The last weeks’ travel have been starkly contrasted. From London to
breathtaking Courchevel in the French Alps (usually skiing
yahsville; in the summer musical heaven); back up to Paris, across
to a Berlin even more shinily efficient since my last visit. After
industrial Katowice I set aside an extra day, originally intended to look
around Krakow - but instead I caught a different rattling tiny train. To
Oswiecem.
All summer, nothing but music. Lessons, lectures, masterclasses,
critiques, concerts, applause, flowers, and eating and drinking late in the
warm nights. At the summer's end, there is also silence: as my
father wrote in a poem, "the obscene stillness" of
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
No birds sing in Auschwitz, they say. I thought I heard one cheep
mournfully in the work camp, where now some small trees grow, but on
Birkenau's merciless asphalt there is nothing but the wind.
In Courchevel unluckily I missed an extraordinary performance of Messiaen's Quartet
For The End Of Time. Extraordinary, too, is the work itself: a
divine vision of transcendence, power and light; birdsong – in a concentration camp. How can it be, in the
midst of unimaginable atrocity, that can refute the existence of God?
In Auschwitz, by the former "hospital" where Jewish women
underwent sterilisation experiments, I bought the Polish political prisoner
Tadeusz Sobolewicz's But I Survived. When his camp finally
distintegrated in 1945, he was sheltered by some kindly Bavarians:
"One meets all sorts of people in life and there are all sorts of
Germans. Perhaps it was a good thing that we were able to convince
ourselves of this fact just before the war finally ended."
Such sensitive thinking is why Sobolewicz was incarcerated in the first
place: incredibly it survived with him. Battered inhumanely, his own humanity confronts two of the most difficult aspects
of Auschwitz. Even by the very ashes, it
is impossible to understand how it could ever have happened, and equally how
can such a thing can exist in our world. With its music. The sun on the
mountains.
As a mark of respect, and perhaps because there is nothing normal to say,
talking is not allowed in Auschwitz. That didn't stop some tourists, as they photographed reams of women's
hair on their mobile phones. Did you also, you fat-arsed westerners, snap
the commandant's corpseskin lampshades? The false limbs removed from
cripples before they themselves were removed to "take a
shower"? Did you munch a hotdog after the baby clothes? Did you see them?
As with chatter, the camps usually
permit no music. There is no joy here,
and without joy you can’t have music - only sound. The photographs of the camp orchestra, forced to play marches as the
prisoners went to work, are grotesque, music "raped and degraded"
(survivor August Kowalczyk). It’s
horrible, too, that the Nazis loved music. It stirs up emotions, and if people feel what they are told, they will
believe it.
Recognizing this, my imagination is on the rack, but it’s true: music is plastic, played out in time, and
moulded by human beings. It can be used
to manipulate people, if we want it to. We are our own realities, mixed by experience and education and
imagination. We can be pathetic, like
Oswiecem’s less sensitive visitors; or
superbly noble, like Sobolewicz. Or
unspeakably terrible.
Music, human as it is, mirrors all our faces. This is why I love Beethoven above all other composers. With him so intensely, and so honestly, are
the rage and violence and misery of the human condition; and also an incredible sweetness, a
tenderness, a largeness of heart that reminds one, as with Sobolewicz, or with
Messiaen, how much potential we have for the good, the sublime.
I know the Nazis listened to Beethoven too. Perhaps it is also part of being human, that there will always be things we cannot understand.
