After Kobani - Night and Fog or bearing witness?

Sometimes historians feel like the ancient mariner or Cassandra - a burden on progress, that damned albatross of history holding us all back; or cursed to speak the truth and be ignored, or disbelieved. We’ve even got a special word that’s used to shut historians down (it is used to shut others down too, but I’m talking about historians here) – the accusation of Godwinning. 

Right now, the world needs historians to speak, to remind of us of our collective pasts, to provide context for acts, decisions, policies, and symbols we’re currently seeing and using. Right now, the world needs to make some analogies that reference Nazi Germany.

If after Auschwitz, to write a poem was barbaric, how then can we respond to the image of a small child, dead on a beach, drowned seeking refuge from a war?

Adorno later amended his statement about the barbarity of attempting to create art after Auschwitz. He evaluated the traditional interdiction against representative imagery (Exodus) in the context of  Leviticus 5:1, which describes the necessity of bearing witness - coming to the conclusion that while silence is the natural human response to such evil, we must move beyond silence to speech, to creative acts. Failing to do so, in the context of Auschwitz, perpetuates "the silence in which Auschwitz was encircled and enshrouded, first in a Nazi policy of Night and Fog, and then in a post-war silence of those 'unable' or, more accurately, unwilling to mourn." [i]

Adorno’s revision concluded that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.”[ii]

Why worry about Adorno now?

Last week police officers in the Czech Republic removed refugees from trains and wrote numbers on their arms in vivid.

In 1938,  as part of Allied attempts to appease Nazi Germany’s lebensraum policies, Germany, France, Italy and the UK agreed, in Munich, to Germany’s annexation of the area of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, largely populated by ‘ethnic Germans’, a legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Poland quickly took control of disputed parts of Silesia that had large Polish-speaking minorities, while Hungary annexed parts of Slovakia and the Rus. The rest of Slovakia ceded from Czechoslovakia in early 1939, declaring allegiance with Nazi Germany and thus retaining independence in name.

The remaining districts of Czechoslovakia were occupied by Germany as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and, between 1938 and 1945 approximately 345,000 Czech citizens, including 277,000 Jews, were killed or executed. Hundreds of thousand more were imprisoned, sent to concentration camps, or used as forced labour. 

You’ll see from the above table that the Jewish population of Czechoslovakia once substantial. Approximately 14,000 Jews survived the war.

Most Czech Jews died in Terezin (Theresienstadt), in lower Bohemia, or were sent on from there to the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka.  

The recent history of the Czech Republic is filled with refugees and displaced peoples – from the time of the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland in ’38, people have moved on from towns and villages that they and their families have inhabited for generations, fearful that the new power structure will favour people other than themselves. This part of middle Europe, where ethnicity, language, religion became markers of insider or outsider status, is deeply familiar with the processes that make a person become a refugee instead of a citizen.

It was in Moravia, heart of the German-occupied territory 1939-45, that last week, refugees were taken off trains and had numbers written on their arms.

Terezin, which now has a population of approximately 3000, was used to intern ethnic Germans after the war. Now the camp’s site is part of a planned rejuvenation of the area, to be preserved site, where tourists can walk through the gates marked Arbeit Macht Frei. The history of the Czech Republic is intertwined with the history of the Holocaust, of Europe’s dark past. How did numbers on an arm lose meaning?

In Hungary, the Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, has decried the numbers of people seeking refuge in his country:

Contemporary Hungary is, as Orbán claims, a “Christian” country, largely homogenous – current data states that 83.7% of the population identify as being of Hungarian ethnicity, largely Catholic or Lutheran. This revisionist interpretation of Hungarian culture ignores the fact that Hungary was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1541 to 1699, and that the ethnic and religious diversity that typified the Ottoman Empire, with Jews, Muslims, and Christians living alongside one another, remained an aspect of Hungary, particularly urban Hungary, until the end of the First World War. At the Treaty of Trianon, which dismantled the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1920, Hungary lost 71% of its territories, and 66% of its population, impacting severely on the diversity of Hungary’s peoples. Hungarian Jews became, in the period between the wars, the most visible minority.

Hungary, led from 1920-1944 by Miklós Horthy, aligned itself with Germany in 1938, introducing its own version of the Nuremberg Laws, defining Jewishness and restricting Jewish citizens’ access to education, work, and political power. Hungarian Jews suffered death, disease, and deportation, which then accelerated once the Final Solution became the focus of the Nazi Regime after the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Jewish citizens were interned in the Budapest Ghetto and sent, via train, to Auschwitz.

As Robert Fisk noted in the Independent yesterday, the railway station in the small town of Biscke was both one of the last towns captured by the Soviet Army in ’45 – from whence many Jews were sent to their deaths – and the location that last week’s influx of Syrian refugees were stopped by police en route to Germany.

 Fisk posits, as others have done in the last few days, myself included, that it is those former Soviet Bloc countries that have failed to include the mistakes of the past in their planning for the future.

Sunday morning, I had a twitter conversation with the wonderful Nicola Gaston:

It is apparent that the European community – as opposed to the European Community – needs to think, and quickly, about what stories about its past are given primacy.

The largest synagogue in Europe is in Budapest , the Dohány Street Synagogue – built there because once Budapest was the regional capital of a diverse and teeming populace, with 23% of Budapest’s urbane, educated population being Jewish. An estimated nearly one million people within Hungary’s borders by 1941 met the Nuremberg Law’s definition of Jewishness, and of those, only 100-200,000 survived the war. First they were killed by the Hungarian army and police forces or deported to Serbia or Poland, where the Serbian or German military dealt with them. Many died as slave labour; those remaining were sent to the Ghetto and on to Auschwitz, or killed by the Hungarian Arrow Cross militia. Hungary, home to European Jewry’s greatest synagogue, still houses Europe’s largest Jewish population after Russia, approximately 120,000 people.

Numbers on arms, separating families at railway stations, fences being built across borders, razor wire keeping foreigners in camps or out of nation states, rhetoric of European Christianity needing to remain ‘pure’. Historians have seen this before. Europe has seen this before. The world has seen this before.

How do we bear witness? Incorporate the past into the present? Stop history repeating itself? How do we look? What do we see?

For me, this is the power of the life and death of Aylan Kurdi, whose small three-year-old body became the image of a crisis.

Not in the image of death, but in this, a fragment of a family before becoming ‘other’.

Emmanuel Lévinas, the French-Jewish philosopher, wrote extensively on the notion of ‘the other’ –

“…the face, for its part, is inviolable; those eyes, which are absolutely without protection, the most naked part of the human body, none the less offer an absolute resistance in which the temptation to murder is inscribed: the temptation of absolute negation. The Other is the only being that one can be tempted to kill. This temptation to murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To see a face is already to hear ‘You shall not kill.’”[iii]

We can see Aylan Kurdi, his brother Ghalib in the picture above. We’re looking at them kanohi ki te kanohi, and in that shared connection, eye to eye, face to face, we know them, they are like us.

So let’s keep looking. We need to see those faces, know the meaning of those symbols, those acts. We need to write the stories of those faces. We need history. 

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[i] Lisa Saltzman, ‘To Figure or Not to Figure: the Iconoclastic Proscription and Its Theoretical Legacy’, in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, edited by Catherine M. Soussloff, (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1999), p. 67

[ii] Adorno, cited in Saltzman, p. 71

[iii] Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficult Freedoms: Essays in Judaism, translated by Sean Hand, (The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1990), p. 7-8.