Make a Date – 9, 14 and 26 October

Some time ago I published a regular monthly column linking a set selection of dates in history. The series was popular. I'm busy coordinating the articles into book form. As today is 9 October, here are a number of linked events for that date plus two other October dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets. The three dates for this article are:

9, 14 and 26 October

This month (26) saw the British military occupation of Iraq end – in 1946. Obviously, governments don’t refer to history these days! Peace in the Middle East has been an elusive dream for a long time, and seems to be further away than ever. As far as this month goes, because he had made peace with Israel (and gained a Nobel Prize for his efforts), the President of Egypt was assassinated by members of the Islamic Jihad in 1981 and one week later President Hosni Mubarak was elected (14) President.

On the same day in 1994 Palestine leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (14). Twelve days later, Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty (26).

A year later to the day, Israeli secret service agents from Mossad assassinated the Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shikaki in his hotel in Malta (26).

And still people die in the Middle East – and elsewhere in the world – because of the politics and religion affecting that region’s instability.

Politicians tinkered with the House of Lords and in 1999 the Lords voted to end the right of hereditary peers to vote in the upper chamber of Parliament, bringing to a close hundreds of years of tradition (26).

Lord Home of Hirsel (Sir Alec Douglas-Home), the ex-Prime Minister, died (9) in 1995. He was a keen cricketer and played against Argentina for three of his first-class games for the MCC during their South American tour in the 1920s. On retiring as PM, he became the president of the MCC in 1966.

Cricketer Charlie Parker was born (14) in 1882 and is the third highest wicket taker in the history of first class cricket, behind only Wilfred Rhodes and Tich Freeman. During his career with England he took 3,278 wickets and scored 7,951 runs.

Running of a different type is the 1,500 metres race – which was first run under 3 minutes 30 seconds by Steve Cram, who was born (14) in 1960. At one time he seemed unbeatable, gaining world records for the 1,500, 2,000 metre races and the mile, all within nineteen days in 1985. His record for the mile stood for eight years.

Sportsman Matthew le Tissier, who played soccer for Southampton and England, was born (14) in Guernsey in 1968. A little over a hundred years earlier, in 1863, the Football Association was formed (26).

 
An association of a different kind was cemented by the marriage (9) of Louis XII of France and Mary Tudor, the daughter of our own Henry VII in 1514, striving to get a male heir. They were not successful and he died the following year. The Salic Law did not permit either of his two daughters by an earlier marriage to succeed to his throne so his cousin succeeded him instead to become King of France.
 
The Royal Charter, a steam clipper, was wrecked (26) by a severe hurricane off Anglesey in 1859. Over 450 souls died.

Sixty years earlier, HMS Lutine was transporting over a million pounds of bullion to the Hamburg banks when she encountered heavy gales and off the Dutch coast she became a total loss, with all but one of over 240 passengers and crew dying.

Lutine bell, Lloyd's - Wikipedia commons

 

Several attempts were made in succeeding years to recover the gold but most of it remains unsalved to this day. The ship’s bell was found almost sixty years later and was placed in the Underwriting Room at Lloyd’s. Traditionally, the bell was struck once when a ship was lost and twice when an overdue ship returned. A crack has developed so the bell is only rung to commemorate disasters, such as the atrocities of 11 September 2001, the Asian Tsunami, the London terrorist bombings and annually at the end of the Armistice Day silence.
 
HMS Royal Oak was sunk (14) by German U-boat U-47 in 1939, six years to the day after Germany withdrew from The League of Nations (14).

German businessman Oskar Schindler has been immortalised in the 1982 book Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally, filmed by Steven Spielberg as Schindler’s List. He saved over 1100 Jews from the concentration camps and died (9) in 1974.

 
Jewish-born Hannah Arendt fled her home in Germany in 1933 and lived in France until she had to elude the Nazis again in 1940, this time with her husband and mother. She was helped by American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, who illegally issued US visas to her and about 2,500 other Jewish refugees. She was born (14) in 1906 and brought her considerable intellect to bear on the philosophical conundrums posed by the twentieth century and attended several US universities.

The Commission of National Education was the first recorded ministry of education and was formed (14) in Poland in 1773.

Education and intelligence could be the death of you in Pol Pot’s regime in the 1970s; ‘intellectuals’ – if you could write, you fell into that category! - were massacred in their thousands. The Khmer Republic was proclaimed (9) in Cambodia in 1970 and civil war was waged until 1975 when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were victorious, renaming the country Democratic Kampuchea. His guerilla fighters and later his government were responsible for the deaths of over two million Cambodians in the Killing Fields.

 
Guerilla fighter Che Guevara was captured in 1967 in Bolivia and the day afterwards he was executed without trial (9). Guevara is variously a socialist revolutionary icon or a terrorist and butcher. He was in at the beginning with Castro and founded Cuba’s labour camps and state-endorsed executions and mismanaged the Cuban economy, overseeing the near-collapse of sugar production, the failure of industrialization, and the introduction of rationing—all this in what had been one of Latin America’s four most economically successful countries. Many Cuban exiles have said that their country could not afford another Che Guevara. The Left still idolise him, however.
 
Cuban musician Chucho Valdés was born (9) in 1941 and in 1967 co-founded Orquesta de Música Moderna with his compatriots guitarist Carlos Emilio Morales, reedsman Paquito D’Rivera, trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and singer-percussionist Oscar Valdés. In 1973 eight members of that orchestra formed Irakere, which in 1978 became the first Castro-era Cuban ensemble to obtain a contract with an American-based record label. Irakere's debut on Columbia was a Grammy winner.
 
The Cuban Missile crisis began in 1962 when a U-2 flight (14) over Cuba took photographs of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed on the island. These definitely were Weapons of Mass Destruction, no doubt about it, and the world teetered on the brink of war.

U2 plane on USS America - Wikipedia commons

Another momentous flight was that of the Bell X-1 which Chuck Yeager flew faster than the speed of sound (14), the first man to do so in level flight in 1947.

Eleven years later, in 1958, Pan Am made the first commercial flight of the Boeing 707 from New York to Paris (26). [The Pan Am airline collapsed in 1991.]

In 2001 internal US Delta Flight 458 was an early symptom of terrorist paranoia which we’re still seeing today, some years later. The aircraft was diverted (14) and passengers were taken off while officials investigated a report that two ‘Middle Eastern men’ were making threats in a foreign language. The two were actually Orthodox Jews praying... Not a suicide bomber in sight.

In 1984 there was one strange suicide when John D McCollum shot himself after spending a day listening to Ozzy Osbourne records (26); a law-suit was later filed by his parents over the song ‘Suicide Solution’ but the case was thrown out.

 
Osbourne’s wife Sharon was born (9) in 1952, the same year as the poet Andrew Motion (26).

American poet e.e. cummings was born (14) in 1894. Fellow American writer Harold Robbins, author of The Carpetbaggers (1961) and A Stone for Danny Fisher (1952), seemed to invent the modern blockbuster with its sex and violence; he died (14) in 1997. In complete contrast was the author A.A. Milne’s book Winnie-the-Pooh, which was first published (14) in 1926. An Italian author who wrote political works as well as stories for children, Carlo Collodi died (26) at the age of sixty-four in 1890. Collodi created Pinocchio, the puppet without any strings.

 
Someone who has had a string of popular hit singles is Cliff Richard, who was born (14) in 1940, the same day and year (14) as actor Christopher Timothy, the actor best known for his portrayal of the vet, James Herriot.
 
Also born (9) in the same year was John Lennon, musician and songwriter. The term ‘Beatlemania’ was coined (14) in 1963 to describe the scenes at the previous night’s performance of The Beatles on the TV show Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. In early 1964 The Beatles appeared at the Palladium with Alma Cogan, the singer who had ‘a laugh in her voice’. Tragically, cancer killed her (26) in 1966 at the age of thirty-four; she was also known for wearing amazing dresses.

Alma Cogan

American fashion designer Ralph Lauren was born (14) in 1939. One wonders what he would have thought of the sumptuary law passed (14) in 1651 in Massachusetts forbidding poor people from adopting excessive styles of dress - the law-makers were filled with ‘utter detestation’ concerning those people of ‘mean condition’ who disported themselves as ladies and gentlemen by ‘wearing gold or silver lace and silk or tiffany hoods’. What a silly law!
 
What would PM David Cameron make of that law? He was born (9) in 1966, fifty years after Francois Mitterrand, President of France, who was born (26) in 1916 (he died in January 1996). Full circle again, we started with politics so we might as well end on that subject!

[PS - yes, I know, 14 October was included in the 1, 14 and 31 October item too! Well, a lot happened on that day in history!]

Book of the film - Schindler's Ark

Thomas Keneally’s book was published in 1982; its title for the US publication was Schindler’s List. It won the Booker Prize for the same year, though there were ripples of controversy regarding its selection for this fiction prize. Despite it being referred to as a novel, it is far from that: it is a relatively early example of narrative nonfiction (sometimes called creative nonfiction). The writer employs all the tools of fiction, applying them to factual events and real individuals.

Keneally states in his Author’s Note: ‘To use the texture and devices of a novel to tell a true story is a course which has frequently been followed in modern writing. It is one I have chosen to follow here; both because the craft of the novelist is the only craft to which I can lay claim, and because the novel’s techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar. I have attempted to avoid all fiction, though, since fiction would debase the record, and to distinguish between reality and the myths… Sometimes it has been necessary to attempt to construct conversations of which Oskar and others have left only the briefest record… But most exchanges and conversations and all events, are based on the detailed recollections of the Schindler Jews, of Schindler himself, and of other witnesses to Oskar’s acts of outrageous rescue.’

In effect, Keneally succeeds beautifully. The documentary feel about it is perhaps appropriate for the subject matter.

 

It’s probable that Oskar Schindler needs no introduction these days, thanks to this book, subsequent books and of course the Oscar-winning Spielberg film, Schindler’s List (1993).

 

Briefly, before the war, Schindler worked for the Abwehr, the Nazi party’s intelligence service, where he build up a number of contacts who proved useful to him when he began an enamelware business in Cracow, taking over the Rekord works, renaming it Deutsche Email Fabrik (DEF) [email before e-mail, indeed!] His factory employed about 1,700, a thousand of them being Jews. Initially, he seemed driven by the profit motive, when he wasn’t cheating on his wife and also drinking to excess.

Then war descended upon Poland and, gradually, he saw and heard of the inhuman treatment meted out to the Jews by the German invaders and many Poles. He addressed a number of newly recruited workers: ‘You’ll be safe working here. If you work here, then you’ll live through the war.’ He was a big imposing man, and yet many wondered how he could make such a promise. Didn’t he know what was happening all around? His tone commanded belief.

Schindler seemed to be an uncanny judge of character. SS Oberfuhrer Julian Scherner would ‘sometimes be discovered wearing the smirk of his unexpected power like a childish jam-stain in the corner of his mouth. He was always convivial and dependably heartless. Oskar could tell that Scherner favoured working the Jews rather than killing them, that he would bend rules for the sake of profit…’ (p91) Often, Oskar had to deal with and bribe men in authority, and always got what he wanted.

SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Amon Goeth was the commandant of the Kraków-Plaszów concentration camp, which he had built by forced labour; here Oskar’s workers were forced to live.

‘Oskar had the characteristic salesman’s gift of treating men he abhorred as if they were soul brothers, and it would deceive the Herr Commandant so completely that Amon would always believe Oskar a friend… Oskar despised Goeth in the simplest and most passionate terms. His contempt would grow without limit and his career would dramatically demonstrate it.’ (p164)

Goeth was a psychotic killer, who thought nothing of leaning out of his window and shooting to death a passing worker in the camp. Oskar had the measure of him, however, and during one of their drinking sessions together, he risked Amon Goeth’s murderous ire: ‘… acting out of an amity which, even with this much cognac aboard, did not go beyond the surface of the skin, merely a sort of frisson, a phantom shiver of brotherhood running along the pores, nothing more – Oskar, leaning towards Amon and cunning as a demon, began to tempt him towards restraint.’ (216) And it seemed that Goeth became magnanimous, no longer arbitrarily murdering people.

Oskar’s deviousness knew no bounds. He constantly risked his position, his business, all his money and his life by protecting his workers. There is an allusion to good soldier Schweik, a First World War character created by Jaroslav Hasek, ‘to foul up the system’ (p229). That was Oskar’s Czech ancestry. Schweik bamboozled authority with his comic incompetence, puncturing pomposity and highlighting military stupidity (my copy of The Good Soldier Schweik and His Fortunes in the World War translated by Cecil Parrot proved useful in my research for The Prague Papers!)

There are many painful and memorable moments in this book. Take, for example, the three-year-old child. Even at that age she had her vanities – ‘a passionately preferred colour. Red. She sat there in red cap, red coat, small red boots…’ (p100) – more of which anon.

Rumours in closed societies can be debilitating, dangerous and destructive. Whispers about salt mines, being buried alive… ‘All this hearsay, much of which reached Oskar, was based on a human instinct to prevent the evil by voicing it; to forestall the fates by showing them that you could be as imaginative as they. But that June all the worst of the dreams and whispers took concrete form and the most unimaginable rumour became fact.’ While out horse riding, Oskar witnessed the clearing of part of the ghetto, and he saw a little girl, a toddler, being shepherded with the doomed men and women by SS guards, and the toddler was wearing a small scarlet coat and cap. Before moving out of sight, the child witnessed abhorrent brutality and murder. Afterwards, Oskar realised that the culprits ‘permitted witnesses, such witnesses as the red toddler, because they believed all the witnesses would perish too.’  (p123)

Even disallowing the moral dimension, it beggared belief that the Nazi war machine would squander so many resources on the ‘Final Solution’, diverting transport, troops, administrators, and weapons in their insane mission of extermination.

Eventually, towards the end of the war, Oskar realised he had to move his workforce out of Poland before they were selected for the crematoria. Not without much conniving, effort, and payment – kilos of tea, leather shoes, carpets, coffee, canned fish – he arranged for his Jews to be transferred to a factory in Moravia. A list was created and the authorities sanctioned the move for all on the list. There was privation and despair before they all finally arrived at the new factory, however...

 
Ultimately, Oskar saved 1,200 Jews by employing them– and he was such a con-man that they never produced one item that aided the German war effort. At the time of liberation, those he saved spread to countries round the world.

Keneally’s book is moving without lurching into sentimentality, and provides many psychological insights, some touched upon in the few quotations above. The writing is at times almost poetic: ‘… without the evidence of the crematoria, the dead could offer no witness, were a whisper behind the wind, an inconsequential dust on the aspen leaves.’

 
The film condenses much of the book, starkly in black-and-white – save for that shot of the little girl in red. The presence of Liam Neeson as Oskar dominates the screen. The other characters are faithfully acted, notably Ben Kinglsey as Itshak Stern, Oskar’s accountant and conscience, and Ralph Fiennes is horribly real as Goeth.
 
This film should be viewed at least once in a lifetime.
 
And this book should be read, too.

When Oskar Schindler died in 1974, ‘he was mourned in every nation.’ (p401).  

Holocaust (1)

As this year marks the 70^th anniversary of the Allies’ liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp, I thought it was high time I read a particular book that has been in my library for almost thirty years: The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert (1986). 

There are a number of reasons why I haven’t tackled it until now: I know the subject from many other books; it’s a daunting read by page-count, let alone the subject matter; I have so many unread books on the shelves anyway.

Now, however, the time seems poignantly appropriate, as we detect a rise in nationalism, extremism, hate and disconcerting political vacuum within present-day Europe.

So, over the next week or so I may refer to this book as I work through it.

Among other books I’ve read relating to the Holocaust are:

Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally (1982). Winner of the Booker Prize. A best-selling narrative non-fiction work, Keneally gets into the skin of characters both good and evil. And of course Spielberg’s heart-wrenching film Schindler’s List was the result.

The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas (1981). Short-listed for the Booker Prize. At the time I was studying psychology and as this novel was ostensibly about Sigmund Freud and his patients, it seemed logical to read it. Thomas is foremost a poet, and this is evident from his language. The tale begins with Freud’s female patients’ erotic fantasies but then descends into the Holocaust which is harrowing and leaves the reader numb.

I Will Survive by Sala Pawlowicz (1962). I read this in 1965 and it lingers with me still. An excellent review is on Amazon UK by Russell Fisher, and this is an excerpt from that review: The final page of 'I Will Survive' illustrates the dignity and humanity of this remarkable woman: 'I cannot find it in me to spend my life condemning the Germans. I do not forgive them for their treatment of me and my family, but I have found too much in the world to love. There is no room in my heart for hate. Rosie is our hope for the future. We try to make her feel wanted, as we ourselves finally came to feel we were wanted. We try to make her understand the sacredness and dignity that is human life. If she is instructed well, then the world will indeed be happy with us.'

Ashes to the Vistula by Bill Copeland (2007). When I wrote a review of this in 2008, I began: ‘Over the years I’ve read a number of Holocaust books, fiction and non-fiction, yet no matter how much you read about this period, thankfully you can never become inured to the horror. Perhaps I thought that there was nothing new to be said about this important yet horrendous subject; but I’d be wrong. Because despite the evident inhumanity displayed by several individuals, what shines through is the powerful humanity, the will to survive, the will to serve fellow men and women, no matter what the risk.’ Bill was a poet, too and this was his first published novel; it won multiple awards. It is a story about two boys that are taken to Auschwitz and forced to overcome great trials together despite the hardships that they already face. Bill died in 2010.