Bride of Belsen

It takes a lot to survive a concentration camp, so to survive three is practically miraculous. All the more so if you live through a death march as well. If, finally, you turn that experience into a life-enhancing event, rather than a crushing blow, then you’re a remarkable person indeed.

That was the case of Gena Turgel who died earlier this month.

Gena Turgel meets the Queen at Buckingham Palace
on 28 May 2015

She was born Gena Goldfinger, on 1 February, in Krakow. That’s a wonderful, vibrant, exciting Polish city even today. Back then, it was little different, though in those days some of that vibrancy was doubtless supplied by the city’s large and active Jewish community – then some 60,000 strong but down to 500 today.

When the Nazis occupied the city, Gena’s family was forced to give up its textile business and move into the newly designated ghetto. One of her brothers was shot there and another escaped, but no one heard from him again. From the ghetto, the survivors in the family were moved to Plaszow labour camp, made famous – or infamous – by the film Schindler’s List.

Her sister and brother-in-law were caught by the Nazis trying to smuggle food into the camp and executed by them.

From there, Gena was marched in 1944 to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but instead of being gassed was sent on a death march to the camp at Buchenwald. She survived that too, and was finally moved to Bergen-Belsen.

There she nursed Anne Frank through the typhus that killed her.

Appalling experiences that no human should suffer, especially when they are completely unnecessary and merely inflicted by other humans. That is, humans who have lost their humanity.

Fortunately, she didn’t lose hers. Among the first allied soldiers who liberated Bergen-Belsen was a young Jewish sergeant in the British Army, Norman Turgel. I assume he was really a Nathan, like my grandfather, who was also often called Norman by his gentile friends (or non-friends). Norman met Gena in the Infirmary. He apparently found her attractive enough to want to invite her to dinner.

The dinner was in a British Officers’ mess. The tables were covered with crisp white linen, shining cutlery and vases of flowers. For someone who had spent over five years in concentration camps, the sight was difficult to take in. But Norman had an explanation ready. 

‘This is your engagement party,’ he told her.

As Gena would tell the story, he had decided on first meeting her that they would marry. As indeed they did, within six months, and, by special permission, inside the Bergen-Belsen camp. That won her the title she kept ever after: the Bride of Belsen. She even had a silk wedding dress, made from a British army parachute.

Norman and Gena Turgel
He in battledress, she in the parachute-silk wedding dress

She spent the rest of her life working constantly to spread awareness of the Holocaust, its causes and its victims.

She died on 7 June this year, at the age of 95. Having lived a long life marked by early and terrible suffering. But which she turned to great value.

My thanks to the BBC, via my wife, who heard it on the radio. At a time when we have an Italian Interior Minister prepared to leave people to drown in the Med rather than let them land, and a US President who sees nothing wrong in forcibly separating children from parents and keeping them in cages, we badly need to be reminded of humans who kept their humanity.

It’s a wonderful relief.

The parachute-silk wedding dress
Preserved in the Imperial War Museum, London

Hopes for 2018. Or are they just blinkers?

One of the aspects of 2018 that appeals to me personally is that it will be my second calendar year in a job I actually enjoy.

That may sound pretty unimpressive but when you’ve spent ten years moving between six jobs, five of which were lousy fits – or, to be fair, to which I turned out to be hopelessly unfitted – finding one that I actually like is a remarkable uptick.

So it’s good to be starting a new year in it.

One of the aspects I enjoy of the job is that it involves quite a lot of work in Italy. Why should that appeal to me? It’s where I was born, but in the course of a long career, I’ve never had the opportunity to work there. Now, however, I’ve been working with Italian colleagues and developing relations with Italian clients, and it’s wonderfully rewarding.

As a child, I spoke Italian pretty well. Perhaps to near-native level. Today – well, it’s half a century on and things get rusty. So one of the things I’ve been doing is working on the language. Reading is one of the best ways of doing that.

Do you know Primo Levi’s book The Periodic Table? I liked it so much that I’m re-reading it. The beauty is that it’s extremely funny, which only intensifies the harrowing poignancy of the life story of a man who was one of the few survivors of the extermination camp at Auschwitz.

Primo Levi: an extraordinary history for an outstanding writer

The book’s title is derived from the profession Levi first chose, long before he became a writer. He was a chemist. Each chapter is associated with the name of an element from the Periodic Table. Near the end of one of the early chapters, Zinc, Levi explains that:

…I had always considered my origins a negligible if curious fact, a little amusing anomaly, like someone whose nose is bent or who has freckles; a Jew is someone who doesn’t decorate a tree at Christmas, who shouldn’t eat salami but does anyway, who learned a little Hebrew when he was thirteen and then forgot it.

That struck a cord, because it is so close to the way I feel about being a Jew myself. If I were more religious it would matter much more but, since I’m not, it remains for me simply a cultural idea – or, more importantly, a cultural emotion – which is far from defining who I am. It’s as essential to my character as is my imposing height (167 cm or 5’7”) or my spectacular hair colour (six decades to get it to this particular white, though it was well under way in just three).

That’s surely how these characteristics should be. Of some interest, maybe, but not the basis for any kind of real judgement. Sadly, for Levi, in the late 1930s, his origins wouldn’t long remain a mere curiosity. As racial laws were promulgated by the Fascist government, walls began to go up around him, with the doors in them closing one by one.

These days, of course, while anti-Semitism is hardly dead, it isn’t the force it once was. Nor is it by any means the main cause for the persecution of people on the basis of what they are, rather than what they have done. Today the groups suffering the most are Muslims or Blacks.

Something that brought this home to me particularly strongly was when I asked a black woman I’d just met, where she was from. It was an innocent question. Her accent said loud and clear that the answer was ‘Luton’, the town to which my wife and I had just moved. That was the answer I was expecting. But that’s not an innocent question to a black person.

She replied, “I’m from Cheltenham”.

Now Cheltenham and Luton are about as far apart as any two towns can be in England. Not geographically, though they’re hardly neighbours. The real distinction is social. Cheltenham is nice, a word you should pronounce ‘naice’. It’s wealthy. It has a fine girls’ school. It has a major British spying centre. It has a Tory MP. House prices are, I doubt not, astronomical.

Luton has two Labour MPs. It’s just a tad dust-blown. Its great advantage is that, for being this close to London, its house prices are amazingly cheap – perhaps a third to a half of the capital’s.

It’s hard to imagine anyone with her accent coming from Cheltenham.

Still, that was her answer, and we chatted a little about the town and her upbringing there before moving on to other subjects.

By the afternoon, she’d got to know me a little better. And suddenly, unprompted, she turned to me and said, “actually, I was born in Jamaica. I came to Cheltenham when I was five”.

All the weight of blackness was suddenly laid bare for me. Ask a white Englishman where he’s from and he tells you. Ask someone black, and there’s a moment at least when he has to be wondering, “are you checking on whether I’m an alien? Whether I don’t belong here?”

The attitudes that would ultimately inflict terrible suffering on Levi are still there. They just have different targets, for the most part, today.

Back to Levi’s book.

The following chapter, Iron, starts with the words:

Outside the walls of the Chemistry Institute it was night, the night of Europe: Chamberlain had returned outplayed from Munich, Hitler had entered Prague without firing a shot, Franco had subjugated Barcelona and was sitting in Madrid. Fascist Italy, a minor pirate, had occupied Albania, and the premonition of catastrophe was condensing like a viscous dew across the houses and in the streets, in careful talk and muted consciences.

Well, we’re not there yet. Reading those words on the brink of 2018 reminded me how much less bad things look today than they did in 1939. But then, they didn’t look so bad in 1930, but the 1939 catastrophe came anyway.

And yet, if we wanted to live, Levi tells us later, if we wanted in some way to take advantage of the youth that was flowing through our veins, there was no other resource… than voluntary blindness.

Yes. That’s what stops us preventing that kind of slide. And yet, if Levi chose voluntary blindness, with what he was facing, what’s to stop us doing the same?

I’m looking forward to another year in a job I like. It should be fun. But is that just me choosing blindness too?

Ways to remember the Holocaust

It was an odd experience visiting the Auschwitz extermination camp.

My Jewish background made a trip inevitable, I suppose, in time. I’d always put it off, as I tend to be far too easily moved by this kind of thing. An extract from Schindler’s List, say, or perhaps the hopeless face of a young man or an old woman waiting for the next step in their fate, a mystery to them but all too well-known to us, can bring tears to my eyes.

But with my wife being sent several times to work in Kraków, the Polish town only an hour and a half from Auschwitz, and having joined her there for the second time, I felt it couldn’t be put off any longer. I had to go and see for myself.

Well, I’ve been. Despite my fears of being overwhelmed. And it moved me far less than I expected.

In the first place, it was all terribly familiar. I’ve seen too many photos, too many films. Even the sign with its great lie, ‘Arbeit macht frei’, ‘Work will set you free’, seemed familiar and, to tell the truth, rather smaller than I expected.

In addition, the place is now a museum and feels like one. The barrack blocks are cold, bitter, uninviting, but they’re sterile, as are the walkways between them. Get there after 10:00 am and you have to walk around with a guide, though I noticed some people who weren’t: we should have emulated them since our guide spoke uninterruptedly, barely drawing breath, leaving no time for the kind of silence real awe requires.

Most important of all, there are only buildings left. Naturally, I’m delighted there are no more inmates, but it was their presence and their treatment that gave the place its horror. Without them, it’s merely a collection of ugly barrack blocks. Only the barbed wire felt sinister, as it was obviously designed to keep in, whereas when we see that kind of fence these days, it’s usually intended to keep people out.

Barbed wire and barrack blocks at Auschwitz I
The sign warns about high-tension electricity –
that is, it warns people outside: we don't want them getting hurt

Even barbed wire, though, isn’t as eloquent as the human stories. That was brought home to me when I came across an enlarged extract from a photo of Jews walking towards the gas chamber. It showed three young boys walking side by side, one holding the hand of what looks like his younger brother. Now that was harrowing. Little boys. Like my sons once were. My sons would, indeed, have been in that same position had Hitler got his hands on them: a Jewish grandmother would have been enough to send them down that deadly walk too.

The boys, off to the gas chamber

People are what give the Auschwitz story its searing quality, not physical structures. That’s why I found the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague far more moving. It has been plastered and whitewashed from floor to ceiling. On its walls, have been painted thousands of names in stark red and dates of birth and death in grim black. Old people, young people, children. An entire community, the 78,000 Czech and Moravian Jews with their hopes and failures, dreams and achievements, wiped out. To top it all, there are the paintings by Jewish children made in Theresienstadt concentration camp under the direction of Bauhaus-trained Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who was herself killed in Auschwitz.

Names and dates of death of an entire murdered community

Those were sights that brought tears to my eyes. I tried to guess the stories of victim after victim. Born in 1935, murdered in 1942. Who does that? And why?

Back in Kraków, in the old Jewish quarter, we visited the Kupa synagogue, one of four that are once more open for worship. At the Jewish community centre – motto ‘Building a Jewish future in Kraków’ – we were told there were just 120 practising Jews in a city which once held more than 60,000. In all, 500 residents who recognise their Jewish roots, whether they choose to worship or not, have registered with the Kraków Community.

The Kupa Synagogue
An active centre of Jewish worship again

I feel no inclination to practice Judaism myself. If others wish to, or indeed to be active Muslims, Catholics, Protestants or members of any other faith, that seems to be their choice and none of my concern.

On the other hand, when I see Jews begin to organise again in a city from which their predecessors had been so thoroughly eradicated, that feels like more than the exercise of a right to worship. It doesn’t matter that the beginnings are so small. It’s still the living reasserting their claims over their would-be murderers.

I find that a far more moving testimonial than Auschwitz.