The Cafe
Independence issues
The English are
the most civilised
of all the races
John Cameron
Havel and Klaus
This is the last Scottish Review of 2011. SR returns on Thursday 5 January 2012.
Rear Window
Christmas in Scotland 100 years ago: 1911
On Christmas Eve, Harry Lauder rowed across to Dunoon in a four-oared boat from Gourock, singing some of his favourite songs to the boatmen. He was visiting his son, who was unwell. Mr Lauder returned on the first boat on Christmas Day.
Top of the bill at the Glasgow Empire was ‘A Real Aeroplane – in full flight on the stage’, described by the management as a ‘genuine and positive sensation’. The main support was provided by Miss Juliette and her school of highly educated sea lions.
Edinburgh police took a Christmas census of vagrants in the city. There were 423 – 301 Scottish, 73 Irish, 46 English and three ‘foreigners’.
On Christmas Day in Glasgow, a horse yoked to a parcel van belonging to the Caledonian Railway Company broke away outside Buchanan Street station and bolted across Port Dundas Road and down West Nile Street, where it overturned a milk van, and continued through the city centre, smashing a lamp-post and knocking down a visitor from London, who ended up in hospital.
Clydebank Police Court sat on Christmas morning. Four boys from Yoker who pleaded guilty to stealing nine pairs of football boots were each fined 10s 6d.
In Aberdeen, 103,000 letters were brought to the Post Office on Christmas Eve (a Sunday) and the capacity of the city’s pillar boxes was said to be ‘sorely tried’.
Although ‘the national festival of New Year’s Day’ remained the main Scottish holiday, Christmas was gaining in popularity. In Glasgow, the dockers decided to take the day off. In many districts, however, the schools were open ‘much to the disgust of the children’. Elderslie Public School was closed because of an outbreak of mumps.
The weather in Aberfeldy was said to be ‘ideal’ – with a little snow, frostbound roads, and ‘an exhilarating crispness in the air’.
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Testimony
My uncle Cliff
and the need to
bear witness
Joanne McNally
He kept his silence. Then a year ago, he felt the need to describe to me
a French family seated at a kitchen table – the scene was of normality,
yet, their bodies were of charcoal.
There was further silence from official bodies and institutions when I raised the matter of Geneva Conventions and the misleading administrative records. His account was turning out to be an uncomfortable and neglected key part of the past with ramifications for the present. Indeed, I discovered from official German documents dated 2 January 1945 that he and other British prisoners of war were to be marched along the same route with inmates from Birkenau ahead of the Soviet advance on the area. Again this raised further questions. Their commandos were marching under the code word ‘Krebs’ (crab) and were being transferred towards the interior of Germany in order to be put to work there.
Cliff did eventually arrive back to his village in one piece, with a flight first from Landshut to Reims and then from Reims to Buckinghamshire. All the villagers turned out to greet him when they heard he was on his way. Soon afterwards his feet collapsed and a year or so of mental and physical healing ensued. Some aspects of war and what he had witnessed as a soldier were just too horrendous for him to recount. He kept his silence. Then a year ago, he felt the need to describe to me a French family seated at a kitchen table – the scene was of normality, yet their bodies were of charcoal.
Cliff could not talk much about his experiences after the war. All we really knew was that he had worked on a farm in Poland and that he had been happy there. Few in the village would have been able to understand his extensive ordeal. From 2002 we talked regularly and in depth. It was only then that I discovered that he also knew German, and that he had remained in contact via German with Marie from the farm throughout the cold war, and had last spoken with her in June 2011, yet they had not seen each other since 1943. This truly was an example of genuine friendship across nations. Furthermore, when Marie married in 1950, her son was born on the same day as Cliff’s birthday.
The non-fiction manuscript based on his account and my archival findings and interviews with the last survivors await publication. Over the years I nevertheless persisted in trying to get this underbelly of Auschwitz known to the public at large: in 2007 I prepared a touring exhibition about Cliff’s experience in the mines beneath Auschwitz and his three-month forced march from upper Silesia to Bavaria. This exhibition was recently displayed again in Berlin (and subsequently confiscated by the police).
But, as I write this from Palestine, I realise more clearly than ever how historical facts can be uncomfortable and blatantly suppressed to suit an agenda and how generations can be brutally oppressed, displaced, and decimated, and how ordinary families suffer and continue to suffer immeasur-ably as a consequence. Cliff would have clearly identified with the people here, and would have hated what governments, politicians and international bodies have been doing to this part of the world, and to these people under occupation.
During the last few years, Cliff turned his attention to recording past village life and farming practices in Binbrook which are now mostly forgotten, along with the people who once inhabited this niche in the Wolds. In spite of his advancing age, he managed to capture with his voice and memory the vibrancy of daily life and the lost voices from the past. These voices will be heard by generations to come, thanks to his own need to bear witness.
Joanne McNally is a poet, writer and independent scholar
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