Happy Christmas

Whatever you're doing over the next few days, have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'm off to Berlin on the 28th, so it's unlikely I'll post on here again until 2011. Here's my favourite Christmas song of all time, from Frankie Goes To Hollywood. It was No.2 in the UK Charts in 1984, which given the competition for No.1 included Band Aid's 'Do They Know It's Christmas' isn't bad going at all.

One other thing. The band had originally intended the video to be solely focused on the Nativity, but it was pressure from their label and others that made them have the weird border around the edge of the screen with Holly Johnson singing. Also, I think it's quite poignant to remember that the band that wrote the song 'Relax' wrote one of the most religiously focused Christmas pop songs this side of Cliff Richard. Enjoy.

'Die Toten reden durch uns'

I am back in Dachau after a very moving few days in Mainz, where I was staying with the Carmelite community there in order to research the life of Br. Raphael Tijhuis O.Carm. A friar from the Netherlands, he was arrested in 1940 after writing 'slanderous' comments in a letter to his provincial- he had actually suggested they take their church bells as they were banned by the Nazis from ringing them! - and spent five years in German captivity, three of which were in KZ Dachau. After the war, he moved to Rome to live in the Carmelite community of Sant' Alberto, the college for student friars. In 1978 he moved back to Mainz and died there during the celebration of Mass in 1981. Many are convinced it was the psychological effects of KZ Dachau that led to his rather premature death.

Br. Raphael Tijhuis, O.Carm (far right) with some of the Mainz community c.1930s. Also in the picture is Br. Thaddeus Karpinski O.Carm (far left), who would die on the Eastern Front

My time in Mainz was mostly spent with one document, his memoirs of his time in captivity written in the post war period. I had read the English translation "Nothing Can Stop God From Reaching Us", an edited version, but they were far inferior to the full document. With the title Von Kutte und Verbrecherkluft (lit. 'Of the Habit and the Prison Uniform') Raphael spoke of his time in KZ Dachau with great clarity, despite the fact he was writing in German, a foreign language to him. I plan to translate extracts into English and post them here in the coming months, but I will start with the thing that most struck me.

The first page of his manuscript began as follows:

'Maria.

DIE TOTEN REDEN DURCH UNS'

(The Dead speak through us)

The thought of Raphael, sitting down at his typewriter with all sorts of thoughts running through his mind about what to write, how to portray other people and his responsibilities to the dead, and him typing out that first, focussing word, a prayer to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, is frankly mindblowing.

Br. Raphael Tijhuis, O.Carm meeting Pope Paul VI in June 1972 during a Papal Audience for Religious who had survived Concentration Camps

His faith was always strong and many call his time in Dachau a purification of sorts, in which he met Titus and began to grow into a mature faith. Later on, when suffering from the psychological trauma of those years, he was always good humoured and pleasant to know, and stayed in contact with many fellow survivors. His desire to tell the world of what happened, and in particular of Bl. Titus's actions, led to his involvement in the cause for the Beatification of Titus Brandsma, which took place in 1985, four years too late for Raphael.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to be able to research the life of such a humble and inspirational man, who refused to hate humanity, and in particular Germans, despite being given reason to do so.

Br. Raphael in the courtyard of the Carmelite maintained school adjacent to the Carmel in Mainz, c. 1930s

Hello Mainz!

As ever pitiful excuses all round for my failure to post something on here in the last few days. My Uncle and Dad visited me over the weekend which took up a lot of time, then there was the matter of the usual workload to contend with. Next week will be far quieter, a break I will take advantage of to put the finishing touches on my guided tour of Dachau. Sometimes I long for my student days when procrastination required a small dose of Bullshit to avoid being found out - now faiure to get work done has consequences!

Having said that, I'm writing this from a small guest 'cell' in the Carmel in Mainz, Rhineland Palatinate. I posted a couple of months ago on my plan to write a short biography of Br. Raphael Tijhuis, who was in captivity for five years, three of which were spent in KZ Dachau, for the Dachau Remembrance Book project. The ever friendly Br. Thomas Feiten, O.Carm invited me to come to Mainz, where many of Raphael's documents are kept, so that I could undertake some research while enjoying Carmelite hospitality! It's actually quite a moving experience to be staying with the same community Raphael lived with. The Carmelite Province (region) of the Netherlands played an important role in the re-establishment of a Carmel in Mainz during the early 1930s, and Raphael moved to Mainz in 1933 to help with this work. It was also here in Mainz that on the 25th July 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo after a throwaway comment in a letter to one of his Dutch superiors about not being able to ring the Church bells. The Sacristy, where he was informed by one of the brothers that the Gestapo had come for him, is now the community chapel.

I will tell you more as my time in Mainz progresses. For now I'm admiring the perfect view from my window of the Mainz Hilton - the second best place to stay in town!

Just another day at the office...

One of the many wonderful things about my work in Dachau is the variety of projects I am involved in. I work with the Dachau Youth Hostel's Educational Department once a week, eventually with taking visitors round the site, with the Church of Reconciliation and with the Remembrance Book project. We discovered in late October that the Remembrance Book project had been awarded a Bürgerkulturpreis (Citizen's Cultural Prize) by the Bavarian Landtag (Parliament) and as such were to attend a ceremony at the Maximiliansaal, where the Parliament meets.

Myself, Irina and Klaus Schultz by the Remembrance Book project stall

We all dressed up for the occasion and got to spend the day in one of Munich's best buildings, where Irina and I manned our display stand. The Remembrance Book has so far about 130 biographies, and is growing all the time. One of the best things about the project is that it is open to all interested. Schoolchildren, priests, relatives are invited to engage with the life of a person who was transformed by their experience of KZ Dachau and hopefully learn something of their suffering not only during their time in Dachau but living with the memories afterwards. Thus the project gives the prisoners their lives, their identity back

A great day was had by all, as we all got to see a worthwhile cause receive well needed cash and promote the project to interested visitors. While eating our lunch, Knödel mit Gulaschsuppe, we were visited by a middle aged woman who asked us about the project. We obviously answered her questions willingly and explained our situation as volunteers, which suitably impressed her and she went on to the next stool. I jokingly told Irina we'd probably discover she was the Queen of Bavaria or some other lofty title.

Later on she returned and our bosses had their photos taken with her. Afterwards I asked Klaus who she was- It was only the President of the Bavarian Parliament and one of South Germany's most prominent politicians!

Myself, Irina and Frau Stamm, President of the Bavarian Parliament

I also had the privilege of meeting Max Mannheimer for the first time. In this part of Germany he needs no introduction, for he has spent the last thirty years or so telling people about his suffering in Auschwitz, Teresienstadt and finally Dachau. He is now the inspiration behind the International Youth Meeting, which meets in Dachau every July/August, and the Max Mannheimer Study Centre, for which I volunteer once a week. I have found meeting Holocaust survivors quite intimidating - what do you say to someone who has been through so much? - but he was extremely friendly and spoke in perfect English about my work and the project. It was a pleasure to meet him and hopefully not the last time.

It was a great experience to represent the project and spend the day celebrating the achievements of an extremely worthwhile cause.

Hr. Ludwig Schmidinger, Hr. Klaus Schultz, Fr. Felizitas Rath and Hr. Bjorn Mensing, just some of those involved with the Remembrance Book Project

A Very Twentieth Century Massacre

Why do I love Berlin so much? I'm in town for the second of four seminars run by my sending organisation, Aktion Suehnezeichen Friedensdienste, and I'm staying in a typical Berlin Youth Hostel i.e in a dingy, converted factory. Berlin means a lot to me on a personal level. I first came here on a school trip aged fourteen and the city continues to change with me. The Palast der Republik has been taken down and a Hauptbahnhof has been built. A city that was for decades a byword for men in trench coats and suitcases is now the poster child for an invigorated and politically ‘redeemed’ German nation.

Berlin has reinvented itself – and not for the first time – as a youthful city. One sometimes gets the feeling that the forty years of divided rule acted as a kind of purgatory for the city, in which all Prussian militarism and Nazi association were removed through the torture of security checks and foreign government, ending finally with the events of November 1989 and the huge opportunities for development. One word describes the city: Alternative, the kind of alternative that, like the mythology of the 1960s in the UK, is always happening to someone else. It is the sociological equivalent of a twenty two year woman with multiple piercings, multi-colored hair, a ripped shirt and an ill fitting bowler hat, this of course being her work uniform. There are art projects here, all sorts of buildings converted into bijou apartment blocks and studios as well as the kind of clubs and bars that are designed not for profit but for exclusivity.

Anyway, back to my seminar. The purpose of these seminars, organized alongside compulsory EU ones, is to allow us the chance to learn about the place of contemporary debate within discussion about the Extermination of European Jewry. On the 3rd December we visited the Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz for what I assumed would be the usual memorial site visit. The Wannsee Conference is notorious as the meeting at which the Final Solution was decided, where numbers were crunched and the mass murder of millions was concisely processed. I expected to be taken through an exhibition explaining the Holocaust, with the centre piece the room in which, over brunch, Jews became numbers.

Of course History and Memory being the couple they are, preconceptions were not true. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference, known as the Wannsee Protocol, describes a formative moment in the extermination of European Jews but by no means the beginning or the end. Mass murder of the Jews had been set in motion by the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 – in hindsight what other conclusion could there be? – and Wannsee was but a bureaucratic meeting to confirm who would do what and who was in charge of the operation. After all, what makes the Holocaust unique in History is the bureaucracy and systematic nature of mass murder, an age old crime committed within a contemporary morality.

The exhibition was not to my taste, and followed the usual pattern of Concentration Camp Memorial Site exhibitions. In my humble opinion they tend to be text heavy, relying on the same descriptions and the same photos to make the same points. Visitors, in particular individuals unattached to groups, do not come to read; they come to see and to feel. According to the ASF volunteer who works there, an Israeli woman, the site receives many Jewish groups who view Wannsee not as a place of learning, but as a place of remembrance. Despite the assertion that Wannsee was one of many stepping stones to mass murder, many Jews view Wannsee as the grave they do not have. Visitor Guides explain the history, and yet they do not listen, such is the mythology that we build in order to be able to come to terms with the past.

Berlin is great, alternative as ever and it’s fantastic to be back with my fellow ASF volunteers. More to follow.