The Best Australian Essays 2015 (5 page)

A slick layer of graphite preserved in 3.8-billion-year-old rocks near Isua, Greenland, was long believed to contain the earliest evidence of life on Earth. But recent studies reveal that the carbon composing the graphite was not formed by life at all. The next oldest evidence was long thought to be 3.5-billion-year-old microscopic fossils of algae from Western Australia. But recent research has shown that the ‘fossils' are far more recent, and in any case may not be fossils at all, but crystals. A 2012 study announced that fossils of bacterial ecosystems dating back 3.49 billion years had been discovered in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, and this is now widely accepted as the oldest evidence of life.
²

Charles Darwin famously speculated that life began in a ‘shallow, sun-warmed pond'. But back when Earth formed, its surface was probably covered entirely, or almost so, by oceans. And because Earth lacked an ozone layer for the first 2 billion years of its existence, it is unlikely that shallow waters could have hosted life's origin because ultraviolet radiation would have torn apart the delicate, assembling RNA.

Currently favoured candidates for an earthly origin of life range from hot springs to mid-ocean ridge vents known as ‘black smokers'. Conditions there may have aided the formation of the ever-longer strings of amino acids and molecules, including RNA, that were eventually able to metabolise and reproduce. Mid-oceanic ridges are protected from ultraviolet radiation by the overlying ocean. They are also rich in the elements required for DNA. Additionally, the majority of the most ancient life forms on Earth are thermophiles, small organisms some of which thrive in near-boiling water. One problem for this theory is that water attacks and breaks up the nucleic acid polymers that make up RNA. And unless protected, it is also destabilised by heat.

*

Most research focuses on a search for the earliest life. But perhaps we should be searching instead for evidence of the first nanomachines. Chemical signatures in rocks that result from the activities of the nanomachines offer one means of doing this. For example, studies show that the nanomachines that make atmospheric nitrogen, and can add oxygen to the ammonia so produced in order to create nitrate, were in existence by at least 2.5 billion years ago.
³

Joe Kirschvink argues that Earth's rocks are the wrong place to look for the nanomachines' origins. He is a leading proponent of the seemingly radical theory that the nanomachines, and perhaps life itself, originated on the ice caps and glaciers of ancient Mars. The case is fleshed out fully in
A New History of Life
, and recent discoveries are building an impressive body of supporting evidence. NASA's Curiosity lander, for example, has found evidence for ancient Martian streams and ponds: billions of years ago Mars probably had an ocean, as well as land and ice caps. The red planet may have offered a far less hostile environment for assembling naked strings of RNA than Earth. Kirschvink also points out that space travel by early life is not improbable. Mars is small, so its gravity is weak compared with that of Earth. Asteroids could therefore have thrown up a lot of rocks capable of escaping Martian gravity. And we know, through experiments, that meteorites originating from Mars can reach Earth without being sterilised.

But if the nanomachines did originate on Mars, where might they have crossed the ‘Darwinian threshold' and become truly living things? Kirschvink argues that Earth's atmosphere offers a plausible nursery. Held aloft by fierce winds and currents, the Martian RNA fragments may have mixed with each other, exchanging fragments from one chain to another. Natural selection would have favoured the more functionally complex and efficient strands, which would then have proliferated. Eventually, perhaps when the strands became encompassed by cell walls made of tiny droplets of lipids (a type of molecule that includes fats and waxes), the mass transfer of genes between the nascent nanomachines slowed and their chemistry stabilised.

The Nobel laureate Christian de Duve believed that at this point life would have emerged from nonlife very quickly, perhaps in minutes. Safe behind its lipid cell walls, the RNA could enter the ocean, finding the rich trove of nutrients that exists around the black smokers. From then on, Darwinian evolution would have ensured the survival of those that operated most efficiently in a hot environment. This story is, of course, almost entirely unsupported by evidence. It is a scenario – a vision of how things might have been – rather than a fleshed-out scientific theory. It is nonetheless useful because it provides a target for future researchers.

*

A New History of Life
deals with life's entire trajectory, from the time before its first spark to the present. The conventional view is that for a billion years after life first evolved, very little seems to have happened. Then, over perhaps a few hundred million years, oxygen utterly transformed the face of Earth. That oxygen came from the most complex cellular nanomachinery ever to evolve – the trinity organisms, composed of three organisms embedded within a single cell, that could photosynthesise. But Falkowski's nanomachines make me think that the billion-year ‘pause' before their emergence is illusory. Enormous changes to life's engines occurred as they transformed from relatively simple nanomachines to planet-altering photosynthesisers.

A mystery surrounds the oxygenation of Earth. The oxygen produced by the photosynthesisers should have interacted immediately with organic matter, preventing any increases in free atmospheric oxygen. And indeed this is what appears to have happened for hundreds of millions of years after the first trinity organisms evolved. What was needed, if free oxygen was to accumulate in the atmosphere, was for some of the organic matter it reacted with to be put out of the oxygen's reach.

Falkowski thinks that ‘the oxygenation of Earth had much to do with chance and contingencies'. Ward and Kirschvink agree, saying that one of the greatest contingencies was the creation of what we call fossil fuels. For fossil fuels and other buried organic molecules are organic matter put out of oxygen's reach many millions of years ago, and they exist in Earth's crust in direct proportion to the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.

The dependence of evolutionary change on contingencies is further highlighted when Ward and Kirschvink discuss the evolution of the first large animals. They arose about half a billion years ago, in what is known as the Cambrian explosion. Scientists have long argued about why they evolved so rapidly, and at that time. Ward and Kirschvink think they have an answer, in the form of ‘true polar wander'. Essentially, the idea is that as the continents moved over the face of the planet, they altered its centre of gravity. By around half a billion years ago they had so shifted the gravitational centre that the Earth's outer layers had begun to move relative to Earth's core. Over millions of years, the landmasses originally lying over the poles came to lie over the equator. This southward shift may have released methane trapped in clathrates (ice-methane combinations kept stable by low temperatures or pressure), triggering a release of greenhouse gases that warmed the climate and provided favourable conditions for an increase in biodiversity. There is evidence to back parts of this theory. Something odd was happening to Earth's poles around the time complex life evolved. And ‘true polar wander' is characteristic of other planets, including Mars. But again, Ward and Kirschvink are pushing the envelope with this theory.

Neither
Life's Engines
nor
A New History of Life
is an easy book for the non-scientist, but both are immensely rewarding. Like Galileo's telescope and microscope, they focus on the very small (Falkowski) and the very big picture (Ward and Kirschvink). Both are full of novel thinking about life's origin and subsequent evolution. Taken together, they help us begin to see where the next big questions about life's origins lie, and how they might be investigated.

Notes

1.
See Jon Cartwright, ‘Quantized Vibrations Are Essential to Photosynthesis, Say Physicists',
physicsworld.com
, 22 January 2014.

2.
See Nora Noffke, Daniel Christian, David Wacey and Robert M. Hazan, ‘A Microbial Ecosystem in an Ancient Sabkha of the 3.49 GA Pilbara, Western Australia, and Comparison with Mesoarchean, Neoproterozoic and Phanerozoic Examples', GSA Annual Meeting, November 2012.

3.
See ‘Billions of Years Ago, Microbes Were Key in Developing Modern Nitrogen Cycle',
(e) Science News
, 19 February 2009.

New York Review of Books

Belsen: Mapping the Memories

Nadia Wheatley

I vividly remember my reaction when I discovered that my father had worked at Belsen.

This revelation came in 1983, a few weeks after his death, when his widow sent me an old press clipping, together with a note saying she'd found it among his papers and she supposed I had better have it. Feeling as if I should handle it with tongs (and not just because the paper was brittle with age), I picked it up. Dated 22 February 1947, it was from the newspaper in my father's hometown in northern England, and was typical of a small-town newspaper piece.

Titled ‘Hexham Man's New Post in Germany', the article explained that Colonel J.N. Wheatley had recently been appointed chief medical officer for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in the British Zone, where he would have overall responsibility for some 280,000 Displaced Persons (DPs) living in makeshift camps. As I skimmed through the account of the work he had been doing in Germany for the two years prior to this appointment, I found myself coming to a dead halt at the information that ‘Colonel Wheatley was medical superintendent of the Belsen camp hospital'.

Belsen! Although I was aware that this must have been
after
the time when it was a Nazi concentration camp, nevertheless the very name made my blood run cold. Simultaneously there came into my mind's eye a photograph (or was it a moving image I had seen in some documentary film?) of naked corpses – already looking like skeletons – being bulldozed into the pit of a mass grave. A few moments later, still holding the page of newsprint, I was astonished to be feeling an unaccustomed benevolence towards my father, even a sense of dawning comprehension. Ah, so this was why the man was so difficult, so cold! Did it even explain his habit of whistling through his teeth – a single monotone note, more of a hiss really than a whistle – as he blocked out everyone and everything around him? And indeed, did whatever my father had experienced at Belsen explain, if not excuse, his treatment of me, and of my mother?

*

As reality set in, memories began to flow. While my father's connection with Belsen was completely new to me, the fact that both my parents had worked for UNRRA in post-war Germany had been a part of my knowledge even before I could print the alphabet letters that made up the acronym of the world's first international aid agency. Indeed, one of my first picture books was an album containing the photos of the strange-looking people who were my parents' friends and colleagues from that period, as they gathered in June 1948 to celebrate the marriage that had taken place earlier that day at the British Consulate in Hamburg; a bare ten months later, my mother gave birth to me in Sydney. Although I never knew even the names of the wedding guests, the DPs with whom my mother and father had been working in Germany were to me real flesh and blood, because through the first six years of my life a steady stream of people whom my parents had known in various camps came to live in the flat that was attached to the side of our house. Forbidden to bother them, I paid my visits in secret, and as I lay in bed at night the sound of voices talking and singing in Polish used to come through my nursery wall with its Beatrix Potter frieze; sometimes, too, there was the sound of crying.

Yet if my neighbours brought something of the history of postwar Europe into my middle-class suburban world, I felt there to be an even more powerful link between myself and the people who always seemed to be summed up by a couple of alphabet letters. I knew from fairy stories that the naming of a child involved the bestowal of something magic, and whenever I pestered my mother to tell me why I was called ‘Nadia' (a most peculiar name in 1950s Anglo-Australia) she would reply, in her breeziest manner, ‘Oh, I named you after one of the DPs.'

‘Who?'

‘Nadia, of course.'

‘Nadia
who
?'

At that point, my mother would sigh volubly and light up a Craven A, and as she would die when I was nine years old, I would learn from her no more details about my namesake, and indeed nothing more than a picture-postcard version of the Germany where she had spent four demanding and even dangerous years. Yet while my love for my mother made me store up every scrap of personal information I had ever garnered from her, my father was a completely different matter

And so, when I received the newspaper clipping that was my sole legacy after his death, I put it into the box where I kept my parents' wedding album and my mother's UNRRA shoulder-flash and the other memorabilia from the time that immediately preceded my birth. It took more than three decades before I went to Belsen and began finding out what my father had been doing there.

*

It is September when I first arrive at Bergen-Belsen. Bypassing the sleek silver bunker of the Documentation Centre, I make my way into the vast open area of the
Gedenkstätte
(Memorial), where the earth is still wearing its summer cladding of the tiny flowers typical of the Lüneburg Heide, or heath. Notwithstanding the daintiness of this pinkish mauve groundcover, this is a topography as stripped to its bare bones as the bodies in the mass graves that rise out of the flat earth like Neolithic barrows.

HIER RUHEN 800 TOTE APRIL 1945 …

HIER RUHEN 1000 TOTE APRIL 1945 …

HIER RUHEN 2500 TOTE APRIL 1945 …

HIER RUHEN 5000 TOTE APRIL 1945 …

Even my schoolgirl German is up to translating the terrible arithmetic that is recorded in the signs on the stonework facing of the mounds. At each of these collective burial sites there are simple offerings that other visitors have made: a red candle, a line of pebbles, a bunch of twigs, a small basket of heather. As I remember (or feel as if I remember) the bulldozer with its terrible load, the starkness of these anonymous graves seems to me to say all that can be said about a genocide, and much more poignantly than the dozen or so individual tombstones – including one bearing the names of Anne and Margot Frank – that seek to personalise death. Despite the sign carefully explaining that these memorials ‘have only a symbolic meaning. They do not mark graves', the one for the Frank girls is decorated with bunches and pots of flowers, photographs, pebbles and handwritten messages addressed to the young diarist whose own writing has touched so many lives.

If the earth beneath Anne's gravestone is empty, so is the landscape. Here the visitor wishing to map the memories needs to walk the place; there are no buildings – either original or facsimile – to give an idea of the size or form of the seventy or so huts where some 40,000 prisoners were once crowded together. (‘This isn't Disneyland,' the
Gedenkstätte
's archivist says to me a little later on this memorable day. And when I see the historical photos displayed at the Documentation Centre I discover that, after the liberation, the British burned the huts to the ground – primarily to stop the spread of disease, but also to symbolise the destruction of the Nazi regime.)

Making my way towards an obelisk and commemorative wall that mark the western perimeter of the
Gedenkstätte
, I arrive first at a stone memorial, erected at the time of the first anniversary of the liberation and commemorating ‘Thirty thousand Jews exterminated in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen at the hands of the murderous Nazis'. A couple of hundred metres on, a wooden cross stands ‘in memory of about fifteen thousand Polish men, women and children who were martyred in Bergen-Belsen'. In front of the wall (itself covered with inscriptions in various languages), another stone commemorates the lives and deaths of
Juden
and
Sinti und Roma
, of
Zeugen Jehovas
and
Homosexuelle
, as well as
Soldaten aus der Sowjetunion und aus anderen staaten
. The English-language text on yet another stone declares it to be ‘in remembrance of all Jewish and non-Jewish Turkish citizens who were murdered in Bergen-Belsen 1943–1945'.

Although it is at this point that I begin to become aware of the complexity of this memorial site, which reflects the many layers of the camp's history, it is only later that I discover that the assumption I brought with me – that Belsen was primarily a
Jewish
camp – does not reflect the way it was initially ‘marketed' to the English-speaking public. Indeed, one of the most shocking things I would subsequently discover about the history of Bergen-Belsen is that, at the time of the liberation, the British authorities and media were at pains not to mention the fact that the majority of the concentration camp's inmates (both the living and the recently dead) were Jewish. This was in line with the policy of the British Ministry of Information during World War II, which dictated that stories about the enemy's atrocities ‘must deal with indisputably innocent people. Not with violent political opponents [such as socialists and communists]. And not with Jews.' It would take some decades before the historiography would correct this gap in the record, and even today Belsen is often seen as the site of one of Britain's ‘finest hours', rather than as a place of Jewish mourning.

*

In fact, the camp did not begin as a place to detain prisoners – Jewish or otherwise. Innocuously enough, the huts were erected in 1935 as temporary housing for 3000 German labourers who were engaged to build an extensive set of barracks for the
Wehrmacht
(German army) to use as a Panzer Training School. Situated a couple of kilometres south of the barracks in the vicinity of two villages, named Bergen and Belsen, the camp would later acquire both their names. In 1940, the
Wehrmacht
used some of the now vacant huts to accommodate 600 French and Belgian prisoners of war. The following year, barbed-wire fences and watchtowers were erected when the camp was prepared to receive the 21,000 Soviet POWs who arrived in July. Without adequate housing, many spent the coming winter in burrows they dug into the earth. By the following March, two-thirds of these prisoners had died of hunger, disease and exposure to the cold. While some of the survivors remained in the 1200-bed camp hospital, the rest were sent out into the surrounding area on work details.

It was in April 1943 that the major change began to take place in the purpose and administration of the Bergen-Belsen camp, and in the composition of its inmates. While the
Wehrmacht
continued to hold POWs in its hospital to the north of the camp's main road, the part of the site – representing half the area – lying to the south of the road was taken over from the military by the SS, the black-uniformed paramilitary elite that had begun as a security guard for Hitler and by now was responsible for implementing the Final Solution to the ‘problem' of the Jews and other enemies of the German state. Notwithstanding this ultimate goal of exterminating all Jews from the territory of the Reich, the Bergen-Belsen ‘holding camp' (
Aufenthaltslager
) included an area (unique in the entire concentration camp system) that was established to hold certain special Jewish prisoners whom the German Foreign Office hoped to be able to exchange for German nationals imprisoned abroad.

Only a small number of exchanges were ever made, and conditions in what was called the Star Camp (because of the yellow star that occupants had to wear on their clothing) were far from easy. However, contrary to a widely held misapprehension, Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp. This indeed was a major difference between the camps established on German soil and the camps in the conquered territories to the east of the German border. It was in the east that certain camps were equipped with the gas ovens and other infernal devices that provided the mechanism for Hitler's Final Solution.

Despite this important distinction between the eastern and western camps, the boundary blurs because, over the last months of its history, Bergen-Belsen began to receive prisoners who had survived extermination camps in the east and had been sent to the west in advance of the Soviet army. The 8000 women who came from Auschwitz included the two Frank girls. By now the huts were so full that many of the women were provided only with tents for the coming winter; holes in the ground served as toilets. Faced with a camp that was bursting at its seams, in January 1945 the SS took over the northern half of the site from the
Wehrmacht
and used it for an enlarged women's camp. This did little to ease the overcrowding. As the Death Marches brought more and more prisoners from camps in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union, the population of Bergen-Belsen increased from 15,000 in December 1944 to 42,000 in March 1945. Yet in the lunacy of that time, 6700 Bergen-Belsen inmates were herded into train-carriages and sent on journeys back towards the east. Despite this, by early April the camp was so full that when another 15,000 prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp arrived, they were housed at the nearby
Wehrmacht
barracks.

Meanwhile, the regime hardened in December 1944 when Josef Kramer, former commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, was put in charge of Bergen-Belsen; other SS personnel from Auschwitz (including women) joined his staff. As part of a deliberate policy that could be described as a form of extermination, the provision of food – always minimal – dropped to starvation level. Water was contaminated and in very short supply. The sanitation facilities collapsed and huts were soon ankle-deep in faeces. Yet as winter gave way to spring, an even worse peril appeared. Spread by the lice that infested the huts as well as every article of clothing and bedding, an epidemic of typhus killed people who had managed to survive years of hunger, forced labour and even the threat of the gas chambers. The number of deaths rose from 7000 in February to 18,000 in March; a further 9000 people died in the first two weeks of April. As the camp's crematoria could not keep up with the death rate, corpses were left to rot in the huts and on the ground; by mid-April there were 10,000 lying unburied among the living and the barely living.