Auschwitz Archives - Nicholas Hedges

An Archaeology of the Moment

May 18, 2010 by Nicholas Hedges

I’m currently reading an excellent book by Colin Renfrew, Senior Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, entitled ‘Figuring it Out’, in which the author examines what he describes as ‘the parallel visions of artists and archaeologists,’ with an emphasis on contemporary art practice. As an artist with a deep interest in archaeology, I had to buy the book, and I’m very glad I did, for it’s helped me pull together numerous strands of thinking which have emerged from my research over the course of the last four years; in particular, the idea of the physical or ‘sensed’ present as a lens through which to ‘see’ the past. Professor Renfrew writes: “The past reality too was made up of a complex of experiences and feelings, and it also was experienced by human beings similar in some ways to ourselves.” The way we experience the present then, tells us a great deal about how people experienced the past when it too was the present.

I’ve written before how one of the problems we have in considering past events is the temporal distance which separates us. Reading a history book, although we know its content is‘ factual’, is nonetheless an interpretation of events; an outline at best no matter how well researched and well written it is. There may be a structure, just as in a novel, with a beginning, a middle and an end. But of course reality isn’t really like that – the boundaries are much more fluid. Necessarily therefore, a history of any event will be full of holes and it’s these holes which interest me.

In October 2006, I stood on the Ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau and my experience there is something with which I’ve been working ever since, even whilst researching different places – whether other camps such as Bełżec or the battlefields of World War One – it’s that particular moment which I have been researching, peeling back the layers comprising the moment, much as an archaeologist digs through layers of stratified soil to uncover a whole range of times.

History is, in some respects, like fiction. What is known and written about can only be surmised from surviving evidence and what we ‘see’ as receivers of that knowledge, can only be imagined. What’s always missing is a sense of the present, as if what happened in the past always followed a script, one in which the main protagonists took their cues and delivered their lines accordingly. Hindsight, which one can hardly escape, joins all the dots, but leaves many gaps between the lines.

In the foreword to Peter Weiss’ book The Aesthetics of Resistance, Frederic Jameson writes how for the critic Georges Lukács, the world historical individual should never be the novel’s main protagonist, but rather seen from afar by the average or mediocre witness. We could say the same for history; that events described in history books are ‘best’ when seen through the eyes of those ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’ witnesses; people which history labels as ‘the mob’ or the ‘masses’; who are often buried beneath unimaginable numbers – mass graves within which, their names and individual identities are forgotten.

I’ve produced numerous works which examine this idea of the anonymous individual in history, but there’s another element I try to show, and that’s the ‘everydayness’ of any historic event. This is, I believe, key to our understanding of the past, for not only is history best seen by the ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’ witness, but – for me at least – when the main event is glimpsed as a backdrop to an individual’s own life experience. That’s not to say the event should always be viewed through the eyes of someone far away from the scene, but that it should always be seen behind the individual, rather than the individual being buried somewhere beneath.

In the time after my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, I wanted to find a way of identifying with those who died there. That’s not to say that I can identify with what they went through, no-one who wasn’t there can ever claim to understand what it was like to suffer, but we can seek to separate the individual from the grim statistics and site the camp in the landscape of the everyday world. Again, that’s not to say that Auschwitz-Birkenau was an everyday place, but what’s important for me, in understanding the past, in filling in the gaps which history inevitably leaves behind, is an understanding that the everyday world was happening at the time. Whatever event in whatever period we’re researching, the world was happening around it. The wind blew in the trees; the birds sang and the rain fell. The sun rose in the morning; the sky was just as blue or grey as it is today. There were clouds with their shadows, and during the night, the moon might be reflected in small pools of water, like that described by Auschwitz survivor, Filip Muller – in a pit soon to be filled with bodies. The events like the place were not everyday, but they took place regardless in an everyday world and understanding this ‘everydayness’ can help us understand and picture much more clearly events of the past.

For example, we can read hundreds of titles about the Holocaust and World War One, but when we read in the Diary of Adam Czerniakow – the ‘mayor’ of the Warsaw Ghetto – what the weather was like on a particular day, suddenly, in words like ‘beautiful weather,’ the full horror of the Holocaust is revealed, because, with these words at least, we can identify and – albeit in a very small way – empathise with someone who suffered; the past in effect becomes very much present.

In Birkenau, it wasn’t so much the sight of the gas chambers which was so horrific, or even the gaze of the infamous gatetower, but rather the way the trees moved, just as they’ve always moved, right throughout history.

Similarly, on the battlefields of the Somme, just as we cannot comprehend the horrors faced by the soldiers – the incessant shelling and machine gun fire – we can nonetheless see and feel the ground beneath our feet; we can see the sun in the sky, and feel the wind on our faces, and it’s these everyday details which take us, albeit just a little, into the midst of a battle. Of course we still need history to draw in the outlines, but it’s these other details which prevent history being a script. Events in history were not preordained, people made choices and choices can only be made and acted upon in a moment – in the present. Understanding the present therefore – that space wherein reside all our hopes and fears, our dreams and ambitions, and into which we bring our memories – is key to our understanding of the past.

In a passage written by Tadeusz Borowski, another Auschwitz survivor, we read the following: “do you really think,” he asks, that without hope such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for a day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity.” People often ask why, when faced with certain death people didn’t revolt or even attempt to escape? If we read history as a script we might well feel obliged to ask that question, but when one’s alive in a moment, that in which we continue to exist, we will do anything to maintain that existence, and second by second that was achieved by doing nothing, right up to the end, for up to the end there was always the hope that something would change. Again, it’s through understanding what it means to live in the present that we can understand the past a little better.

In his book ‘The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology,’ Christopher Tilley writes: ‘The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects. Dillon comments: “The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.”’ Just as the trees function as Other therefore, so must the sun, the stars, the clouds, hills, mountains, the sea, rivers, the wind, the rain and so on. Objects too, excavated during digs or on display in museums, act in much the same way.

Through archaeology, we excavate moments. We might come to better understand epochs and eras, but revealing a stone beneath a field which once belonged to part of a road reveals the movement of individuals and thereby an individual. And as we in the present stand on that stone and sense the world around us, we can bridge the gap between the past and present, even if that gap is one, two or three thousands years. If we walk along the line of the road, what we know of any relevant history becomes animated. With the aid of the ‘everydayness’ of the world we can position ourselves within an event – even if that event took place many miles away. We can become the ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’ witness, and rather than seeing a past event as one sandwiched between two pasts (those more and those less distant) we can instead bring to that past, the concept of the present and consequently the unknown future.

At the beginning of his book, ‘Figuring it Out’, Professor Renfrew looks at Paul Gauguin’s painting ‘Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going to?’ (1897) a title, and a question, which many artists and archaeologists alike have tried to answer. The questions posed in the title of are of course about the past, the present and the future and in reading this book I could see how these questions have always been there behind my work. After visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau and in an attempt to find anonymous individuals in history to whom I was related I began to investigate my own family tree, and, over the course of the last few years I’ve found several hundred ancestors going back on some lines as far as 1550. A year before she died, my grandmother told me about her childhood in Wales and in particular about my great grandfather who died in 1929 after years working in the mines. The following is an extract from that conversation:

‘I can see him now because he went up our garden over the road and the mountain started from there up… and he’d go so far up and he’d turn back and wave to us, and if we went out to play, our Mam would say, ‘you can go up the mountain to play…’ but every now and then our Mam would come out in the garden and we had to wave to her to know that we were alright you know… always remember going up the mountain…’

On visiting Hafodyrynys, the small town where my grandmother grew up, I walked up the ‘mountain’ she’d described and followed the path my great grandfather would have taken to work in the mines at Llanhilleth. On top of the hill I stood and looked at the view. One hundred years ago, when I did not exist, he would have seen the very same thing. One hundred years later, long after his death, I found myself – through being in that place – identifying with him, not because I know what it was like to work in the mines (of course I don’t), but because I saw the same horizon, felt the same wind, saw the same sun and so on. I’d found him there on the path (one which would in time lead to my being born).

I realised too in Hafodyrynys, that I’m not only who I am because of the genes passed down by my ancestors, but because of the things they did throughout their lives, not least because of the roads and paths they travelled, such as that upon the ‘mountain’. Anything different, no matter how seemingly irrelevant and I would not be here, and in a sense, that which I described earlier in relation to my standing on the Ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the way the trees moved seemed pregnant with the horrors of the Holocaust, is relevant here, albeit for different reasons; the everyday, insignificant details which make up a moment, are key to our existences. Until the time of our conceptions, we were always one step away (many times over) from never existing and again this refers back to what I described at the beginning of this piece; the idea of my own non-existence in relation to past events.

For the catalogue to the third in my series of exhibitions entitled ‘Mine the Mountain’ I wrote the following, in an attempt to summarise my thinking: ‘The Past is Time without a ticking clock. A place where paths and roads are measured in years. The Present is a place where the clock ticks but always only for a second. Where, upon those same paths and roads we continue, for that second, with our existence.’

The last line resonates when considered alongside what I described earlier regarding hope – that emotion which Borowski describes as ‘paralysing’ those who died in the camp.

I wrote earlier too, that through archaeology we excavate moments, that although we might come to better understand epochs and eras, revealing a stone beneath a field which once belonged to part of a road reveals the movement of individuals and thereby an individual, one continuing his or her existence for a second along the way. Artist Bill Viola wrote: ‘We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights.’ If we take what he says regarding this ‘same moment’ – that which we’ve been living continuously – along with what I’ve written above regarding pathways taken by our ancestors, we can see that that ‘same moment’ extends beyond the limits of our own existence and that moments and epochs are in the end, one and the same thing. The gap between the past and present – however big or small the temporal divide – is removed.

To conclude…

An ancient road, uncovered beneath a field, may be thousands of years old but nonetheless it will have been ‘written’ in terms of moments, where one individual amongst many others has carried his or her existence from one moment to the next. And as we walk ahead towards the future, along the line of the road, carrying our own existence with us; as we feel the ground beneath our feet and watch the wind blowing through the trees. As we listen to the birds and smell the scent of the grass, we’ll find ourselves in empathy with every individual who’s gone that way before us. Somewhere, beyond the horizon, Stonehenge is being built; the Romans have landed in England and the Mary Rose is sinking beneath the waves.

The Gate – A Reflection

April 11, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Today I made what one might term an ‘intervention’ in the Larkin Room of St. John’s College as part of the Travel and Trauma Colloquium which is being held there today and tomorrow. The work has been written across two large glass doors and throughout the day I’ve been reflecting on its meaning in light of answers I have given to questions posed by delegates and also in light of the papers delivered as part of the colloquium.

When I started to create the work in the morning, the weather was beautiful; blue sky, sun – a perfect Spring morning. Yet very quickly the day changed and as I was writing about the bad weather on 26th March (that being the day on which I wrote the text: see Work in Progress – The Gate) so the heavens opened and the rain (and hail) began to fall. And at once I began to think about the weather and history (as you do). History (with a capital ‘H’) is of course full of accounts of bad weather (storms, droughts and so on) but what one doesn’t read (for perfectly understandable reasons) is accounts of average or day-to-day weather conditions in relation to less than average events. There are of course numerous historical exceptions to this, such as in the diaries of Samuel Pepys whose accounts of the weather serve to bring the seventeenth century alive, but as the rain fell, just as it had over two weeks ago, I began to wonder what the weather was like at times of less than average – great – historical events. In my text I wrote:

“It’s stopped. The rain, but all around, the colours are by a few degrees darker.”

And I wondered, how were colours similarly changed in the past?
I was talking with a delegate about how it is such small things which tell us the most about the past, and knowing how the weather was on certain notable days in history would help paint a better picture of the past. There isn’t much weather in history, some yes, but there should be more! Anyway I digress… suffice to say, what the similarity in the weather showed me, was how from year to year, century to century, rain is always rain, sun is always sun. They both come and go along with fog and snow. They help fill in the outlines of facts with colour (the outlines in my case were the words I was writing).

Going back a moment, to Wednesday when I typed up the transcript (the text of what I had written on 26th March) I found the version I was typing was almost a dreamlike replica of the actual event. It was very different to remembering the event, for the remembered event doesn’t follow the same temporal pattern as the memory inspired by the typed text. The memory (not that inspired by the text) of that time is limited to a few images which blur and blend together to create an homogenous view of the hour I spent in the Larkin Room; on remembering it, I have by no means the sense of any linear time. Writing it out word for word however was like re-living that moment, but time was changed to the time it took me to type it up again; the hour became more like two – but it was linear all the same.

After a few of the speakers had delivered their papers I began to consider what I could see as a connection between tourism and history. One of the questions raised in the colloquium was why we are tourists? (The question emerged from a discussion about 19th century tourists but it still holds today) What are we doing when we visit other places? One of the answers which emerged was that we are somehow comparing the places we are visiting with that from which we’re from, usually unfavourably. We go away in order to return grateful for what we have, we travel, in part, to confirm that where we live is better. Of course this by no means universal – far from it, but travel often augments are sense of home.

As I wrote in my introduction to the project, for me, it’s the individual tourist’s resolution of a disquiet resulting from a shift in the status of a place – the act of leaving or being able to leave – which in some respects makes such places popular today (heightening as they do our sense of existence, of life).” Just as we return from our holidays with a heightened sense of home, so we return from the camps with a heightened sense of life.

We are I believe, in History, tourists of the past. History is a place, a foreign country which we can visit and leave. It goes without saying that those in the past cannot. When we write or read about the past, we are making our own barbed-wire fence to keep the past in. We look as Wiesel says but go no further. We observe but cannot participate, we see from a distance. The barbed wire keeps us out just as it keeps the past in. But as I have written lately in regard to another project (Umbilical Light), to read history, to know it properly – to understand it – necessitates our own non-existence, we have to tear down the wire and enter the past into which we must then dissolve like smoke in a grey sky. The text of history books is therefore an armature by which we are shaped, it makes us the living and those behind the dead. But what about the not-yet-born? Are they also to be found behind the text, or like the dead within the words itself? As I have already written, “to know it properly necessitates our own non-existence” and in our conscious minds that becomes the very image of death. Does that not mean therefore that we exist amongst them?

As one can see, the creation of this work today in the context of the colloquium has thrown up many more questions. But to summarise… the historical text in respect to trauma acts as a fence to keep that trauma at bay, we can read of the trauma in words and glimpse a world behind them, but as when one reads the words on the window, we cannot see the world very clearly. If we focus on the world behind, we lose sight of the text, of the past. Standing in Auschwitz-Birkenau I could of course see the world as it is now, but the words I had read seemed vague, I could not correlate the two – my mind simply couldn’t conceive it. And now, when I return to the words, my memory of the place in which I’d stood is vague, as vague perhaps as the images I have of the past and all its traumatic events. I have gone to the gate but no further.

New Studio, New Work

October 19, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

I have finally got myself into gear as regards moving into my studio at Magdalen Road and have now started to get some work done. I started with putting some pictures up on the wall (those I made after my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau) and was struck by how different they appeared when shown all together. When I first showed them they were on two walls and all in a row, but having them all on one wall lent them a whole different – and more sinister – aspect.

They’ve always been rather intimidating images, but now there was something relentless and almost obsessive about them; as a group they seemed to talk more; but this was not a dialogue between the pictures and the viewer (me in this case, but I believe it would have the same effect with anyone else) it was now more like an internal monologue – the externalisation of a guilty conscience. I thought about wallpapering them to the walls which would I think strengthen their obsessive quality.
I also drew more of the ‘collective views’ which are interesting. They too have the same relentless, clawing quality, but do not have quite the same connotations of guilt which one gets from repeated and near identical images.

As I drew these images, I ‘found my way’ back inside the camp, seeing it clearly in my mind as I drew with my eyes closed. I followed the various lines, in particular the railways tracks, the wire fences and the telegraph wires. And as my pen marked them on the page, I began to think about their functions. The train tracks were a means to the outside world, they were defined by their end points – outside, beyond the camp – connected to the great European cities and the home towns of many who died there. The telegraph wires were likewise a means of communicating with the outside world, which for those in the camp was an impossible dream – something quite unreal. All I could think as I drew, was the ‘image’ of screams being carried down the wires. Sadly the outside world wasn’t listening.

Having worked on the drawings for a while, I then began to work on an idea I sketched out a while ago.

I started working on the knot using the balls of string which I dyed last week and as I began to build up the knot I found that the dye hadn’t taken properly which nevertheless produced and interesting effect as the knot grew.

.

Any work associated with the Holocaust and which is realised with fabric has certain connotations, but what interested me particularly was what I’d thought about whilst drawing earlier – in particular the telegraph wires. The cut strings trailing on the floor – which represent the cut threads of life – became telegraph wires in my mind.

Could I perhaps use wires instead of string?

The Final Week

May 4, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

The final week before the exhibition opens and new ideas are presenting themselves. I wanted to do something with the dismantled typewriter and so I took the letters and the ribbon and printed the title on some paper ‘The War to End All Wars’.

What I liked about the result was how the red of the ribbon was smudged beneath the writing, giving the impression of blood. The unevenness too reminded me of some text-based work I did following a visit to Auschwitz and I wondered whether I could reprise this work. However, there would have to be differences. The dismantled typewriter, as a piece, has the title, as above, ‘The War to End All Wars’. Clearly we know that this wasn’t the case and that there have been hundreds of wars fought since 1918. Giving the typewriter such a title makes it a metaphor for the First World War (I originally arrived at the idea thinking about the names of all the dead being recorded on just such a machine) and so, as the First World War wasn’t the last, so the typewriter must be shown to still work somehow. Using the letters and the ribbon does this, but if the result is on paper, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the typewriter has been dismantled i.e. it could have been made before it was taken apart. Printing directly onto the wall however does make this connection; after all it is obviously impossible to type with a working typewriter onto a wall, this can only be done if the machine is in pieces. The First World War may be over, but man has continued to fight nevertheless.

The Unknown Soldier

April 17, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

“The Post Office Rifles and the 6th Battalion – ‘the Cast-Iron Sixth – in turn would then pass through their lines to continue the advance to the next objectives on the downward slope of the ridge, the ‘Cough Drop,’ also known as ‘Leicester Square’, and the ‘Starfish Line’. The London Irish and the Poplar and Stepney Rifles were to lead the advance to the west of High Wood, before being succeeded by the 19th and 20th Battalions. ‘The postmen from quiet little hamlets or clerks who had spent their lives hitherto in snug offices, talked about these future regimental mortuaries with the homely names with astonishing calmness…'”

What struck me about this quote from Neil Hanson’s book, was how soldiers used the names of well known and familiar places, to name those places which were not only unfamiliar, but also terrifying, often places of horror and death on a scale which could never be imagined within those more familiar places back home. Trenches were named in a similar fashion: Oxford Circus, Oxford Street, George Street, Broad Street and so on.

“By day, the screams and groans of the wounded and dying had been drowned by the deafening clamour of the battle. At nightfall, though still counterpointed by the rumble of the guns, their pitiful cries and please for help could be hear echoing through the shattered wood…”

This quote reiterates how this war was a war of sounds; how men could be reduced to tears and much worse by sounds; those of the incessant shells or the solitary man crying in a dark wood.

“‘The reading of the battalion roll-call must have broken the hearts of all who heard it – ‘a hollow square of jaded, muddy figures… A strong voice… calls one name after another from a Roll lit by a fluttering candle, shaded by the hand of one of the remaining Sergeant Majors.’ Name after name went unanswered; each silence, another man wounded, missing or dead.'”

This very poignant passage reminded me of some text-based work I did whilst investigating the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. These text-based pieces started as free-written prose and through a process of increasing the spacing between the letters changed to become squares where the words were reduced to a scattering of letters. As soon as I read the words ‘a hollow square’ I thought at once of those.

Reading and Experience

April 6, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

“Decayed sandbags, new sandbags, boards, dropped ammunition, empty tins, corrugated iron…”

These words are those of a German soldier – written at the Front just before the Battle of the Somme – and form just a small part of an extract in Neil Hanson’s book, ‘The Unknown Soldier.’ Instantly I read them, they called to mind the remnants dredged from the battlefield which I’d seen in the museum at Hill 62 in Ieper.

On their own, these artefacts are powerful – yet mute – witnesses to the Great War, but when reading a soldier write about them, even listing them as above, they change. They each regain their voice – their signifier, and re-emerge from the shadows.

In my painting ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau Remembered‘ I cut words up into individual letters and scattered them onto the painting, I also wrote directly into the paint itself to show how words failed to articulate the horror of such a place (the written words could barely be read). Another way of looking at this however, is to say that words are able to speak of such horror, but have simply lost their original voice. It then falls to us to speak the words for those who are no longer able to do so, to put them back together.

Subsequent to this, I’ve been thinking about the process of reading, for example an extract from Filip Muller’s powerful testimony, ‘Eyewitness Auschwitz – Three Years in the Gas Chambers,’ in which he describes the horrific murder of a fellow prisoner.

“There was utter silence, broken only by the twitterings of the swallows darting back and forth.”

We were not there in Auschwitz at the moment this line describes (the moment before the doomed prisoner speaks up against the camp’s brutal regime), yet we all know silence and have seen and heard swallows. So although we were not there to witness at first hand this terrible event, we can imagine a silence, a particular one we might have felt some place before, and picture a time we saw a swallow fly. We can use fragments of evidence (photographs, documentary footage) to construct a fuller picture, and fill in the gaps with fragments of own experience. When we speak the words of others therefore, those words will form pictures in our own minds drawn from our own experience.

“As the torrents of machine-gun bullets ripped through the grassy slopes up which the British troops were advancing, the smell of an English summer – fresh cut grass – filled the air. For thousands it would be the last scent they would ever smell.”

This extract, also from Neil Hanson’s book, ‘The Unknown Soldier,’ presents us with an image of slaughter, made all the more terrible (if that were possible) with a reference to the smell of cut grass – one of those smells which invokes in most of us, memories of lazy summer’s days. The two are, obviously, utterly incongruous, yet it somehow makes our task of imagining the horror a little easier. We know the smell of cut grass, and waves of associations and memories are no doubt triggered by the aroma. In the days before the battle, when the soldiers doomed to die waited for the day, they too might have smelled the grassy air and found their way back to times when things were better. It is again the contrast – something which I’ve described before in relation to my visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ieper which makes this passage so heart-breaking.

Finally, I wrote earlier (Imagination and Memory) of how as a child I created a world, made up of fragments of landscapes which I loved, and how as I grew older, I created worlds that were ‘real’ – visions of Oxford as it might have looked centuries earlier. Just as when reading the quote above, I would – as I still do – use documentary evidence to start – images (photographs and drawings) of how the city looked, contemporary writings (such as those of Anthony Wood) – and then fill in the gaps using my own direct experience, in effect, the city as it looks today.

Walking

April 2, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

As part of my continuing work on sites of the Holocaust, I have been investigating Belzec death camp which I will be visiting next month. Even with a place as large as Auschwitz-Birkenau, it’s hard to equate its size with the number of people killed there (1.1 million). Yet this appalling correlation of camp size to victims, is perhaps at its most disturbing in Belzec, where in a space of less than 300 metres by 300 metres, approximately 600,000 people perished. Death on this scale, on the open fields of battle is hard enough to imagine, yet it somehow seems all the more sickening in a place the size of Belzec (and one designed for the purpose). In order to ascertain just how big (or rather small) 300m x 300m is, I bought a pedometer and looked for somewhere in Oxford which might, more or less, equate with these dimensions. The closest I got to those dimensions was in Christ Church Meadow, which if anything was bigger. As I’ve already documented my continuing investigations on this subject I won’t add any more here, but I would like to explore further the idea of using the memory of a place to understand the wider past; something which I touched on in Postcards.

During my walks, I found myself recalling a raft of memories from my own past, triggered by the sites I saw as I travelled. Even a short walk around Christ Church Meadow (the length of which, in terms of time, was itself indicative of the horror and magnitude of the suffering at Belzec) opened the floodgates, not only for my own memories to pour through, but those of the city itself . Here I was, an individual with my own recollections, walking amongst the hundreds of thousands of memories of people long since dead from which the city is inevitably constructed – an interesting metaphor for the individual swallowed by the world stage; swallowed by the violence war.

As I have already written, but something it’s worth stating again, the Italian author Italo Calvino discusses memory and its relationship to a place in his book Invisible Cities. The city he says, consists of:

“…relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past; the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock…”

Could it also be said, that there is a relationship between the measurement of spaces within the city and the events of the past elsewhere?

Silence

March 30, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

It was after reading a poem by Edmund Blunden that I started to think much more about silence as a space in which to remember. In ‘1916 seen from 1921,’ we get a glimpse of what it was like for Blunden, for a survivor of the Great War, as he looks back at the horrors of the conflict and ahead towards the future.

“…Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree…”

In my previous entry, ‘Night and Day’ I touched on emptiness as a means by which we (or a place) might best remember an event or events:

“It is better to form one’s memory loci in a deserted and solitary place, for crowds of passing people tend to weaken the impression…”

Emptiness equates of course with silence, and, particularly in the case of the war, and all proceeding wars, silence is the means by which we collectively remember those who lost their lives. It is only now, having visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ieper, that I see the two minutes silence as a metaphor for the holes left by those who died; holes made by the absence of sound, the absence of voices. It is not only our voices which are stopped as we remember, but rather those of the dead.

Maps and Walking

March 16, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

The main theme of much of my work has so far been the Holocaust and in particular its sites, such as those at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec and Babi Yar. I’ve also been studying memory and how memories within objects and buildings might allow us a glimpse of the past; a theme which has fascinated me ever since I was a child. It was through reading Bill Viola’s writings a few months back that I was reminded of the mnemonic techniques practiced by the ancient Greeks:

“The idea of art as a kind of diagram has for the most part not made it down from the Middle Ages into modern European Consciousness. The Renaissance was the turning point… The structural aspect of art, and the idea of a ‘data-space’ was preserved through the Renaissance however in the continued relations between image and architecture. Painting became an architectural, spatial form which the viewer experienced by physically walking through it. The older concept of an idea and an image architecture, a memory ‘place’ like the mnemonic temples of the Greeks is carried through in the great European cathedrals and palaces, as is the relation between memory, spatial movement and storage (recording) of ideas.”

When I first read this quote, I was at the time researching The University Parks in Oxford, and in particular examining the plaques on the benches. I realised then, that my act of walking and ‘remembering’ those who have passed away, was in a broad and rather loose sense, like walking through one of those ‘mnemonic temples’ albeit in a physical sense. I was constructing a bigger picture of the place.

More recently, walking has started to play an important role in my work on the Holocaust (one of the themes which has struck me through my research has been that of walking. Many photos of the Holocaust show people walking, usually, and tragically, to their deaths). I’ve started to look at the Operation Reinhard camps and in particular Belzec. Laurence Rees, in his book, ‘Auschwitz’, describes the unimaginable scale of death and contrasts it with the disproportionately tiny size of Belzec Death Camp, which measured less less than 300m x 300m. I knew this was a small size, but it wasn’t until I walked around some familiar spaces in Oxford – including the University Parks – that I realised just how small it was.

Since then I’ve started looking for more evidence of the size of Belzec (and other camps) so that I might walk specific distances around the city, and have since discovered a number of maps drawn by survivors, SS men and archaeologists. These roughly sketched maps, these ‘memories,’ are a poignant reminder of the camp’s existence and might help me in my attempts to bring people closer to the Holocaust, which should never be forgotten.

“All things fade away in time, but time itself is made fadeless and undying by recollection.” Apollonius of Tyana
“We have to describe and to explain a building the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tool are found and remnants of glacial fauna is the layers below… Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are ‘housed’.” C.G. Jung
“Memory, whether individual or generational, political or public is always more than the prison house of the past.” Andreas Huyssen

Here I must return to the ancient Greeks and their mnenomic temples. With a place or loci, such as a house, fixed in the mind, the person remembering would place various objects in its rooms (“…what I have spoken of as being done in a house can also be done in public buildings, or on a long journey, or going through a city…”), objects which by association would remind them of part of the whole thing – such as a speech – to be remembered. Here I saw at once a correlation with my work on Belzec. The ancient Greeks were walking as a means of remembering, of not forgetting; their memory loci were in effect maps which one could sketch, maps of the mind. Therefore, the maps drawn by survivors, are in effect maps of their minds and bring us closer to the horrors of the time – closer to the individuals who suffered.

The fact that objects were used to create associations, and therefore build (through ‘walking’) a bigger ‘picture’ of something also fits in with the recent work I’ve been doing on Auschwitz, looking at the possessions left by the victims and trying to build a picture of the individuals before the Holocaust, to see them not only as victims, but people who lived lives before its horror.

Through walking distances which I’ve taken from descriptions of the camp, I have found myself walking back into my own past and the past of the city in general; for example, walking the route of Cuckoo Lane and the Old London Road at Shotover. My own past confirms my individuality and the past of the city confirms my place as a small part in the mass of memories associated with this place (this also correlates with my work on Auschwitz, trying to find the individuals amongst the huge number of dead, individual possessions from amongst the mountains, names rather than inconceivable numbers). The fact these walks have been derived from a map or a description of Belzec, helps me to identify further with the individuals who suffered there; not because I can in anyway conceive of their suffering – no-one could ever imagine the horrors they endured – but because I can imagine their own pasts and that of the places they knew so well, places from which they were taken to their deaths.