Read Online The Best Australian Essays 2015 by Geordie Williamson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Geordie Williamson
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in bed at night the sound of voices talking and singing in Polish used to come through my nursery wall with its Beatrix Potter frieze; sometimes, too, there was the sound of crying.
Yet if my neighbours brought something of the history of postwar Europe into my middle-class suburban world, I felt there to be an even more powerful link between myself and the people who always seemed to be summed up by a couple of alphabet letters. I knew from fairy stories that the naming of a child involved the bestowal of something magic, and whenever I pestered my mother to tell me why I was called âNadiaâ (a most peculiar name in 1950s Anglo-Australia) she would reply, in her breeziest manner, âOh, I named you after one of the DPs.â
âWho?â
âNadia, of course.â
âNadia who ?â
At that point, my mother would sigh volubly and light up a Craven A, and as she would die when I was nine years old, I would learn from her no more details about my namesake, and indeed nothing more than a picture-postcard version of the Germany where she had spent four demanding and even dangerous years. Yet while my love for my mother made me store up every scrap of personal information I had ever garnered from her, my father was a completely different matter
And so, when I received the newspaper clipping that was my sole legacy after his death, I put it into the box where I kept my parentsâ wedding album and my motherâs UNRRA shoulder-flash and the other memorabilia from the time that immediately preceded my birth. It took more than three decades before I went to Belsen and began finding out what my father had been doing there.
*
It is September when I first arrive at Bergen-Belsen. Bypassing the sleek silver bunker of the Documentation Centre, I make my way into the vast open area of the Gedenkstätte (Memorial), where the earth is still wearing its summer cladding of the tiny flowers typical of the Lüneburg Heide, or heath. Notwithstanding the daintiness of this pinkish mauve groundcover, this is a topography as stripped to its bare bones as the bodies in the mass graves that rise out of the flat earth like Neolithic barrows.
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Even my schoolgirl German is up to translating the terrible arithmetic that is recorded in the signs on the stonework facing of the mounds. At each of these collective burial sites there are simple offerings that other visitors have made: a red candle, a line of pebbles, a bunch of twigs, a small basket of heather. As I remember (or feel as if I remember) the bulldozer with its terrible load, the starkness of these anonymous graves seems to me to say all that can be said about a genocide, and much more poignantly than the dozen or so individual tombstones â including one bearing the names of Anne and Margot Frank â that seek to personalise death. Despite the sign carefully explaining that these memorials âhave only a symbolic meaning. They do not mark gravesâ, the one for the Frank girls is decorated with bunches and pots of flowers, photographs, pebbles and handwritten messages addressed to the young diarist whose own writing has touched so many lives.
If the earth beneath Anneâs gravestone is empty, so is the landscape. Here the visitor wishing to map the memories needs to walk the place; there are no buildings â either original or facsimile â to give an idea of the size or form of the seventy or so huts where some 40,000 prisoners were once crowded together. (âThis isnât Disneyland,â the Gedenkstätte âs archivist says to me a little later on this memorable day. And when I see the historical photos displayed at the Documentation Centre I discover that, after the liberation, the British burned the huts to the ground â primarily to stop the spread of
Yet if my neighbours brought something of the history of postwar Europe into my middle-class suburban world, I felt there to be an even more powerful link between myself and the people who always seemed to be summed up by a couple of alphabet letters. I knew from fairy stories that the naming of a child involved the bestowal of something magic, and whenever I pestered my mother to tell me why I was called âNadiaâ (a most peculiar name in 1950s Anglo-Australia) she would reply, in her breeziest manner, âOh, I named you after one of the DPs.â
âWho?â
âNadia, of course.â
âNadia who ?â
At that point, my mother would sigh volubly and light up a Craven A, and as she would die when I was nine years old, I would learn from her no more details about my namesake, and indeed nothing more than a picture-postcard version of the Germany where she had spent four demanding and even dangerous years. Yet while my love for my mother made me store up every scrap of personal information I had ever garnered from her, my father was a completely different matter
And so, when I received the newspaper clipping that was my sole legacy after his death, I put it into the box where I kept my parentsâ wedding album and my motherâs UNRRA shoulder-flash and the other memorabilia from the time that immediately preceded my birth. It took more than three decades before I went to Belsen and began finding out what my father had been doing there.
*
It is September when I first arrive at Bergen-Belsen. Bypassing the sleek silver bunker of the Documentation Centre, I make my way into the vast open area of the Gedenkstätte (Memorial), where the earth is still wearing its summer cladding of the tiny flowers typical of the Lüneburg Heide, or heath. Notwithstanding the daintiness of this pinkish mauve groundcover, this is a topography as stripped to its bare bones as the bodies in the mass graves that rise out of the flat earth like Neolithic barrows.
HIER RUHEN 800 TOTE APRIL 1945 â¦
HIER RUHEN 1000 TOTE APRIL 1945 â¦
HIER RUHEN 2500 TOTE APRIL 1945 â¦
HIER RUHEN 5000 TOTE APRIL 1945 â¦
Even my schoolgirl German is up to translating the terrible arithmetic that is recorded in the signs on the stonework facing of the mounds. At each of these collective burial sites there are simple offerings that other visitors have made: a red candle, a line of pebbles, a bunch of twigs, a small basket of heather. As I remember (or feel as if I remember) the bulldozer with its terrible load, the starkness of these anonymous graves seems to me to say all that can be said about a genocide, and much more poignantly than the dozen or so individual tombstones â including one bearing the names of Anne and Margot Frank â that seek to personalise death. Despite the sign carefully explaining that these memorials âhave only a symbolic meaning. They do not mark gravesâ, the one for the Frank girls is decorated with bunches and pots of flowers, photographs, pebbles and handwritten messages addressed to the young diarist whose own writing has touched so many lives.
If the earth beneath Anneâs gravestone is empty, so is the landscape. Here the visitor wishing to map the memories needs to walk the place; there are no buildings â either original or facsimile â to give an idea of the size or form of the seventy or so huts where some 40,000 prisoners were once crowded together. (âThis isnât Disneyland,â the Gedenkstätte âs archivist says to me a little later on this memorable day. And when I see the historical photos displayed at the Documentation Centre I discover that, after the liberation, the British burned the huts to the ground â primarily to stop the spread of
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