The Best Australian Essays 2015 (7 page)

Although the records of his administration make it clear that my father ran the hospital very efficiently, there was a problem with his attitude towards the people in his care. A month or so after he took over the role of superintendent, a French doctor who was in charge of the Medical Inspection rooms wrote a comprehensive report on the camp, in which he stated that ‘Dr W' had a ‘more correct and friendly manner' than his predecessor, but ‘unfortunately it does not seem that he has a better understanding of the state of mind (
états d'esprits
) and the needs of the DPs'. Even more damningly, the UNRRA archives contain a fragment of text from an article published in late 1945 in an American Jewish weekly newspaper, which (in the translation provided from the original German) declared that ‘the UNRRA hospital is under direction of an Englishman Whittley, who only employs former German doctors and nurses who were not quite innocent of the big destruction work'.

Whatever truth there is to this allegation about the culpability of his medical team, it is the case that there were seven German doctors (some of them former
Wehrmacht
officers) and 131 German nurses working at the Glyn Hughes Hospital in my father's time, and there is evidence that he was both favourably disposed towards his German staff and reluctant to employ Jewish personnel. It is small comfort to me that his views were shared by a number of much more senior UNRRA officials, including the Chief Medical Officer for the British Zone (Australian advocate of racial purity, Sir Raphael Cilento) and the Director of Health for the European Office. The aid organisation's official response to complaints on this politically charged issue was that it had inherited the German medical personnel when it had taken over the Glyn Hughes Hospital from the British military, but the tone of the internal correspondence on this matter reveals an attitude of systemic anti-Semitism.

*

Two days after this bus tour to the old hospital, Mr Ronald Lauder, speaking on behalf of the World Jewish Congress at the ceremony held to mark the seventieth anniversary of the liberation, points out that anti-Semitism is once more on the rise in Europe. ‘Today a Jewish boy wearing a yarmulke,' he declares, ‘cannot walk down the street in Paris or London or Copenhagen without fearing for his life.'

Sadly, the same might be said about a Muslim girl in hijab, I think as I write down his words in a soggy notebook. By Sunday, the blue skies have changed to grey clouds and intermittent showers, and as I sit looking at the obelisk through a sea of black umbrellas, the weather seems the objective correlative of this ceremony that is one of mourning rather than celebration. That is only appropriate, of course, and one thing I notice in the morning's program is that there is no British representative listed among the speakers. Twenty years ago, at the time of the fiftieth anniversary, there were complaints that the event had been a glorification of the liberators, to the exclusion of the suffering of Belsen's Jewish victims. That, of course, was in line with the way the media had presented the story to the British public in April 1945. The upshot was a conference of historians and survivors held in the United Kingdom a few months later, and the publication of a book,
Belsen in History and Memory
. It was after that 1995 conference that the historiography of Bergen-Belsen (at least, the material written in English) began to change.

Certainly on this occasion, testimonies in a medley of languages are given by survivors from Poland, Hungary, France, Israel, America and Ukraine, as well as by a member of the Sinti and Roma community. As the President of Germany stands unsheltered in the rain and expresses his perplexity as well as his regret that the history of Belsen could ever have occurred, I find myself realising another thing that is conspicuously absent from the proceedings. Although the shuttle bus on which I travelled to the
Gedenkstätte
went through three police check points, I can see no sign of security at the site itself, and the minders around the
Bundespräsident
are so discrete that when by accident on my arrival I ended up walking in the middle of the official entourage, I only realised who my companions were when I found my progress being tracked by half a dozen television cameras. Some days later, when I mention the event's low-key security to one of the Memorial staff, he delicately observes, ‘We cannot allow the place to look like a concentration camp.' In this, as in all matters, I am awed by the sensitivity not just of the people who work at the
Gedenkstätte
but of the state government of Lower Saxony, which oversaw the organisation of the anniversary and indeed pays the huge ongoing costs of the Belsen Memorial. I find myself trying to imagine a similar level of official recognition being accorded to the victims and survivors of Australia's frontier wars.

After the speeches are over and dozens of wreaths (including one, I see, in honour of Belsen's homosexual victims) are laid at the Inscription Wall, it is fitting that we move from the site of the Horror Camp to the other Belsen, where the 29,000 survivors started their new lives.

Here the British come into their own, putting on lunch for a few hundred guests in the splendiferous dining hall of the Round House. Just as a wake provides mourners with a much-needed chance to relax and revive their spirits after the catharsis of a funeral, this is a welcome opportunity for those who have travelled from far and wide to catch up with old friends. Soon people are moving about between the tables and spilling out onto the terrace, where some sunshine is finally breaking through the clouds. By the time the official part of the proceedings begins, there is such a hubbub going on that I need to move close to the platform to hear what is being said.

‘Who's that?' I ask a nearby military bod as a man in an elegant lounge suit delivers what is clearly the key speech in praise of the role played by Belsen's British liberators.

‘That's the Duke of Gloucester,' I am told in a hushed tone. I must appear unimpressed, because I am swiftly advised: ‘He's the Queen's cousin.'

Whatever his lineage, his words seem to fall on mostly deaf ears, but as the Duke finishes his address, a frail-looking man with a gentle face hastens up the steps in what is obviously an unscheduled conclusion to the formalities. Promising he will say only two words – and indeed he is almost as brief as his promise – the new arrival graciously presents the Duke (now halfway across the platform) with a book of which he is the author. As I hear him quietly describe it as testimonies of the children of Holocaust survivors, I realise this to be Menachem Rosensaft, yet another Glyn Hughes Hospital baby, and one whose parents were major players in Belsen's political history.

Menachem's mother, Hadassah (Ada) Bimko, managed to survive Auschwitz concentration camp despite the deaths there of her parents, her husband and her young son. Having qualified as a dental surgeon before her deportation, she gave what medical aid she could to her fellow prisoners, both at Auschwitz and later at Belsen concentration camp, and she was also part of the unsung team of survivors who supported the British military's medical efforts in April/May 1945. Within a month of moving to the DP camp, Dr Bimko became a member of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone of Germany, an organisation founded by Mittelbau-Dora survivor, Yossele (Josef) Rosensaft, whom Hadassah later married.

A brilliant political tactician and propagandist, Josef Rosensaft used the name and reputation of Belsen for all it was worth, and quickly won international support (especially in America) to his cause. In a two-pronged campaign, he demanded that the British government change its position on the Mandate of Palestine and open the gates of immigration to provide the homeland of
Eretz Israel
for the
She'erit Hapletah
– the ‘surviving remnant' left after the Holocaust. Simultaneously, he pressured the British authorities in Germany to recognise Jewish Displaced Persons as a nation, and indeed to make Belsen DP camp a segregated haven for Jewish survivors. Although at first the British resisted on both fronts, it only took a couple of years before they were forced to give in. Belsen DP camp became (as I have mentioned) a self-governing Jewish community; as for Rosensaft's other demand, the outcome needs no elaboration.

As I watch the son of this man who was anathema to the British government unostentatiously make his gift to the somewhat bemused representative of the British crown, it is for me one of the great symbolic moments of this day. Yet if this reconciliatory handshake seemingly passes without notice, it also makes me conscious of another historical event soon to occur in this remarkable place. Within a few months, the British army, which has been based here since the DP camp closed in 1950, is due to leave. While the adjacent training area will remain in the hands of NATO, the German military who will take over the barracks will not require such a huge complex of buildings. Having already seen what has happened to the Glyn Hughes Hospital, I expect that much of this weird
Wehrmacht
wonderland will soon also fall into irremediable disrepair.

Later, as the day's pilgrimage of remembrance moves on to the Jewish cemetery at the base, I hear people worrying out loud about whether it will be looked after, when the British are gone. Unlike the mass burial sites of the concentration camp, the graves here are individual, yet many of the tombstones bear the single word ‘
Unbekannt
' (Unknown): a poignant reminder that those who are buried here managed to survive until the liberation, and even a month or so beyond, but succumbed before their identities could be recorded.

This final and comparatively small commemoration is very much a Jewish community event, and I feel honoured that it was one of the five ‘children' whom I met the other day outside the hospital gates who has insisted that I come along. While there are military flourishes to the proceedings (including a bugler playing the ‘Last Post' and even – strange to my Australian ears – a rousing chorus of ‘God Save the Queen'), this is a religious service. Earlier today, in the testimony of one of the survivors, we were reminded that no fewer than 2000 children were born in the Belsen DP camp. ‘It was these children,' Dr Ernest Mandel told us, ‘and
their
children and grandchildren, who defied the Final Solution.' And as I hear the strength of the voices of these survivors and their family members joining in the recital of the Mourner's Kaddish, I realise that this new life represents the hope that came to Belsen on 15 April 1945.

*

A few days later, returning alone to the
Gedenkstätte
to continue my work in the archives, I begin by walking the site, as I first did eight months ago. Today the sky is blue again, the crowds with their black umbrellas have disappeared, and the only sign of Sunday's events is the blaze of wreaths that lines the Inscription Wall. Yet even when these, too, are gone, the remembering will continue. The very earth of Belsen maps the collective memory of those who survived here, as well as the many thousands who died. Stripped back again to the bare bones of landscape, the place itself bears continual witness to its history.

Griffith Review

Strange Weather: Writing the Anthropocene

James Bradley

As fires engulfed the hills outside Adelaide in early January it was difficult not to be gripped with an uneasy sense of deja vu. For while there have always been fires and floods, in recent years they have grown more frequent, more intense, more devastating.

On their own these events would be frightening, harbingers of what a changing climate will mean in the years ahead. But in fact they are only one part of a much larger environmental crisis, embracing accelerating species loss, collapsing fish and bird populations and acidifying oceans. What's worse, it's a situation most of us feel powerless to affect.

In such a situation it's probably not surprising that our literary culture has become suffused with narratives about the end of the world, or that so many of them have an environmental element. One only needs to look at the recent
oeuvre
of Margaret Atwood, whose
Maddaddam
trilogy took place against the backdrop of a world despoiled first by human rapacity and later by a genetically engineered plague, or American author Edan Lepucki's debut,
California
, which depicts an America sliding back into tribalism in the aftermath of peak oil and climactic instability, or her fellow American Nathaniel Rich's surreal actuarial comedy,
The Odds Against Tomorrow
, the second half of which features a journey through a flooded Manhattan.

Some have argued this growing library of books exploring environmental themes should be understood as a new genre, usually described as climate fiction or – to use the unlovely shorthand preferred by its proponents – cli-fi.

Speaking personally, I'm unconvinced of the term's utility. After all, there's nothing new about books about worlds transfigured by environmental disaster or environmental change, as classic novels such as John Wyndham's
The Day of the Triffids
, John Christopher's
Grass
, John Brunner's
The Sheep Look Up
or Australian author George Turner's
The Sea and Summer
, which was recently republished as part of Gollancz's SF Masterworks series, and takes place in a flooded Melbourne attest. Nor, given the fact many of these books are distinguished at least as much by their tendency to elide traditional genre categories as by their subject matter, does it seem useful to impose a rigid new category upon them.

But more deeply, the notion seems to ignore the fact that novels such as
California
and
Maddaddam
are really only a subset of a much larger phenomenon, one that embraces not just the rapidly growing list of novels set against the backdrop of a world devastated by disaster or disease, like Emily St John Mandel's luminous
Station Eleven
and Peter Heller's
The Dog Stars
, but television shows such as
The Walking Dead
, in which the characters are cast adrift in a world almost emptied of other humans, and even movies such as the nonsensical but visually sumptuous Tom Cruise vehicle
Oblivion
, in which the world's most famous scientologist spends his days exploring the remains of an Earth devastated by alien attack. For while not all are about climate change in any narrow sense – in
Station Eleven
and
The Dog Stars
, for instance, civilisation collapses in the aftermath of a flu pandemic – they speak to the same fears, the same sense of vulnerability and loss, the same grief.

In one sense, of course, climate change is simply the latest in a long line of fears that have given rise to apocalyptic imaginings. Go back a decade and it was terrorism we were frightened of, fears that echoed through books and television shows such as
The Road
and
Battlestar Galactica
; go back three decades and it was our terror of nuclear war that gave rise to television events like
The Day After
and books such as Russell Hoban's
Riddley Walker
. Over and over again fictional narratives have afforded us a medium in which the anxieties of the day can be engaged with, explored and, hopefully, controlled.

Yet it is difficult to escape the conclusion there is something different about climate change, and not just because of the scale of the challenges it presents. The scholar and critic Fredric Jameson once remarked that it's easier to imagine the end of world than the end of capitalism. And indeed it often seems we have lost our capacity to imagine the future, tending instead to imagine more of the same or total collapse.

As the writer Robert Macfarlane observed almost a decade ago, part of the problem is that climate change as a subject lacks the charismatic swiftness of nuclear war; instead, it ‘occurs discreetly and incrementally, and as such, it presents the literary imagination with a series of difficulties: how to dramatize aggregating detail, how to plot slow change.'

For writers of fiction this poses problems. Because it tends to focus upon character and psychology, fiction often struggles to find ways to represent forces that cannot be turned into obstacles for its characters to overcome, or which take place on timeframes that exceed the human. And so we tend to fall back on set pieces and stories we understand, of which the apocalypse is only one.

Looked at like this, our passion for narratives about our own extinction begins to look vaguely suspect, a symptom of a larger failure of imagination. For while they give shape to our sense of loss and vulnerability, there's also something reassuring about imagining the end of the world, a sense in which it absolves us of the responsibility to imagine alternatives.

Imagining alternative futures has traditionally been the preserve of science fiction, so perhaps it's not coincidental that one of science fiction's luminaries, Neal Stephenson, recently issued a challenge to his contemporaries, calling on them to give away their passion for dystopias and rediscover the belief in technology's transformative power that underpinned science fiction's Golden Age.

But it is also a reminder that genuine imaginative engagement with the meaning and effects of climate change demands writers do more than imagine devastated worlds and drowned cities. We need to find ways of representing not just the everyday weirdness of a world transformed by climate change, but also the weirdness of the everyday, find ways of expressing the way the changing climate affects not just the natural world but our own worlds, our own imaginations, find forms and modes capable of making sense of the enormity of what is happening around ourselves. Or, as the narrator of Ben Lerner's
10:04
puts it as he looks out over Manhattan, ‘I'll project myself into several futures simultaneously … work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid'.

In many ways, that is a revolution that has already begun, visible in the flood-haunted visions of novels as different as Australian author Kathryn Heyman's comic yet tender
Floodline
and Simon Ings' bleakly brilliant vision of near future Britain,
Wolves
, both of which explore the way the changing environment infects our consciousness, dissolving social bonds and altering our sense of who we are, as much if not more than it alters the world around us. But it is equally visible in Barbara Kingsolver's most recent novel, the deeply impressive
Flight Behaviour
, in which a swarm of monarch butterflies whose migration has been disturbed by climate change descend upon a community in America's rural Midwest, throwing the lives of the locals into disarray.

With its careful dissection of the contradictions of class and privilege (and and indeed its extraordinary final image's reminder of the world's capacity for sudden and transformative change),
Flight Behaviour
underlines the extent to which the challenges climate change presents are inextricably interwoven not just with a series of much older questions about wealth and power.

This awareness of the interconnectedness of these questions is also present in books such as Ruth Ozeki's Man Booker Prize–shortlisted
A Tale for the Time Being
, which explores time, loss and globalisation, and science fiction author Monica Byrne's dazzling debut,
The Girl in the Road
, in which the main character elects to walk from India to Africa along a floating wave power installation, a structure that symbolises both the possibilities of the future and the way history divides the rich from the poor, the fortunate from the unfortunate. For despite their differences, both seek to open up a conversation about the degree to which our thinking about climate change is framed by the privilege of our lives in the West, the way our wealth inoculates us from the consequences of our lifestyle.

Auden famously said that poetry makes nothing happen. Yet people tend to forget he also said it survives, giving voice to our experience, bearing witness. And when it comes to climate change, that isn't nothing: we need ways to articulate the despair so many of us feel about what is happening around us, about the world we are bequeathing our children, about the species we are condemning to extinction.

But fiction can also help us repossess our future, take imaginative control of it. In time that might mean big change: as Ursula Le Guin observed recently, ‘We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.' But if nothing else, it can help us grasp the enormity of what is happening in a way that allows us to comprehend it, and perhaps, just perhaps, begin to do something about it.

The Weekend Australian