OLIVE BRANCHES

Fallen Leaves in a Void
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In the course of a visit to the Jewish museum in Berlin, in mid July 2014, I came across this truly creative and provocative piece. It is called Fallen Leaves. Some 10,000 faces punched out of steel are scattered on the ground. The work is dedicated not only to Jews killed in the holocaust, but to all victims of violence and war.

You are invited to walk over the faces
and listen to the sounds they make
as they shift beneath your feet.

This is what you see in front of you
as you try to keep your balance.

And this is what you nearly fall on top of.

It is hard to convey the emotional impact of this place. The noises made by the shifting faces remind you both of screams, varying in pitch and volume depending on the sizes and shapes of the faces making them, and of something like a clanking tank running over fleeing victims. It is quite unnerving.

Then, in the middle distance, a shaft of light which turns the faces to gold. What does it mean? Hope amid despair? Gold from the teeth of the dead? Just plain Shekels? Even more unnerving

Olive Branches

A nearby exhibit is the olive tree. Presented here as a symbol of fertility and peace. Visitors can write a wish or prayer for placing on the tree.

Unfortunately, the olive tree for me has become a symbol of the wanton destruction of the livelihood of Palestinians on the West Bank by illegal settlers. So this item brought me up a bit short.

And then a mental exercise suggested itself to me and I would like you to go back to the beginning of the Fallen Leaves and slowly go through the sequence again. Only this time, still being true to the artist's wider conception, imagine they are the faces of the Palestinians of Gaza.

Even more unnerving.


[My web page on the Jewish Museum]

Anne Frank

There is an Anne Frank exhibition at the Dublin City Library and Archive in Pearse Street. It is short and to the point. Anne was arrested and murdered because she was a Jew. No other reason.

It is not surprising then, that in a talk he gave on Anne Frank: an Irish Dimension there on Thursday, Yanky Fachler was was upset at what he saw as the politicisation of the memory of Anne Frank both by the official website and others who had begun to omit the fact that she was a Jew from their publicity material. He even instanced the leaflets at the exhibition which contained the Anne Frank set of commitments, pointing out that they did not mention her Jewishness. He put these things down to pressure from the pro-Palestinian anti-Zionist lobby in Europe.

I have looked at the Anne Frank house site which now does make it clear that she was Jewish and that the Nazis were bent on exterminating the Jews. I am glad to see that glaring omission rectified though I cannot understand for the life of me how they got away with omitting this kernel of the story in the first place.

In any event, Yanky's talk was very interesting. He was basically drawing connections between Ireland's Jewish community and WWII, particularly the concentration camps.

He mentioned Ettie Steinberg, the only member of the Irish Jewish community to have been exterminated in the camps. He told the story of Tommi Reichenthal, who survived the camps and eventually came to settle in Ireland. He reminded us of Chaim Herzog, raised in Bloomfield Avenue off the SCR who, as an intelligence officer in the British Army, was one of the first to enter Bergen Belsen concentration camp during the liberation. He mentioned Dr Bob Collis, a Dublin doctor who ran a children's hospital in Belsen after the liberation and who "smuggled" some Jewish children into Ireland on his return.

He was particularly critical of the refusal of the Irish government to accept Jewish refugees from the Nazis both before, during, and, to a lesser extent, after WWII. He also reminded us of our pro-Nazi Ambassador Bewley in Berlin at the time.

He told us that, according to recently unearthed documents, all of the roughly 4,000 Jews in Ireland were earmarked for the gas chambers by the Nazis.

Yanky has written a book, Kaleidoscope, containing short pen portraits of 100 characters who helped shape the Irish-Jewish community. You will probably recognise many of the names in it and, in many cases, be surprised to find they were Jewish. The Jewish community in Ireland has certainly made a more than proportionate contribution to the life of the nation.

He mentions Raphael Siev, with whom I had some slight contact. Raphael was for a number of years a legal advisor in the Department of Foreign Affairs and subsequently curator of the Jewish Museum in Portobello. Raphael was quite convinced that the Nazi bombings of Terenure and the SCR were purposely aimed at the synagogues and Jewish communities in those areas. These views are lent some weight by Raphael's own standing and German plans to exterminate the Irish Jews.

That the later North Strand bombing does not fit into this pattern does not make it any the less likely. Accidents do happen too.

In the Q&A after the talk, I mentioned that I had been reading the children's visitors' book at the exhibition outside and was encouraged to find the entries very positive, though one child had written "Hitler Sucks", not exactly positive, but on message, nevertheless.

I contrasted this with what I had seen reported about the Israeli state sponsoring Jewish children's visits to the concentration camps and using this to effectively reinforce negative feelings towards the Palestinians (as in: this is what they will do to you if we don't sort them out now). I was making the point as a sort of counterweight to the politicisation of Anne Frank referred to earlier. I don't think it went down too well and perhaps I did not nuance my point sufficiently. I think it was taken to mean that one should forget the Holocaust and not visit the camps.

I do not think one should forget the Holocaust. It is a graphic illustration of man's inhumanity to man and a reminder that "eternal vigilance is the price of peace". I was, myself, very affected by my visit to the Dachau camp in the 1970s.

My point referred to the political use made of the visits by an Israeli state which is, to all intents and purposes, behaving like a war criminal itself.

I look forward to dipping into Yanky's book and putting some flesh on what have to me been mostly only names over the years.

James Joyce - Terrorist

Give me a child until he is seven
and I will give you the man
Joyce
I remember being terrorised as a child by the priest's sermon in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It took me months if not years to get over it. It's hard to tell because that sort of thing was part of the environment in which I grew up. Guilt, fear and terror were the instruments of "development".

There is, of course, truth in the slogan above which is attributed to the Jesuits, God's Storm Troopers and Educators Extraordinary. The minds and psyches of children are malleable and none better to mould them than the Js.

Jews
I've just watched a film called Defamation in which an Israeli, Jew and film director, sets out to find out what all this "anti-semitism" is about and where it can be found. Two stark points emerge from his journey.

His film shows that much of the current reported anti-semitism appears to have been manufactured. In the USA by the Anti-Defamation League in order to keep themselves in a job and ensure that their officers are held in high social and political esteem throughout the world. The key premise on which they survive is the assertion that all those who are anti-Israel are closet anti-semites. And at home in Israel, it is manufactured by some of the media who see the need to cultivate resentment and victimhood so that the Israeli State can misbehave with impunity.

His film also shows disturbing sequences of Israeli children being brought to Auschwitz to experience the Holocaust first hand, so to speak. In itself this would be no harm, we should not forget. But it is the context that is worrying. The trip is used to reinforce the line that Jews are still being persecuted on a grand scale, and that, therefore, "proportionate" retaliation is in order. The film-maker asks one of the young Jewish girls "How do you feel?". "I want to kill them". "Kill who?" "The Nazis". "But they're all dead" "Yes, but they've got heirs".

Palestine, Iran, or whoever you are, you have been warned.

Homeland Security
We all had paintbooks, or colouring books, as they now appear to be called. They had animals and cartoon characters, baloons and buildings, all for colouring in. Guess what? They now have colouring books for children to colour in TERRORISTS. I kid you not. And, they have little cards, like the cigarette cards of my day which pictured footballers or cars or whatever. But these have pictures of TERRORISTS and right in the middle of them is Julian Assange. Nuff said.

Credits
Now, where did I get all this subversive stuff. I got Joyce from my excellent school English teacher, Michael Judge. I got "Defamation" from a comment on the blog of that sterling ex-Foreign Office employee and now human rights campaigner, Craig Murray. And I got the colouring book from a Tweet retweeted by @wayupnorth, whom I follow on Twitter.

Punchline
And what is the point of this rambling and semi-coherent post. It is that you pick your own sources over time. Follow those that you can trust, irrespective of the particular format in which they publish. And, above all, be wary of the MainStreamMedia, or the Presstitutes as they are known in some quarters. They present themselves as objective, moderated and authoritative but they all have an agenda from the ideological to the profit motive.

And do read some Joyce,
he can be fun.

Dachau

The year was 1985 and the Germans were running courses for foreign civil servants showcasing how well Germany was doing and how the federal system was working well.

After a few days in Bonn, the then capital of West Germany, we went to Munich, to see how one of the German Länder was making out. We arrived at the beginning of the weekend and so had a day's respite before getting down to serious business on the Monday.

I had been looking at the map and saw a Dachau nearby. I wondered if that might be the concentration camp and it turned out it was. So I resolved not to pass up the opportunity to go and see it. The other members of the Irish contingent were game and even some of the British said they'd come along.

Come Sunday morning and there was no sign of the British, so we decided to carry on ourselves. Some among us needed to get mass so this was taken care of in Munich before our departure for Dachau. As it turned out it was some sort of feastday, of St. James I think, and everyone leaving the church was presented with a single stem rose.



Off we set on the train to Dachau. I don't know what we expected but when we came out of the station in Dachau there wasn't a concentration camp in sight. We were in a leafy residential part of town. We might as well have been in Foxrock. So what next? Where's the camp? How do we find it? The obvious thing to do was to ask. But what do you say? Excuse me, where's the concentration camp?

I was certainly reluctant to take this line since the time I nearly gave an elderly German man a heart attack when I tapped him on the shoulder from behind in Aachen. Maybe he was a war criminal in hiding but I only wanted to ask the way to the motorway to hitch a ride to Ostend.

So we decided to have something to eat first. Big mistake. The only thing that got eaten was part of the day so it was heading well into the afternoon when we were back out on the street and none the wiser.

Eventually, we plucked up the courage to ask a passing backpacker and were told to ask for the Memorial or the Anlager, but we'd be as well just hailing a taxi as it was not far off closing time for the camp. That we did.



We reached the camp with about an hour to closing time so we had to keep moving through the various exhibits. You could have spent the whole day there. The emotion was overwhelming. You could feel the fear, the sadness, the anger. Whether it was coming from inside yourself or not was hard to know. But the effect was devastating.

Dachau was one of the earliest camps. It was both a training ground for those who went on to run other notorious camps and it was also a medical "research" centre which performed horrendous medical experiments on the prisoners.

We eventually ended up in the crematoria. Yes, there were gas chambers in Dachau, but they were never used. Victims to be gassed were transported to other camps. But people were shot there, in large numbers, and the bodies burned in the crematoria along with those who died from other causes. There were over 200,000 people registered as entering the camp and there are records of over 30,000 dying there, whether from illness or being shot or as a result of torture or medical experiments. These figures are probably underestimates as many went unrecorded and some records were destroyed when it was clear that Germany was losing the war.



One thing that made a huge impression on me and stays with me to this day is the cigarette butts. These were standing on ledges in front of the doors of the crematoria like candles at a shrine in a church. I can only think that people were so affected by the place that by the time they got to the crematoria they wanted to express sadness or sympathy or hope, in some way or other, and left lighted cigarettes standing on the ledge like candles. These had then burned down to the butts. It was so sad. Fortunately we still had our single stem roses which we gently placed on the ledge.

The next morning at breakfast in the hotel our guide, an elderly German who had fought on the Russian front, was asking participants how they had spent the Sunday. Some had gone to the lake, others to see castles and the like. When he got to us and we told him we'd been to Dachau he clearly got a shock. After all, it was part of his job to show us the positive side of the modern Germany. He didn't really comment and passed on to the next table.

A short while later we met him in the lift. His immediate, unprovoked, comment was "Ja, it was good you went to Dachau". He had been clearly mulling over what we had done and had, himself, the strenghth of character to see the positive side of it. Full marks. The man shot up in my estimation, which was already high, by the way.

By way of contrast. I know there had been more than Jews in Dachau, in fact the Jews were probably not even a majority in this particular camp, but the overwhelming sadness I felt there, and which has stayed with me all these years, is rapidly fading and turning to cold anger when I contemplate today's vast concentration camp on the Gaza strip where the Israelis are subjecting the population to nothing short of what they themselves were subjected to in places like Dachau.

The abuse continues.