January 2nd, 2024
The rain wouldn’t let up last night, this morning really. At 3.10 am I picked up my phone to find a Substack note linked to a piece on Gaza that had a familiar construction: commonly recognised facts, followed by unnecessary adjectives, significant omissions, self-indulgent insertion of personal disgust, all tied together with a quotation from Primo Levi’s If This is a Man. The author broadcast on Russia Today until February 2022. He encourages you to take out a paid subscription.
A deceitful, self-serving opinion piece shoe-horns in an exceptional person to lend dignity. What also stung was the thought that I could be doing the same thing. The habit of referring to established figures for support might be an exercise in selective quotation and appropriation, no different from wearing a The Specials button on a school blazer. Even that example could be another gambit, a diversion to nostalgia to provoke empathy.
What happens when reading up leaves you arriving somewhere with a set of responses prepared in advance, conditioned by your cultural reference points? So-and-so wrote the key text, understands the human condition better than you do and leaves you seeking confirmation of their conclusions. What store can you place on your own observations?
When the country you’ve visited only briefly is being attacked, simply opening your mouth afterwards risks insult to Ukrainians, to those, for example, looking at the app’s instruction to go to a shelter and wondering whether to do so.
Every private citizen’s name has been changed in what follows; every other detail is factual.
Lviv, Sunday October 29th, 2023
On a bench near the opera house, on the esplanade running the length of Svobody Avenue, a boy of maybe sixteen sat between parents in their forties, the father in military fatigues, shopping bags at their feet, sports brands. They weren’t talking. Sat tightly together although there was nobody to make room for, the mother resting her hand on the boy’s wrist. Retail therapy before the father returns to the front.
I’m guessing all this. A few days here allows you to confirm the impressions picked up from articles you read beforehand by journalists you decided were reliable.
Seeing the sandbags over ground-floor church windows, statues encased in grilles or muffled by thick sacking, soldiers on leave and flags throughout, on the first day in Ukraine ‘Life During Wartime’ had kicked in. I’d seen Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense twice when it was re-released in October; it hadn’t aged, still had that restless, inquisitive spirit informing great songs. Yet as a soundtrack to actual life during wartime, the lyrics – though never meant to be literal – felt juvenile here, and even with the fault being mine in applying them that way, cultural appropriation loomed. David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries are as much an outlook on life lived with curiosity about the arts and society as an endorsement of cycling in urban settings. It would be something to read an account by him of a stay in Lviv. The Austro-Hungarian streets weren’t laid out for cars plus trams plus cyclists, but the onus appeared to be on drivers to allow me, as a pedestrian, to cross. The pace was measured.
Men in fatigues – all men, that I saw, although a fifth of the Ukrainian army is female, and in combat, not admin and support only (so I read, but where?) – dotted along the thoroughfare. On leave, catching up with girlfriend/wife, family and friends. One man’s arm was in a sling. No other injured soldiers, no amputees. Sunny autumn skies. A group of aging solid citizens sang as a choir with accordion accompaniment, the national flag nestling in a collection basket. Further along, three saxophonists, a trombonist and two standing drummers – the Drogo band – played jaunty numbers, sometimes in step, closing with a slower tune which the audience gently, then firmly took over as a song (the national anthem). Over the applause which followed, the leader raised his clenched fist.
Slava Ukraina
The surge of emotion crept up; it must be ever-present, dormant.
I thought of the seafront at sunset in Donosti/San Sebastian in July 1990, Oskorri starting Euskal Herrian Euskaraz and from the opening chords the crowd knowing every word and singing as one, respecting the melody as well as the lyric. In the Basque country, we speak Basque. You take it from there, whether it’s essential to speak Basque to be Basque, whether the language should be facilitated alongside Spanish or be the sole means of communication, whether monoglot Spanish speakers can feel comfortable in the Basque country or indeed have any right to feel comfortable. What should middle-aged Russian speakers in Latvia do?
For the year after September 1989 I used take a train into Donosti on Tuesdays to the kiosk by the bridge which got three copies of The Observer that morning. They built up in a suitcase, read and reread, the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall, Ceausescu, will Saddam actually kill Farzad Bazoft? In so far as I could follow, the Basques weren’t matched by the Soviet states, nor the Yugoslav ones later on. When you only know the first and last lines of Amhrán na bhFiann and float about the planet with the vague notion that you carry no baggage, identity isn’t something you’re quizzed about. Growing up an English speaker, though not British, from the EU is a free pass. Perhaps it’s also a shallow existence.
With Lviv’s opera house as the backdrop, the national flag above, an amped trio of bass (rectangular, a foot wide), minimal drum kit and electric violin veered between rocking out and plaintive stretches. Their sign had a QR code plus IG account #sho_take. The violinist sometimes started on guitar, then left that on reverb, like Colm Mac Con Iomaire does, before picking up the violin again. The drummer in shades would have fitted in with The Atrix, the goateed bassist in a death metal band and the violinist in an orchestra (and, it turned out, he is in the Lviv Philharmonic) but in that setting, at that time, they were more than the sum of their influences.
Their final tune leant on the violinist with no crowd-pleasing antics from any of them now. It was deliberate and paused in places, culminating in the trio reaching an equal plane. The crowd knew this one, fists and open palms across chests. There was an intake of breath and an outpouring at the close, that anthem again.
Ukraine’s glory hasn’t perished, nor her freedom
Upon us, fellow compatriots, fate shall smile once more.
Our enemies will vanish, like dew in the morning sun,
And we too shall rule, brothers, in a free land of our own.
We’ll lay down our souls and bodies to attain our freedom,
And we’ll show that we, brothers, are of the Kozak nation.
We’ll lay down our souls and bodies to attain our freedom,
And we’ll show that we, brothers, are of the Kozak nation.
The poem upon which it’s based first appeared in Lviv in 1863, with its popularity resulting in the author, Pavlo Chubynskyi, being sent to Archangel. A Russian subject, born near Kyiv, had a poem published in an Austro-Hungarian town, irritating two empires. The wording was altered and approved by an act of the Ukrainian parliament in 2003. It used read Ukraine has not yet perished, a nod to ‘Poland is not yet lost’, from 1797. Perished or lost? Is it the country that’s in peril, or its glory and freedom? In the comfort of a café in Lviv, this is interesting to mull over; in a Russian-speaking mining town in Donbass, the eastern district occupied since 2014, it couldn’t have been less relevant then to daily life.
Tim Judah’s In Wartime (2015) features people in, among other places, Bessarabia, whose family identity changes according to their generation and either matters up to a point or is secondary to concerns about corrupt politicians and the need to give bribes for state services and jobs. There’s nostalgia for Soviet pensions and the prospect of being taken care of again. In that setting, there would have been no patience for Ruthenian daydreaming.
Back on Svobody Avenue the bassist led a call and response of patriotic slogans. Does writing slogans diminish the emotion put into those words? I’m suspicious of people responding together to words designed to induce reaction: matches in stadiums where it’s not enough for a goal to be scored, the crowd must be guided in their reaction, given words and bursts of songs to fall in with; or concerts where singers are fawned over. But Ukrainians are fighting to preserve the possibility of people gathering on a boulevard to chat and sing and maybe protest against the government too, as happens in Dublin on Saturday afternoons. Ironic detachment has to be shelved. #sho_take put on a performance in a photogenic place and the effect was stirring. A soldier stepped forward to snap their sign.
At the book market by the statue of Ivan Federov, a fellow explained the crate of French vinyl. He’d been working in construction around Bordeaux the past fifteen years, but now can’t leave the country. Males between eighteen and sixty can’t travel unless they have more than three dependent children living abroad. I wondered about his age – he looked the same as me – and his younger mate nearby and why they hadn’t joined up, but couldn’t see how to phrase that. In a reverse of the expected average age of soldiers, conscription in Ukraine has applied to men from twenty-seven upwards (twenty-five from April 2024). I’d been thinking about what I’d have done in February 2022, if Ukrainian. Since visiting, I’ve realised that the decade beforehand would have decided things.
Igor gifted me a book of postcard reproductions from 1971. I bought an illustrated volume of Taras Shevchenko’s poetry. There was a sign to a bomb shelter in the church vault across the way. Before yesterday, the siren had scarcely sounded in a month. How long had Igor stayed there? He hadn’t gone, gesturing at his stall. Even in wartime there are still thieves.
The book of poetry was a 1988 reproduction of an 1897 edition. Sketches on every third page or so explained what might be an epic poem. Cossacks travel from a court setting across the country into battle. There’s devastation in the aftermath of a battle and a hero left on a hilltop to start again.
I didn’t linger on this volume at the time, nor when back at home, until in April it was among English translations and ephemera from Ukraine that I brought into the school library. I was about to give a student some graphic novels on historical themes as a way of learning outside the textbook when I leafed through the volume, thinking this might be an example of gleaning details even from an utterly foreign language in a different alphabet, when I noticed something in a series of drawings from early in the saga.
An innkeeper is shown giving out to a labourer; he then counts coins at night, a woman displaying herself on a bed alongside; the Cossacks stop at the inn; the owner entertains them in an exaggerated dance as they half-encircle him; the Cossacks beat the innkeeper.
In every sketch, the innkeeper appears in side profile. The Cossacks are shown from varying perspectives, but the hooked nose of the innkeeper is emphasised through repetition. His yarmulke and beard are also in contrast to the Cossack hohol, a central lock of hair above their cleanshaven skulls.
I didn’t remark on this to the student, only pointed out the series of pages, said they were from Ukrainian poetry and asked if anything struck him. He looked through them, began a second look and then nodded comprehension.
This man’s a Jew, the Jew has money, that’s how they always show Jews.
This student has east African heritage. Seeing him identify the antisemitic trope put the slur in a global setting.
Jews in the Pale of Settlement were seldom farmers because forbidden to live anywhere but in provincial towns – the shtetls – and only intermittently in cities. Some got the licence to run inns for the local landlord. The caricature in these drawings – on a par with Alec Guinness as Fagin – orders a Ukrainian youth about, gleefully tots up his cash, is lascivious and craven. Just over forty years after the publication of this book, sporadic pogroms during those decades were followed by mass murders, all nurtured by such depictions.
In 1983 (at the same age as this student) I read about Oliver J Flanagan, a sitting TD, having linked bees/honey and Jews/money yet that wasn’t preventing him from being given a platform to speak on the 8th amendment. Flanagan’s hateful statements in Dáil Éireann are the sort offered by Russia as a claim of Ukrainian antisemitism.
Brezhnev and Sartre stayed in the George Hotel, a 1901 building which, even after renovation in the 2000s still has an Art Nouveau feel on the staircases and walls, though the furniture is fresher and practical, with nothing period left. I wanted to stay there in 2017 but it was pricey; now it’s €40 a night for a generous room with a bath, full-length windows onto balconies. At breakfast the waiters hadn’t many guests to attend to. One fellow when not needed would play the piano and the older ones would exchange smiles at each new piece.
Seven years ago I was interested in Philippe Sands’s East West Street (2016), his account of Hersh Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, two near contemporaries in the law faculty at Lwów university, who had gone on to develop the concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide (Lemberg/Lwów/Lviv, the city’s name changed with each ruling power). Alongside that, Lauterpacht’s wider family were among the Jewish community murdered in a forest near Zhokva, half an hour away.
Looking back, I made no effort then to learn about what had recently happened in eastern Ukraine.
Before arriving in Lviv last year, on the previous evening in Kraków I had chanced into a restaurant that was a Ukrainian refugee co-op. Galyna, in her early forties, explained that when she arrived at the bus station in early March 2022 there was a system of pairing refugees with local volunteers. Her contact had a space that had been empty since Covid and suggested she could make use of it. Cieplo was on a corner, well-lit by large windows. Ukrainian artworks featured and groups of eaters clustered, shoulders touching. The waitresses were attentive and a little anxious: professionals manage to go on auto-pilot and blend in. Galyna said they want to pay their way as well as help new arrivals. Also, to keep busy.
I told her where I was headed; her eyebrows lifted. Visiting Lviv is in no way risky – though as soon as said, there’s the qualification. I heard myself saying that I hoped I wasn’t a voyeur, that visitors are needed for hotels and cafés to keep going. An unspoken reason was a sense that people under strain can get a lift from a conversation with a stranger, one which can stay humdrum or develop. Last summer in Mahajanga, on the western coast of Madagascar, a stallholder fell silent after detailing her worries about her daughter. I apologised for having prompted this, given that I had no solution and was passing through. No, she replied,
Ça me soulage. (It comforts me.)
Maybe the clarity from saying out loud what was preying on her thoughts was indeed a relief.
Galyna said to be sure to come back when returning the following Saturday; she wanted to hear how it all struck me.
October 30th
On park slopes there are clusters of blue-and-yellow flags for the fallen, each with a name handwritten. In places, the flag is red-and-black, remembering Stepan Bandera’s army. What were the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists: fascist, fascist fellow-travellers, a broad church, my enemy’s enemy? Or génocidaires, the Rwandan term.
Off the street named after Bandera, the Lontsky Street prison, now the National Museum – Memorial of Victims of the Occupation Regimes, was closed. Nobody in two cafés around the corner could help. The prison had no buffer zone; neighbouring four-storey buildings adjoin it. A blood-red weathered steel door marks it out. Retreating Russians in June 1941 killed their prisoners. The incoming Germans left the bodies for viewing. Inflamed OUN saw individual Jews who’d been Bolsheviks as justification for a pogrom against all Jews in Lviv. A ghetto followed in November, 120,000 people at its height. When the Russians returned in 1944, 1 per cent of Lviv’s Jewish population were still alive. The initial pogrom had involved beatings and humiliations and some three to five thousand murders. There’s no exact figure. It seems to depend on dates and location. Afterwards, for the survivors, persecution, then deportation by the German Generalgouvernement to Belzec.
Assessing the extent of OUN assistance in the Holocaust by bullets and later in death camps is similar to assessing that of Ukrainians in general. Examples are clear, as with locals in Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. In Lviv you can buy pop art posters titled Daddy Bandera. I tried asking people about Bandera but got no coherent response, perhaps because my query was too vague.
He’s our hero.
It’s important to have a national hero.
It’s complicated.
The latter was the closest to acknowledging why Russia labels Ukrainians as fascists.
Bandera hoped grateful Germany would grant an independent Ukrainian state. Instead, he was detained in Berlin for the remainder of the war. He died in 1959 from cyanide, the novichok of the day. I read that his family emigrated to Canada. That’s where President Zelensky in the parliament saluted another émigré, one who fought in an SS-organised regiment. Zelensky raised his fist in the air, knowing the history, knowing how Ukrainians are depicted as fascists on RussianTV. Zelensky, who’s Jewish, gets a pass for this. Also, for looking comfortable when smiling with Muhammad bin Salman.
My focusing on one person, even if he’s the president, is a mistake. It contributes to viewing this as a soap opera, or a spectacle to swap opinions over. The war started before his election; note the usage of full-scale invasion as a reminder to place February 2022 in the continuum since 2014. Or 2008. Or 1991. Or 1654, when the Cossacks asked for Russian protection from the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, a temporary arrangement from one perspective, a binding allegiance from another.
A woman, perhaps thirty, maybe a teacher, dressed in jeans and a three-quarter-length navy cardigan walked to a Mitsubishi ASX with her soldier partner holding a new-born in a tiger-striped baby-gro. He was in fatigues, long-sleeved T-shirt, outgrown #2 cut and beard. His shoulders were tense, clutching the child, waiting as she opened the car door, him swaying on the spot.
Leaving Lychakiv cemetery a woman, again say thirty, similar long dark hair, fleece and jeans, was strolling beside a man in fatigues. A second glance confirmed his left jacket sleeve was pinned to his side. It was not fluttering over an arm in a sling; the amputation had removed it fully. Neat haircut and cleanly shaven, his face unmarked, both man and woman smiling.
In the plot reserved for military deaths there was no more space for those killed since last autumn. (An overflow space outside the cemetery holds these graves). Photos and sketches were worked into many of the older civilian tombs going back mid-century. The soldiers’ photos may be replaced in the permanent headstones but for now the choice says something. One fellow off-duty in a T-shirt, smiling, in contrast to the cadets and officers in formal poses. Some were phone snaps taken in the weeks after the invasion: stocky men holding up rifles alongside reflective, vulnerable selfies.
A woman stood by one of the rough-hewn concrete bases poured for post-invasion deaths. She wore a three-quarter-length parka with a small backpack. I avoided looking at her face, noticing only tied-back dark hair partly covered by her hood, no longer young. She didn’t move from the foot of the base for maybe twenty minutes, standing still. I thought I heard words but wind through the adjacent tall trees made this unclear.
Dmytro Kotenko, paratrooper, died three days into the invasion, aged twenty-one. The BBC had an article about his burial, not attended by his parents or any of his family because they were under fire in their village near Sumy, by the border with Russia. His artillery friend, who’d met him in military school:
To join the army meant to come up in the world.
There were rosary beads around the wooden cross. Those Sumy villages have since been evacuated after incessant shelling. I wondered had anyone in his family made it to the graveside – had they placed the beads?
I tried to piece together the lives of the dead soldiers from the photos and dates and tributes left. A teddy bear. Handwritten notes. Miraculous medals. In contrast, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is meticulous, though the clipped surface and rigid layout perhaps – I’m guessing – inhibited relatives when adding to the inscriptions. In Gallipoli only the exception hints at the sorrow felt. In Diego Suarez there isn’t a headstone with anything more than terse details, although a quarter of a century had passed since the Dardanelles and some movement in society might have shown.
The woman stepped forward to lean down to a framed photo on the grave beside a toppled cross. She cleaned the glass in small circular movements with the sleeve of her coat. After standing back for a moment, she left.
The photo showed a fifty-nine-year-old, killed on February 25th, a day into the invasion. He was of average build, with a good head of hair and smiling. His T-shirt read Iron Games, with a weightlifting cartoon. A career soldier so, yet she chose to remember him as her husband, distinct from the others on either side.
Timothy Garton Ash figures Eastern Europe doesn’t exist anymore as a description, that the countries are as diverse as those in the West. In Homelands (2023) he identifies 2008 and Georgia as the point where the wasted opportunity of the ’90s became apparent. What’s followed has been linear.
In Kraków, Masolit’s English-language second-hand bookshop and café winds between five small rooms on the ground floor of a corner building. The workers had that appearance of not being booksellers so much as ancillary staff, a cross between volunteers and those topping up their post-grad grants. I got a copy of Sigrid Rausing’s Everything is Wonderful (2014), her account of her mid-’90s year in an Estonian collective farm which gives terrific quotidian details while, in the background, there’s the awareness that the author had placed to one side the mind-boggling wealth her family has access to.
A young woman serving was short, pale, with curly fair hair under a headscarf and a few piercings. Getting up to leave, I asked how it had been, to find out the previous month’s election result. Her face froze for a moment, her eyes glistening, before shoulders shuddered. She unnecessarily apologised for her English, then said it had been her first time voting and to find that change is possible
For us, for all of us …
Her gesture behind included a rainbow flag among stickers and posters.
It is everything.
In Ivano Franko park a middle-aged soldier sat on an Art Nouveau bench by himself, scrolling, then looking into the distance. He was the first I’d seen by himself. Others were with someone or moving purposefully if unaccompanied, but this fellow was truly alone. The soldiers tended not to be young. Later that day, a Time magazine article gave the average age as forty-three. It presented Zelensky as a driven figure who’s become detached from the experience of ordinary Ukrainians, whose advisers complain there’s no telling him anything.
The Twitter link to that article had underneath a stream of criticism of the author, the gist being that his history meant he couldn’t be trusted. Working out whether that was fair would have involved my then clicking on each of the critical/insulting accounts to read their own back catalogue. Instead, I read the piece with my own prejudice that Time is so tightly edited, so cautious, so aware of its constituency that it omits anything that throws the curve. Or, I won’t let go of
There’s something happening, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
despite that association being speculative.
That thought led to Mr. Jones (2019). The deceitful reporting by Westerners gave the film its narrative but scenes in the snow of desperation in villages during the Holodomor hinted at what Agnieska Holland might have preferred to focus on.
Being on the spot brought a rush of connections.
The statistic in Time on age was followed by
They’re grown men now, and they aren’t that healthy to begin with, says the close aide to Zelensky. This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.
This both rang true and infuriated. An image is inferred of urban Swedes on bike trails at the weekend, juxtaposed with prematurely aged peasant daytime vodka drinkers. It overlooks the diversity within two huge land masses. For sure, statistics on lifespan and causes of death can be searched out to show differences, yet it’s a handy/lazy summation that also didn’t include the health, composition and motivation of the Russian soldiers.
Also, what is Time’s internal protocol on verifying anonymous sources? Did two editors see proof that this wasn’t fabricated? It was typically Time, the self-appointed authority. The print edition’s cover ran with a quote warped by differing font sizes, something the magazine didn’t stoop to during the decades when it was building up its status.
Alongside all of that, the possibility that this remark contained enough accuracy to merit consideration meant it stung.
At a kiosk near the towering statue of Ivan Franko (poet and novelist, yet looming like how Stalin is remembered in Gori and carved as though based on a clifftop) two soldiers queued for coffee. A teenage girl in a broad-brimmed black hat and chunky boots walked with a fellow in grey slacks and ’80s garish tracksuit top, leading him by a noose treble-knotted around his throat. The soldiers watched the self-absorbed pair impassively.
Near Zamarstynivska Street, the lettering on a cabin below a railway bridge was striking. Maybe it was a repair shop. Inside, two fellows were chatting, though no tools were in sight. I stepped back to size up a photo, then noticed a one-man shelter above on the railway line, cloaked in camouflage. A soldier’s profile was visible, rifle resting diagonal. The better photo included the shelter. I let it go and sat on a low wall, taking stock of the lengthy street.
Tram lines and cars were dwarfed by tall nineteenth century apartment buildings on both sides. Something about the railway bridge rang a bell, from a photo by Diana Matar in City of Lions by Philippe Sands (2016). It’s smaller in size than a paperback and was in my bag. Miodowa Street turned out to have been the end of the Jewish ghetto. Through the gate under that bridge the remainder of the community walked before being beaten into vans at Belzec and gassed. Chelmo, Sobibor and Belzec, the three camps of Aktion Reinhard.
Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah (1985) includes footage of unsuspecting Germans being filmed during interviews. Franz Schalling had been stationed at Łódź – dreary – and in response to an offer – We need men who want to break out of this routine – had taken an overcoat and fur-lined boots and found himself a security guard at Chelmno. Not SS, he specifies, not among those who ran naked Jews along a corridor and up a ramp into a van for delousing. Asphyxiation was more efficient if the van was rammed full. Saurer trucks were adapted. The company website has a timeline of developments from its foundation in 1853. Nothing is listed from 1921 to 1946. A June 1942 SS note records the changes needed in the next ten trucks ordered from Saurer.
The van’s normal load is usually nine per square yard. In Saurer vehicles, which are very spacious, maximum use of space is impossible, not because of any possible overload, but because loading to full capacity would affect the vehicle’s stability. So reduction of the load space seems necessary. It must absolutely be reduced by a yard, instead of trying to solve the problem, as hitherto, by reducing the number of pieces loaded. Besides, this extends the operating time, as the empty void must also be filled with carbon monoxide. On the other hand, if the load space is reduced, and the vehicle is packed solid, the operating time can be considerably shortened. The manufacturers told us during a discussion that reducing the size of the van’s rear would throw it badly off balance. The front axle, they claim, would be overloaded. In fact, the balance is automatically restored, because the merchandise aboard displays during the operation a natural tendency to rush to the rear doors, and is mainly found lying there at the end of the operation. So the front axle is not overloaded.
(Shoah – The Complete Text of the Film (1995), p 104)
the number of pieces loaded
Did the Jews enter the van willingly?
No, they were beaten. Blows fell everywhere, and the Jews understood. They screamed. It was frightful! Frightful!
A camera records this from a bag on a sofa across the room, manipulated from a van outside with its own interior filmed. At times the picture flickers and we settle for sound and watch this monitor as though among the two technicians inside the van, who alter the frequency until it returns. Because the filming is surreptitious, the guard is taken as being guilty, shameful, even before he speaks.
Earlier in the documentary a train-driver, Henrik Gawkowski, in motion and at a kitchen table, keeps steady eye contact, an unremarkable older man, aware he’s being filmed. His replies in Polish are paused to allow translation for the French interviewer, giving time to choose words and lending more impact to those words.
Did he hear screams behind his locomotive?
Obviously, since the locomotive was next to the cars. They screamed, asked for water. The screams from the cars closest to the locomotive could be heard very well.
Can one get used to that?
No. It was extremely distressing to him. He knew the people behind him were human, like him. The Germans gave him and the other workers vodka to drink. Without drinking, they couldn’t have done it. There was a bonus – that they were paid not in money, but in liquor. Those who worked on other trains didn’t get this bonus. He drank every drop he got because without liquor he couldn’t stand the stench when he got here. They even bought more liquor on their own, to get drunk on.
Did Mr. Gawkowski (aside from the trains of deportees he drove from Warsaw or Białystok to the Treblinka station) did he ever drive the deportee cars into the camp from the Treblinka station?
Two or three times a week for around a year and a half.
That is, throughout the camp’s existence?
Yes. This is the ramp.
Here he is, he goes to the end with his locomotive, and he has the twenty cars behind him. No, they’re in front of him. He pushed them.
The structure of the filming leaves one man less sympathetic than the other, more likely to receive follow-up questions if you could put these to either. Structure aside, what difference was there between Gawkowski and Schalling.
I hadn’t expected all this to come back to me, resting on the low wall, looking at the railway bridge. I wondered were there traces of the gate which hung there, marking the limit of a ghetto which shrank over the years, squeezing the community further. I walked underneath, noticing where a cement render had been plastered but most of the brickwork was still exposed and no marks were visible. Perhaps a fitted wooden frame held the gates.
I waited for traffic to pause before holding up my camera, wanting to give context to the walls. Raising it, I focused – and a woman stepped in front, close to my face, shouting. She was my age and kept her hands by her side, a shopping bag in each, and eventually, palms out, I grasped that she had repeated military. This bridge was sensitive? That was unlikely, but it wasn’t for me to argue, or to say that nobody had been in the viewfinder. Could I get across how this location was an example of Jewish persecution in Galicia not being recorded outside of books, no plaque or explanatory artwork – no. I couldn’t speak the language, it was her country and given how she was probably raised in the ’70s, her take on security might have dimensions of obedience and distrust that I couldn’t appreciate.
In Homs, Syria, January 2011, there was a photo of Bashar al-Assad above a bus station entrance. It was unremarkable once you’d adjusted to this being a dictatorship. No army or even regular people were passing through this quiet doorway, so I went to raise my phone to get an example of the fascist cult of personality, until a shout came from behind me. A policeman rushed over, middle-aged and agitated. He let it go, and my sense was that his actions were performative, for the benefit of any superior looking on. In what sort of society though, did people operate from fear. Two months later it began to crack.
Another way of considering the woman on Miodowa Street was that she was an example of Ukrainian civil society, her reaction what you’d hope for in a country under attack. I wondered how it was in Lviv to live with a sporadic possibility of harm. It’d be hard to plan ahead, to start a degree or a small business. Would the age of conscription be lowered further. For some, constant anxiety over a loved one serving at the front or remaining in a town under regular shelling.
On Pekarska Street a soldier was chatting with a civilian outside a sandwich shop. He was standing a little sideways from his mate, chin pointing to the right while his shoulders were square on. Slight and short, hardly older than the college students passing by, his outgrown crewcut left him younger rather than a fighter. When he turned face on, his right side was sunken where the socket should be. Two crooked scars led inwards. Maybe his eye had survived but from a glance there was only a fold of skin. The marks were vivid. Was he refusing a patch or awaiting surgery? Had he been advised to get fresh air? Among the students stepping either side of him several controlled a double-take.
In the market on Vicheva square a Tajik woman’s stamped passport photo, circa 1960s, cost 100 Hryvnia (€2.55), a factory group 150 UH. A snap of four adults, one in uniform and a boy all in front of blocks of flats going up among fields, a crane visible, a match for Ballymun towers, 5UH. There’s no writing or date on the 10×8 factory photo. Two women among twenty-five men, half in caps, some wearing grandad shirts buttoned a little to one side. It’s sepia tinted yet even so, some fellows hint at southern Slav rather than Nordic. The movement of peoples within empires precludes neat generalisations. It looked earlier than postwar Soviet and wasn’t local, I figured, although the trader said it was, but his interest lay in pushing WW2 photos with Hitler prominent, so I took against him.
In choosing stamps from packets and albums, what do you look for? Pathos. A brave new world. Design that shrinks the human experience and renders it aspirational and attainable. What was celebrated? How did they want to be seen?
Four stamps on the theme 40. Jahrestag der Befreiung vom Faschismus show DDR women in front of tractors holding the Schlagplan; they’re also in science labs while men are bare-chested with a kanga in the mines or in spacesuits. A year before, the DPR Korea released three stamps with views of the west sea barrage. In 1991, the USSR as it fell apart, put out four drawings of Yuri Gagarin. Afghanistan had a series on ice-hockey at the Calgary games of 1988. A camel drags a plough in Israel, date I couldn’t read. The Iraqi stamp is partly worded in French, so maybe pre-1932.
That stamp of La journée des jeunes de l’Afghanistan in 1986, man with bayonet attached to rifle, sleeves rolled up and fist clenched, postmarked in Kabul, was it sent by an invading Soviet soldier? Did he survive, did he meet bin Laden in a skirmish. Polish youths in the ’60s are studying and running. Mongolian commemoration of the Montreal Olympics is classical; the Czech one features flowing wave effects.
A second-hand bookshop up the road had Lord of the Rings and Nineteen Eighty-Four in Ukrainian, plus a Chekhov collection in Russian, also a Moscow 1976 paperback Talks on Familiar Topics by E.P. Kirillova. This was a collection of TEFL pieces followed by exercises, with the choice of sources manipulated for didactic purposes. In places, you’re reminded what the appeal was.
The motor, oil and construction industries have a gigantic interest in the proliferation of motor vehicles, particularly the private car and the enormous capital investments it requires …
The objective of a Socialist policy would be to effect a drastic reversal of priorities. Making, selling and servicing more vehicles and building more roads would come at the bottom of the list, not the top. The first aim would be to place good transport within the reach of everybody, and to achieve optimum (not maximum) mobility for people and goods with the minimum of scarce resources.
It would ensure that the benefits for one section of the community (e.g. speed) were not achieved by inflicting noise, danger and nuisance on others.
From the Morning Star, 1974
In Tower Hamlets the rats grow fat and lively; whereas on the preceding page
Let’s take any block of flats in this area. Like all Moscow blocks of flats, the tenants are a cross-section of city population, with families of factory workers, engineers, students, doctors, journalists, teachers and workers in the arts and a fair sprinkling of pensioners.
As blocks of flats rise higher, families in nine, 16 and 22-storey blocks have found greater affinity through having more home and local interests in common.
The tenants’ house committee is a voluntary body of flat dwellers, who handle tenants’ complaints and give a helping hand to those who need it.
The house committee gives special attention to the children and the aged.
Unattributed. A first reaction could be scepticism that there was such egalitarian allocation of housing, but maybe the author would ask what you back that up with. When you look at well-kept clusters of towers still existing, or read descriptions of Pripyat in the ’80s, or if Chernobyl (dir Johan Renck, 2019) is faithful, and then consider why the Ballymun flats, blocks between four and fifteen stories high, were demolished within a half-century, something is worth teasing out here.
After two days in Lviv last autumn, there were strong reasons to hold off on attempting a summation of the situation there. Later that week I went on to Odesa and at Easter returned to Lviv and nearby Bolechov, the town featured in Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost. In Kyiv no one I spoke to could see how the war would end though they were clear that it had to be fought. But then, we weren’t in the east, and these were English speakers who were up for talking to a foreigner. My daily reference is the Kyiv Independent, an English-language website run by journalists who left the main newspaper due to pressure to toe the government line. That name didn’t ring a bell with anyone, and why would it, in that it’s in English plus, as a charity shop assistant explained,
I don’t look at the news.
In Judah’s book, written in 2015, he doesn’t pin the separatist movements on Russia, instead saying that’s for historians to clarify. What’s happening now is something that will likewise need time to grasp.
I saw Galyna again in Cieplo restaurant. She’s from Zaporizhzhia. Her husband, still there, was in a shelter as we spoke. Her phone was face down, often vibrating. She’d flip it, then replace it. The environmental damage from the Nova Kakhova dam attack and the safety of the nuclear reactors was on her mind. She asked if I saw a worldwide conflict approaching.
The last Ukrainian I spoke to, on the train to Warsaw with her four-year-old daughter last April, had been at the Maidan protests. Marta and her husband had remained politically active afterwards, then been so deflated by the current government’s coming to power they began planning to migrate to Slovakia. 2022 came, and now he’s developing software for the military and she’s looking after their daughter. She tells her twenty-year-old brother he’s not to join up, something he’s intent on, despite their brother-in-law having been killed in action. It took that death for her mother to stop supporting Russia. Marta is comfortable speaking Ukrainian although it’s not her first language, her husband less so but he’s determined. She wants her daughter to speak Ukrainian yet doesn’t want to live there once the war is over. She didn’t say those words when the war is over; I did, in a question. Marta hesitated, then nodded. When this … and she stopped speaking.
When the US military aid bill was passed, I began writing a text to Galyna, then stopped. This was where humanity had progressed to, what its money was being spent on. She wouldn’t have been celebrating, I decided. She’d have taken the news on board, allowed it to lift her spirits briefly, calculated the impact, then carried on. The damage has been so deep that she’ll be marked for the rest of her life.
Podcasts feature updates and commentary. Parts ring true but then it slips into speculation and we could be listening to their takes on Arsenal’s transfer targets. It’s current affairs as a hobby.
‘Next Year in Moscow’ (The Economist) is, I think, an exception, focusing on eternal questions. How do the lawyers supporting, for example, Vladimir Kara-Murza find it within themselves to continue?
In episode five, Tolstoy’s home recordings from 1908 are played. He was distraught at the hanging of twelve peasants in Kherson. We can’t live like this … we can’t live like this. Tolstoy didn’t believe in political protest, rather in personal moral effort. Don’t participate in violence. Escape. Practise empathy and kindness elsewhere.
Russian émigrés in exile wondering could they have done something different, something more.
As a Russian, Tolstoy isn’t (officially) read in Ukraine now. There’s no space for him. It’s not his time. People are traumatised by the invasion. They’re in the grip of circumstance, not completing thoughts. They’re readying themselves for the least bad future, if still hopeful for anything.
1/6/2024
Francis Foyle, a schoolteacher living in Monaghan, has travelled abroad over the years.
