would allow it.
“‘Does he play well, Benjamin?’ Mama asked. ‘Can we hear him, Papa? Please.’
“Papa, I could see, was struggling with himself. ‘So long as it’s not Mozart,’ he said finally. So I played the Winter movement from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Benjamin’s favourite piece. Papa sat listening with closed eyes throughout.
“When I had finished, Benjamin said, ‘Well, Gino, what do you think? He has a great and wonderful talent, your son, a rare gift you have both given him.’
“‘Then it must not be wasted,’ said Papa quietly.
“So every day without fail after that I went for my violin lessons with Benjamin in his little apartment in the Arsenale. Papa could not bring himself to listen to me playing, but sometimes Mama came along with me and sat and listened, and afterwards she always hugged me so tight it hurt; but I did not mind, not one bit. I began to play in the streets alongside Benjamin, and whenever I did the crowds became bigger and bigger each time. One day Papa was there amongst them watching, listening. He walked me home afterwards, saying not a word until we were walking over the Accademia Bridge. ‘So, Paolo,’ he said, ‘you prefer playing the violin to sweeping up in my barber’s shop, do you?’
“‘Yes, Papa,’ I replied. ‘I’m afraid I do.’
“‘Well then, I can see I shall just have to do my sweeping up myself.’ He stopped then and put his hands on my shoulders. ‘I shall tell you something, Paolo, and I want you never to forget it. When you play I can listen to music again. You have made music joyful for me once more, and that is a wonderful gift you have given me. You go and be the great violinist you should be. I shall help you all I can. You will play heavenly music and people will love you. Mama and I shall come to all your concerts, or as many as we can. But you have to promise me
one thing: that until the day I die you will never play Mozart in public, not in my hearing. It was Mozart we played so often in the camp. Never Mozart. Promise me.’
“So I promised. I have kept my promise to Papa all these years. He died two weeks ago, the last of the three of them to go. At my fiftieth birthday concert in London I shall be playing Mozart, and I shall be playing it on Mama’s violin, and I shall play it so well that he will love it, they will all love it, wherever they are.”
I was still finishing my shorthand when I looked up and saw him coming towards me. He was offering me his violin.
“Here you are,” he said. “Mama’s violin. My violin. You can hold it if you like while we have some more mint tea. You’ll have another cup, won’t you? I make the best mint tea in Venice.”
So I held Paolo Levi’s violin for several precious minutes as we sat talking quietly over a last cup of tea. I asked him no more questions. There were none to ask. He talked of his love of Venice, and how wherever he was in the world he longed to be back home. It was the sounds he always missed: the church bells, the walking and talking, the chuntering of boats, and the music in the streets. “Music belongs in the streets, where Benjamin played it,” he said, “not in concert halls.”
As I left, he looked me in the eye and said, still grasping my hand, “I am glad it was you I told.”
“Why did you?” I asked. “Why did you tell me?”
“Because it was time to tell the truth. Because secrets are lies, and because you have eyes that are kind, like Benjamin’s. But mostly because you didn’t ask the Mozart question.”
from wombles to war
There’s a glowing time in early childhood of blessed and brief innocence. My children and my grandchildren lived it, and each time I have relived it with them. That’s how I can be sure it happened to me too. With each child and grandchild it has been a chance to rediscover and indulge in that delightful and necessary conspiracy in which I suspend all the trials and tribulations of the real world I have come to know, and share with them for a while the wondrous worlds of Trumpton, Thomas the Tank Engine, the Wombles, the Clangers, Winnie-the-Pooh and Peter Rabbit. This is a time of pure delight, when we can live together for a while in contented reassuring worlds of stories where we know for sure that all will be well for those we love, be it in Hundred Acre Wood or on Wimbledon Common. There may be an interfering Fat Controller or the threat of a Mr McGregor; but we know it will all turn out just as we’d hoped it would, that Thomas and Peter and Pooh will be fine. It is a cuddly, comfortable time, and so it should be in those early years. There may be Wild Things or Gruffaloes, a little scary perhaps, but never hiding-behind-the sofa scary, more marvellous and magical than truly monstrous. Dark clouds in those early years should never be that dark, and should always give way to sunshine.
But then, gradually, there comes a time when he or she wants more from a story than mere comfort and reassurance. With a growing awareness of the difficulties and dangers and sadnesses of the world comes a need to find these complexities reflected in stories and poems. This gradual transition, this awakening of awareness, is not allowed to be as gradual as it once was. Indeed, it seems to be accelerating more rapidly with each generation.
For most children now, it is the screen that rules: the television, the video, the DVD, the PlayStation game, the computer. Whilst there are of course many television programmes and films sensitively and intelligently devised for children, many young children also tune in to programmes and films enjoyed by their elders. And because one aspiration leads inevitably to another, very soon children are watching whatever it is that their older brothers and sisters watch or their parents watch, and much of this will be dealing with the world of adults. Just one episode of EastEnders or The Bill or Hollyoaks may involve domestic violence, crime and death. A look at the six o’clock news might bring a natural disaster, murder or war into the sitting room all within the space of ten minutes.
So young children can be brought face to face with a hugely disturbing world, sometimes even before they can comprehend the difference between fact and fiction. The world of gentle dreams all too suddenly becomes a world of hideous nightmares. What took me twenty or more years to discover, to assimilate, to even begin to comprehend, now takes perhaps ten years for a child of today. Many efforts have been made over the years to slow this process down, because we know how traumatic it can be for a very young child to have to come to terms with the stark realities of some aspects of life in our modern world. But the truth is, whether we like it or not, it will be sooner rather than later that the children of the twenty-first century will have to learn to deal with issues and feelings hitherto thought to be the preserve of adults.
Despite its dangers this fast-track growing does have some surprising benefits, one of them being that, in a sense, the worlds of the child and the adult have come closer together. More of our preoccupations seem to be commonly shared. Perhaps one of the great strengths of children’s writing at present is that because the writer and reader no longer feel the experiences of childhood and adulthood to be as separate as they once were, writers feel they are free to tackle in their stories just about any subject that interests them, the presumption being that the child belongs to the same world, that the story will resonate with adult writer and child reader alike. So-called “crossover books” are no accident, I think. The blurring of this arbitrary division between child and adult seems one of the more positive outcomes of the accelerated growing of children. We have, it seems, been brought closer together.
I think I have always considered we were close anyway, believing as I do that the child and the childishness in us is never “put away”, as St Paul suggests it should be, but remains the heart of who we are, of what we grow up to be. So when I begin to think about writing a novel, I do not consider whether my story might be suitable for a child, nor even whether a child reader might like it. The only consideration is whether the story interests me sufficiently; whether I am, or can become, passionate about it. After all, I will be the writer and the first reader; and I am, I know, a grown-up child. I simply hope my story will have the power to engage my readers whatever their age, that they will be as passionate about it as I am by the time they have finished it. So I write as the story dictates, not according to the age of any likely readership.
Like many of my fellow children’s writers (and illustrators and storytellers and poets, whose essential work in this field goes so often unheralded), I have made hundreds of visits to schools and conferences and festivals all over the world. Questions are often challenging. From a nine-year-old last year: “To be a writer you need knowledge and imagination. Which is the more important of the two?” I am still thinking about that. But more commonly asked is this: “In your books like War Horse, like Friend or Foe, like Billy the Kid, like Waiting for Anya, like Private Peaceful, you write about war. Why do you do that? Why are they so sad?”
“Because,” I reply, “I write about what I know, what I care about. I know what war does to people, because I grew up in London just after the Second World War, a London of bomb sites and ration books. I played in bomb sites (surely the best playgrounds ever made). We had cellars for dens, crumbling walls to climb, and in amongst the rubble I made endless discoveries. An old kettle, a shoe, a penny coin, a burnt book – they all became my treasures. Only later came the growing awareness of what the war had done, not just to buildings, but to people’s lives.
“My mother often wept when she talked about the war. On the mantelpiece was a photo of my Uncle Pieter, who was shot down in 1941, two years before I was born. He looked back at me when I looked at him, and I knew he wanted to say something but couldn’t. I used to talk to him sometimes, I remember. I wanted to get to know him.
“A friend of the family used to come to tea sometimes. My mother always told me I must not stare at him, but I always did. I could not stop myself. His face and hands were horribly scarred. I knew he had been shot down in the war and suff
ered dreadful burns. Here’s what the war did. It burned flesh. It killed my uncle. It made my mother weep. So I grew up with the damage of war all around me. I learnt that buildings you can put up again, but lives are wrecked for ever. And why are the books sad, you asked? Because, believe me, war IS sad.”
Flood, fire, famine, disease, a tsunami or an earthquake, terrorist bombings and war, devastation and disaster – television brings them all right into our homes. Punctuated by sport and advertisements and soaps, these catastrophes bombard our senses, each one an agony we are invited to share from the safety and comfort of our sitting rooms. But one horror is all too soon superseded by another on our screens, our attention and sympathy diverted. Old news, old disasters and old wars are soon replaced in the public imagination and forgotten.
Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Northern Ireland – remember them? The cruelties of war and ethnic cleansing seem as rife in modern times as they have ever been. We witness the horrors from afar, cocooned in our comfortable world. Of course we know it’s not just on telly, but it might as well be. After all, it is not in our backyard, it is not for the most part our soldiers getting killed. We know it is vicious and violent and bloody, but it’s over there! I once visited a village in France called Oradour, the scene of a massacre in the Second World War. The French have preserved the place just as the German occupiers left it, burnt out, a village of the dead, a stark reminder to all of us of man’s inhumanity to man. I need reminding. We all need reminding, I think, lest we grow hard, lest we forget. Let us never grow hard. Let us not forget.
I’m including here two stories of conflict, the first as seen by a child as it happened all around her in Bosnia, the second seen also by a child who was warned by his mother not to stare at the terrible scars of war on a man’s face, but who did, often, and wrote about it over fifty years later.