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Touching: the pond at Birkenau
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:: Why do we feel the need to visit sites?
:: Why do we walk on the ground where events took place - tread in others footsteps?
:: Why do we feel the need touch memorials or relics?
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This is the pond at Auschwitz-Birkenau, near Gas Chamber and Crematorium 4.
The ashes of people cremated there were dumped into the pond; ashes from it and the other crematoria were also spread on the fields around the camp.
The pond is encircled with trees - birch, Scots Pine and young oaks - birds do fly amongst them, and sing. The name Birkenau comes from the German word birke meaning birch tree.
The building in the background, behind the trees, is the sauna and bathouse where prisoners who were "selected" to work were washed and tattooed.
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Beside the pond are four simple, black memorial stones (see photograph above) each with the same inscription - one written in Polish, one in Hebrew, one in Yiddish and one in English - it reads:
"To the memory of the men, women and children
Who fell victim to the Nazi genocide
In this pond lie their ashes
May their souls rest in peace"
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“We have to touch people.”
Jacob Brownoski was born in Lodz in Poland his family moving from Germany to England before the Second World War. He became a scientist and well-known broadcaster and was part of the official observer team who visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war with Japan had ended. Between 1969 and 1973 he developed and then made a landmark television series for BBC - 'The Ascent of Man'. In one episode Brownoski and a camera crew visted Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of his discussion about “absolute knowledge” and what he called the “principle of tolerance”.
The programme ended with a sequence in which he stepped into the pool near Gas Chamber and Crematorium IV where the ashes of thousands of murdered people had been dumped. In the final shot he reached down through the water to grasp a handfull of the dripping mud and said, “We have to touch people.”
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"...I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between push-button order and human act. We have to touch people.”
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:: Can touching something lead you beyond the immediate sensation to something else... to memory... to "collective memory"?
:: Is it different that Bronowski's private act of "witness" took place through the very public medium of television?
:: Is this just a 'stunt' to impress an audience?
Bronowski recalled - see the clip below - that these parts of the programme were not scripted in detail and that this sequence was an immediate response to the situation. He says four million people's ashes were "flushed" into the pond - a figurative use - though the ashes of some of the thousands murdered in the nearby crematorium IV were. In what way can the particular - the pond - stand for the whole - the Holocaust?
Screenonline has an introduction to The Ascent of Man in it's Television section which includes streamed clips of the Auschwitz sequence in high-quality available to schools in UK through the NEN: 'Ascent of Man'
The face that appears briefly at the beginning of the sequence is that of Stefan Borgrajewicz as an elderly man who had known suffering; at the end we see a photograph of a younger man, with the name "BOR-GRAJEWICZ, Stefan" and the number 125558, which may be his official record in the archives of Auschwitz.. Information about the face photographs, from Wikipedia
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Bronowski on 'Parkinson', 1973.
Jacob Bronowski discusses the making of the 'Auschwitz' sequence for 'The Ascent of Man' on the Parkinson show - "... we did it in one take ... it's a piece you couldn't possiby do twice...". He recalls how the quote he used from Oliver Cromwell had come into his head unplanned;. "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be msitaken."
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Science and Human Values 1
The German university town of Göttingen has been a centre of sience and learning since mediaeval times; during the 1920's it became a meeting place for scientists developing the new physics - a physics that established through The Principle of Uncertainty that all knowledge is limited.
It is an irony of history that at the same time, under Hitler and National Socialism, another, very different, principle was being worked through - a principle of "monstrous certainty". Indeed, as Bronowski points out the irony is deepened because Göttingen was also where a German scientist Johann Freidrich Blumenbach had made a collection of human skulls as part of his studies in anthropology and the classification of the human species. Blumenbach's work was well-known and respected through the world scientific community but after his death in 1840 his collection was added to and became, through extreme distortions, one of the 'supposed proofs' of the racial divison of humanity for the Nazi 'project'.
To follow Bronowski's argument about "absolute science" and "the principle of tolerance", which is NOT an "anything goes" argument, best read the 'The Ascent of Man' itself - search Amazon or online bookseller of choice - book or DVD.
:: There's a free e-book of some of Blumenbach's work in the Internet Archive. Blumenthal originally published in 1865 by the Anthropological Society of Great Britain.
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Science and Human Values 2: today
Are these issues old stuff? Well probably not, they are about critical values - about belief and action.
This blog by a scientist Michael Gilmore re-visits Bronowski's ideas in the context of Bush's America and events such as Abu Ghraib. Read Science and Human Values: On the Road to Auschwitz. This blog article by Michael Gilmore from 2004.
Gilmore's main point is the necessary relationship between open science and open government - "open to examination for accuracy, error, and truth. Our form of government (democracy) and our science are self-correcting processes." He cites Bronowski: "We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex.” In a world facing challenges of the environment, social mobility, political settlement, economics and poverty in a global dimension, Bronowski voice may be just as needed today as it when he spoke thrirty-five years ago.
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The Pond, a place of ...
The Pond has become a place of contemplation and prayer for many visitors, and for some people one of the locii of their pilgrimage to 'Auschwitz'. Flowers are left by its edge or sometimes thown onto the water.
Groups sometimes use the Pond as a focus for prayer and meditation, and, in some cases, it forms a basis for a ceremony.
Noah's Vision describes the responses of an interfaith group to the Pond in 2003. Ritual in the form of sounding the shofar by a Rabbi was followed by an improvised response as the group hold hands encircling the pond. The website of which this is a part is a record of one person's, very particular, spiritual journey.
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... words ...
touch
reach out
feel
penance
pentitance.
tribute
survivor
witness
remembrance
meditation
contemplation
solace
memory
empathy
redemption
compulsion
impulse
celebration
prayer
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"... one giant step for mankind ... "
Jacob Bronowski's programme was conceived in 1969 - the year when man first stepped onto the surface of the moon and the Beatles recorded their last album, 'Abbey Road'. After 5 years in the making 'The Ascent of Man' was broadcast by the BBC for the first time in 1973.
These were the times of the Viet-Nam war and Watergate and Civil Rights in USA and Czechoslovakia but it was the indelible experiences Bronowski had through his earlier life that drove his thinking:
:: He was a Polish Jew many of whose family and community had died during the Holocaust and he had had to flee his home.
:: He was a friend and colleague of the leading figures who had developed the science that enabled the H-bomb - he had visited Hiroshima as an official observer - and he shared their concerns about how such knowledge could and should be used
:: He was a scientist who believed that science was an integral part of the human condition and saw in Nazi ideology and its implementation how science had been misappropriated for in-human ends - and, perhaps, could be misused in this way again. He saw how the human spirit might be betrayed and how, "dogma closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilisation, into a regiment of ghosts - obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts."
When he made the sequence in Auschwitz Jacob Brownoski was deeply aware of his own experience and beliefs and he used the development of the 'Ascent of Man' project to re-explore and re-state his position for the new 60's period. If his position was founded before and during the war it was re-set to encompass, not just the fears of the cold war and the post-war period, but also the economic, political, social and technological explosions and tensions of the new sixties.
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... from "atrocities" to "the Holocaust" ...
Jacob Bronowski's 'Ascent of Man' was broadcast in 1973, nearly a decade after the Eichmann trials of 1961. The term 'Holocaust' was not yet in the public mind and had not fully developed its association with the Nazi policy of the "final solution"; the name 'Auschwitz' had yet to attain its power as a 'word-image' in the media. It was the 1978 televison "faction" movie of Gerald Green's book 'Holocaust' and President Carter's use of the term in the 'Commission on the Holocaust' in the same year that established the generic usage of the term 'Holocaust'.
Thomas Keneally's book Schindler's Ark appeared in 1983 ten years after Bronowski's programme while Claude Lanzmann's epic television series, Shoah was broadcast in 1985, two years later. Schinder's List, the film of Keneally's novel, didn't appear in the cinemas until a full twenty years later in 1993.
During the 70's and 80's the words 'Holocaust' and 'Auschwitz' grew to attain the iconic status and widespread usage and, indeed sometimes the misuse, that they have today. But, when Bronowski took his steps into the Pond at Auschwitz, public perception and knowledge was quite different.
More on the meanings and use of the term Holocaust:
:: USHMM
:: Shapesoftime's Holocaust Keywords
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Birch Tree: the music of Viktor Ullmann
Birch trees are found throughout the Northern hemisphere and were one of the first trees to become established as the ice age retreated. They are also one of the first trees to come into leaf leading to their place in European mythology as a symbolic of 'new life' and 'purification'.
The name Birkenau was given by the Nazis using the German for birch 'birk' - similar to English place names like Birkenhead and Birkhampstead. Many of the birch trees standing at Auschwitz-Birkenau today were there when the camp was being developed.
Vicktor Ullmann was a composer who was born in Teschen Silesia part of the Austro-Hungarian empire in what is now Polish Cieszyn. The region was struggled over throughout the first half of the twentieth century and since 1958 has been split between Poland and the Czech Republic. Ullmann was interned in the Theresienstadt/Terezin ghetto by the German army in 8th of September 1942. Together with other composers and artists Ullman continued to make music as an expression of his struggle to maintain the European culture which the Nazi's sought to destroy.
One of Viktor Ullmann's songs was called 'Breyozkele' - in English 'Birch Tree'.
"A breeze came from the distant fields
and told the little leaves endless legends
Deep in my heart there awoke a great longing
I beg you, little birch, pray for me too."
:: Listen: Breyozkele is included in the Anne Sofie Von Otter CD project 'Terezin/Theresienstadt', 2008, Deutsche Grammophon Catalog #: 001080302. 'Beryozkele' is from the song cycle 'Brezulinka' ('Three Yiddish Songs'), opus.53
Viktor Ullman's last known work was his Seventh Piano Sonata (Theresienstadt 1944) completed on the 22 August in the ghetto and was dedicated to his children. "It is a noble testament and witness to a life lived with integrity and truth," Jacqueline Cole, pianist.
:: You Tube has a number of clips from programmes featuring Ullmann's music and about the 'recovered musical voices' of the Holocaust. Search 'Viktor Ullman' on http://www.youtube.com/.
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Viktor Ullman writes about creating music in Theresienstadt
In an essay called 'Goethe and Ghetto' Viktor Ullmann discussed how the conditions of internment and the imposition of the anti-civilising power of Nazism affected his practice as an artist. He concluded that he had to continue composing not despite the conditions but rather because of them and his struggle to create musical form was a way of dealing with the present while making something for the future; or in Goethe's words, which he quotes, 'Live in the moment, live in Eternity'.
Viktor Ullman wrote:
'Theresienstadt was and remains for me a school that teaches structure. Previously, where one was unable to experience that weight of cruelty due to 'comfort', (this magic of civilisation), one was allowed simply to disregard it; it was easy to create the beautiful form. Here, where artistic substance has to try and endure its daily structure, where every bit of divine inspiration stands counter to its surroundings, it is here that one finds the masterclass. It is here that one understands with Schiller: 'substance must be consumed by form'. This indeed is presumably the mission of mankind, and not just aesthetic mankind, but ethical mankind as well. I have composed quite a lot of new music here in Theresienstadt, mostly at the request of pianists, singers and conductors for the purpose of the Ghetto's recreation periods. It would be as irksome to count them, as it would be to remark on the fact that in Theresienstadt, it would be impossible to play a piano if there was none available. In addition, future generations will care little for the lack of music paper that we presently experience. I emphasise only the fact that in my musical work at Theresienstadt, I have bloomed in musical growth and not felt myself at all inhibited: we simply did not sit and lament on the shores of the rivers of Babylon that our will for culture was not sufficient to our will to exist. And I am convinced that all who have worked in life and art to wrestle content into its unyielding form will say that I was right..."
Quotation from 'Goethe and Ghetto' 1944, Viktor Ullmann; Translated by Michael Haas.
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Viktor Ullmann: 1898 - 1944
Viktor Ullman, together with two other composers Hans Krasa, who wrote the children's opera 'Brundibar', and Pavel Haas, was in a deportation sent to Auschwitz on 16th October 1944. They were gassed there on the day of their arrival - 18th October 1944
"The deepest pain can not be turned into music,
No word can form it,
It doesn't fashion form from the stone of the earth –
It is veiled in silence.
From Strange passenger,18 a diary made up of poems written by Viktor Ullman when he was in Theresienstadt.
:: Read: the Viktor Ullmann Foundation.
:: Read: About Viktor Ullmann on Wikipedia.
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The Pond as symbol
Can the pond at Auschwitz be described without symbolic reference?
It is difficult to take photographs at the Pond that don't have some possible symbolic or figurative elements in them. In the first photograph on this page the 'punctum' (a touching detail that effects a viewer at a personal level) is the single falling, autumn leaf caught against the sky mid-way in it's fall into the pond.
In the second photograph - see right > - a close-up of the pond's surface the motionless leaves packed along the edge are about to be joined by another single, yellow, floating birch leaf in the centre of the photograph. Yellow was the colour assigned to mark out Jews for hundreds of years in Europe and used to awful effect as a de-humanising symbol by the Nazi regieme. Leaves fall in autumn to decay and become part of the earth and feed new plants - the life-cycle..
A pond is a microcosm supporting numerous life and death cycles - at its most basic a void filled with a life-supporting element water - which is itself always redolent with symbolic reference.
Is this reading in or taking out?
Word bank ...
symbol
metaphor
icon
stereotype
sign
cliché
convention
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Acknowledgements, references and websites
:: Imperial War Museum (IWM) Holocaust Education Fellowship 07/08: Holocaust Education
:: Auschwitz II - Birkenau, Memorial and Museum; http://www.auschwitz.org.pl/
:: The television programme: BBC, Time-Life and Jacob Bronowski, ' Ascent of Man', 1973.
:: The book: 'The Ascent of Man: A Personal View' by J. Bronowski, 1973.
:: 'You Tube', What is Science?' and Bronowski talking...
:: Free University-in-Internet, KAM200
:: Screenonline: 'Ascent of Man' - view the Bronowski clips on-line in UK schools through the NEN.
:: Martin Gilbert: 'The Holocaust' 1987 and 'Holocaust Journey',1997.
:: Michael Gilmore: 'Science and Human Values', 2004.
:: Wikipedia: search 'Jacob Bronowski', 'Ascent of Man' or 'Viktor Ullman'.
:: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), http://www.ushmm.org/
:: Jacqueline Cole and the Viktor Ullmann Foundation: http://www.viktorullmannfoundation.org.uk/
:: With thanks to Michael Gilmore for his help and encouragement for the Science and Human Values section.
:: With thanks to Jacqueline Cole for her help and encourgament for the Viktor Ullman section.
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This page Marshall Mateer established 11th November 2008; last updated 21st January 2008.
With support of Imperial War Museum (IWM) Holocaust Education Fellowship 2007/08
:: Feedback to info@shapesoftime.net
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