Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: Another Post Script
"I went home and wrote in my journal, 'That is how it is going to be.'"
Note: I have no way of knowing what Mavis Gallant (MG) would have thought of “trigger warnings,” but I’d hazard a guess that “not much” might sum up her reaction. Nor am I much of a fan; that said, I recognize that some of the content here, which relates to the Holocaust, while of historic importance, is disturbing. Please take your own sensibilities into account. Thanks.
The liberation of Nazi death camps by advancing Soviet forces began in Poland in the summer of 1944, with Majdanek, in Lublin. Few people are alive today for whom the atrocities enacted there, and in the hundreds of similarly configured extermination facilities across Germany and Eastern Europe, weren’t part of received history: at a given point in our educations we learned that these things happened, but they preceded us; they already belonged to a past from which we were, by simple dint of birth date, disassociated. These were horrors to which we were heir, because they were horrors of history and of the humanity to which we all belong; but, also, they were crimes to which we could plead, if ever we were pressed, a kind of innocence. But imagine the horror — regardless of whatever rumours, warnings or portents might have filtered through all the chaotic noise of war — of people reading the earliest of the first-hand accounts of what was found there, like this one in The Montreal Star, August 30, 1944.
(“…are placing a cross on it in memory of those who perished.” was how the story concluded, as those who had the heart and never to turn to Page 5 would have learned.)
A few days later, September 2, 1944, Mavis Gallant (MG), just turned twenty-two and newly employed by the weekly Montreal Standard, published “Meet Johnny,” the first of her many features and photo essays in the paper’s Rotogravure section. Here's a blurry first page facsimile.
MG was lucky in her collaborator, the photographer Hugh Frankel. A lifelong Montrealer, an entrepreneur and innovator and teacher, he was born a few years before her, 1919, and outlived her by seven months, dying at age 95 in September of 2014.
MG’s portrait of a little boy who is a good-natured terror on the streets of his neighbourhood is a far cry from the ever-more agonizing news emerging from riven Europe. Perhaps her editors thought it might be a welcome relief, and while it can be read as a domestic antidote to so much imported horror, the piece is also several cuts above your run-of-the-mill “Dennis-the-Menace-Boys-Will-Be-Boys” walk on the bright side a lesser writer might have cranked out.
Johnny’s father, away at war, is a mantelpiece fixture, only present in his photographs. The child, unconstrained by paternal example, has been more or less left to his own devices to figure out how to get by; to determine what it is to be a boy. His reliance on connivance, and his fists, and the stones he gathers as weapons; his disdain for his sister and mother; and his emergent gift for bullying are only cute to a degree. They suggest a shadow side of maleness, something with a growth potential that, while writ small, is not entirely disassociated from the consuming conflagration on the other side of the ocean. (One wonders, given the tenor of the times, what conversations MG might have had with Hugh Frankel, a Jew, about the horrible disclosures making their way into their own paper, and into the daily press.)
In her long and revealing interview with Geoff Hancock (published in Canadian Fiction Magazine and then in Canadian Writers at Work, Oxford University Press) MG recalls their work on that first story. (Frankel is identified here as Hi, a misspelling of Hy, as he was familiarly known; presumably Hugh was an anglicized, establishment-approved rendering of Hyman.)
The most extraordinary moment, for me, in that Hancock interview — it was conducted over two days, in Paris, in October, 1977; MG was then fifty-five — has to do with the graphic revelations that were beginning to make their indelible way around the world as the Russians and Allies advanced, as the Germans retreated, and as camp after camp was liberated. If the first written narrative were unsettling enough, how shocking must have been the first pictures? I wrote of this last year, when I was keeping my MG Centennial Diary. For reference, I post here the screenshots (badly taken, sorry) of her remarks in this regard to Geoff Hancock; her memories of what was plainly a signal event in the life of the world and in the life of the young reporter. What befell had taken place thirty-three years prior to their conversation, but the events, for MG, remain vivid and deeply felt.
Last month, while I was spending some time at the Rutherford Library at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, spooling through the microfilm record of MG’s years at the Standard, I happened — quite by accident, I wasn’t looking for it — upon that photo feature — it was printed as a detachable section that could be removed from the body of the paper and kept from children — from May 19, 1945.
This is the opening page; horrifying though the photo is — exciting a revulsion in no way mitigated by the decades-long familiarity that attaches to such images — it’s nothing compared to what followed.
I made facsimiles of the entire piece because it seemed, and seems, important, somehow, to have a record of MG’s contact with this black and white depiction of the worst things human beings can do to one another, the most heinous crimes we can commit and endure; images that seemed so impossible she believed they must have been fabricated, profane remnants of an obscene Brueghel fever dream. These are the photos that, in some measure, set her on her path, defined her quest, gave urgency to her plan to go to the smouldering slag heap of post-War Europe and find out how on earth such a thing had proved possible.
(I remember my own first contact with images like this, pictures in a magazine — perhaps it was Life, must have something along those lines: big double-page spreads. The dead. The emaciated. And some with still the heart to smile for the camera. I was very young, a child, nowhere near adolescent. I was with, I’m pretty sure, one or both of my brothers, boomer children, all born in the 50’s, just few years after the fact, all that blood still calling from the ground. I remember that our reaction, which was untutored, wasn’t horror or revulsion. so much as a kind of ghoulish fascination. We’d look at the pictures and look over our shoulders to make sure we weren’t discovered. It was like pornography. It was, of course, pornography. I look back at that with wonder and bit of senseless disgust. Scary moments from Disney cartoons gave me nightmares. This did not. I can’t say why. Children aren’t creatures of taste, they’re weirdly selective, and resilient in ways we don’t anticipate or give them credit for, which, I’d wager, is one of the reasons childhood exerted such a fascination and magnetic tug on MG. It was there from the get-go. Who was Johnny? What made him tick? How might he go wrong?
The pictures taken by the army photographers — those published in The Standard and many others like them — have been widely circulated, and I won’t reproduce them here, 78-years — almost to the day — after their first publication. What I’ll leave you with is the unsigned record of the words that were used instead of those written by MG. She scorned them, those summations of the unspeakable, but they are serviceable. They sound very much as you might expect, given the time in which they were written, and given the cruelty and suffering they depict. They’re marked by a kind of zealous patriotism and outrage. Some of the summations — one is a variation on the dangerous blonde theme — are crude, hard-boiled, the stuff of Argosy or gumshoe detective novels. Reading them, and thinking about MG’s disappointment that her work was scorned — also, I suspect, her outrage at such an out-of-hand rejection — I wonder, as who would not: what did she write? What few and unadorned words did she choose as cutlines for Hell? I believe — this derives from a memory of something I read, somewhere — that she destroyed her own copy of the captions she’d devised (“Oh caption, my caption, oh bleeding heart of red!”), just as she said she burned her journals when she left Montreal for Paris in 1950, just as she said she tore to shreds the copy of her juvenile poem, “Why I Am a Socialist,” ripping it from the hands of her mother who had found it among her things while looking through them, uninvited. There is something powerful in pages that are lost, even if it’s only the possibility, however tenuous and remote, that they are out there, somewhere, waiting to be found. And there is, so I think, something of more than strictly academic interest in these words that filled the space where MG’s should properly have been.
Montreal Standard, May 19, 1945
Headline: This Is Fascism
Subheading: From Mussolini’s Italy It Spread to Germany — And It Is Still a Threat
Introduction: Over a hundred photos of German concentration camps have come to The Standard from various picture services. They were taken by Canadian, British, and American photographers. We are publishing only a few and not by any means the worst. But we believe it is important for Canadians far from the terrors of war, to see and understand the nature of the enemy. This could have happened here. Our soldiers died to save us from it.
It would be a tragedy indeed if they had to die in vain. It is up to us, the living, to make sure that the Nazi-Fascist spirit which stifles free speech, incites race hatred, encourages intolerance and cruelty, despises humanity and peace, glorifies tyranny and war, is finally eradicated. These ideas are not yet dead in German, still live in every land. Till they too are defeated everywhere there can be no lasting peace.
Look at the photos. Thousands of Canadian soldiers have seen these things. The British have seen them; the Americans have seen them. General Patton forced German civilians to go and see what their army had done. Eisenhower went himself to look. He wired to Prime Minister Churchill suggesting that members of the British Parliament should come and see. U.S. Congressmen flew across the ocean to look as did a delegation of American newspapermen. All agreed that no word or picture could ever convey the full horror of that reality.
Here in Canada we can see around us the peace and freedom we are fighting for. These photos show what we are fighting against.
The Captions:
Charred bodies in concentration camps at Gotha are viewed by General Dwight D. Eisenhower and party of senior U.S. Army officers. In the group are General Omar Bradley, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Major-General Manton Eddy. No estimate has yet been made of how many millions including children were killed, starved, and tortured in the German camps. As the Allies approached, mass murders grew.
Wounded by continuous beating, Belsen prisoner drinks water from a rusty tin. In German concentration camps, beating was a routine occurrence experienced by prisoners. This is an example of its effects.
At Gardelegen, S.S. guards drove 1,000 political prisoners into a warehouse, burned them with acetate to prevent their being liberated. This man was groping for overturned can of water when he died.
Starvation diet, forced labor in a mine, no medical attention, a long forced march did this to an American prisoner, Private Alvin Abrams of Philadelphia. He was one of 63 Americans rescued at Fuchsmuhl.
These two little children were among the thousands at Belsen concentration camp who died the slow death of starvation while Nazi guards stood by. Some were found, half-alive, by their dead mothers.
These are S.S. women who helped guard Belsen. Prisoners say they were even more brutal than male guards. Head of group was 24-year old blonde who had once chosen prisoners to be gassed at Auschwitz. Captured, she said “I appeal to you as a human being . . .”
S.S. guards responsible for the carnage at Belsen look aggrieved as British soldiers force them to gather up the dead for burial. Prisoners are still dying at the rate of 300 a day, too weakened and diseased to be helped by medical care. Offences of Belsen prisoners listed by Nazi camp officials include being “evangelists, intellectuals, Red Spaniards, war prisoners, Jews.” Twenty thousand are buried in this camp.
Belsen’s medical officer was Dr. Klein. He committed to death thousands of prisoners including children, conducted experiments in which benzine was injected into arteries. Below, he stands astride some of his victims. He now dreads his fate, begs guards to shoot him.
German girl laughs as she helps dig grave, unaware that she will later be forced to help bury murdered slave workers discovered by British patrol in hastily-covered shallow pit, at forest near Saltau.
Smiles disappear as women see mutilated, decomposing body of foreign worker killed by their fellow-Germans. Half-starved slave had been brought to Saltau in cattle train, clubbed, beaten to death.
Grim-faced British soldiers watch in silence as townspeople carry coffins to newly-dug graves. British soldiers patrolling woods saw an arm sticking through the earth, unearthed hundreds of bodies. Next step was to show German civilians example of their country’s deeds.
Stuffed dummy dangles from Buchenwald’s gallows (retreating SS Guards had cut down bodies in effort to destroy evidence) as German civilians are brought to see work of fellow-countrymen. Nearby are pillories where men were tied and beaten, British parliamentary delegation, U.S. Congressmen toured Buchenwald, reported with horror. Fifteen hundred men slept in one barracks, six or eight to a bunk.
On General Patton’s orders, 1200 German civilians from Weimar are taken on forced tour of Buchenwald. Here they see crematorium ovens. Some civilans wept and fainted, others look on calmly. Mayor and wife finished the tour, went home, slashed their wrists.
In Buchenwald, some of the American editors and publishers invited to Germany by General Eisenhower to view for themselves evidence of prison camp atrocities see piles of starvation victims. Left to right are William Nichols, This Week; Ben McKelvay, Washington Star; Julius Ochs Adler, N.Y. Times; Norman Chandler, Los Angeles Times; Amon C. Carter, Fort Worth Star-Telegram; John Randolph Hearst.
Three German Burgomeisters (sic) kneel beside a victim of Gardelegen massacre. The German people must be made to realize what their leaders have done and how great is their share of the responsibility.
At Altendorn, slave workers cheer as stony-faced commandant is taken to U.S. First Army H.Q. to face atrocity charges. It is everyone’s duty to insist that war criminals like this do not escape justice.
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I will pass this on to Geoff H, Bill.
Thank you for this Bill. I have spent a few hours reading the excellent book "Out of Hiding; Holocaust Literature of British Columbia edited by Alan Twigg with an excellent and thought provoking essay on ways of hiding by Yosef Wosk. That included the question of what the German people knew and what the world knew and cared not to know, because as Mavis wrote there is no way to process the capacity of human beings to commit such atrocities, or permit them. My father was in the training division of the RCAf and was sent to Britain to help prepare the Canadian troops to come home. He was on the last ship carrying Canadian soldiers home. It took a whole year. But he came back with photos many of the troops brought back from Germany and actually was involved in making photo packs for the men (he never mentioned women) to bring home. He also had a German Luger pistol and a Nazi Flag, These were packed away in a trunk and I used to show them to my little friends. I was born after the war, so this would have been in the early 50's.
As a child, these did not horrify me as they do now. They were so remote from anything I could comprehend. My Mother was terribly upset and burned the flag and the photos and the gun was stored somewhere far out of reach and finally given to a collector. Only now, looking back to I realise how immediate the war and the Depression dn so many of the early tragedies of the 20th Century were to them. And the fact that there were only 20 years between the wars seemed like a lifetime to me then, but not my parents. And here we go again.