Voices from War

Voices have always haunted me, especially voices that call out for help.  As a child, I was enchanted by the recorded dream of our national patron, St. Patrick, a 5th-century Roman-British missionary, who felt called back to Ireland by "the voice of the Irish” pleading with him in a visionary dream.  These were the people whom he had once been enslaved by, and they now appeared to be begging him to return and walk among them again.  Furthermore, the last pleading words of Sal Mineo (1939 – 1976), who was twice nominated for best supporting actor at the Oscars, also somehow rattle around nearly always at the back of my mind: “No… no… oh my God… no! Somebody, please help me!”

Furthermore, unsurprisingly, the sense of hearing is often the last to remain functional in the final hours of life, even when a patient is unresponsive. The brain, apparently, continues to process sound, allowing loved ones to offer comfort through speech or music in a patient's final moments.  As human beings, we are wired to communicate, to speak and to listen and most especially to tell and to share stories.  One of the greatest gifts we can give to another is to listen to their story, which embodies their very identity and being.  Moreover, it is a rich gift also for the listener in this transaction of attention to the other, where our very act of listening tells the other that they really matter, that they are truly worth listening to. 

In this post, I would like to review two books which are authentic records of voices representing suffering multitudes across national and temporal boundaries.  Unfortunately, they recount the gross injustices and even the worst atrocities humans can inflict on their fellow beings.  These books are Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust (Lyn Smith & The Imperial War Museum, Ebury Press, 2006) and We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth (Edited by Ahmad Alnaouq and Pam Bailey, Penguin, 2026). The first I bought at The Imperial War Museum when I visited a few years ago, and the second last week here in Dublin. 

They form a useful, insightful and important diptych, a powerful juxtaposition of two opposite political perspectives, the first from a Jewish point of view and the second from a Muslim perspective.  However, both books speak mainly about the human condition, or indeed our human predicament, where we are locked in a seemingly intractable dilemma of pervasive evil, where sheer hatred of the other leads to unimaginable and horrific suffering. What they both demonstrate clearly and profoundly is that while the onward march of evil seems unstoppable, while the limits to a people’s suffering seem unending, the persistence of hope and belief in the prevalence of the good lives deeply in the heart of every human being.  We desperately need, in today’s shockingly negative world, to listen to these heartfelt accounts.  Everyone’s story is our story.  We must not be afraid to sit and listen.  What hope do we have at all for our future as humanity if we fail to listen to the pain and suffering of one another?  Furthermore, we can surely rejoice also in the truth that exists in the literature that emanates from this crucible of suffering.  If only we could learn from such deeply human accounts of suffering, and learn not to reduce ourselves and others to our primal and instinctual origins, represented solely by opposing and reductive emblems, and antagonistic shibboleths roared in hatred?

Lyn Smith (b.1934), editor, compiler, interviewer and historian, is also a Webster University adjunct professor of politics, international relations, and human rights, and is, furthermore, affiliated with Regents College.  She tells us in her preface that she and her team recorded 785 Holocaust-related interviews with survivors over some twenty years, from the early 1990s. They selected stories of survival from over a hundred voices from this important oral archive, where individual accounts cover life in Germany after the First World War into the 1920s, through the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, through the hellish torments of the concentration camps, right up to the Fall of the Third Reich and the aftermath for these brave souls through the 1950s and beyond.

There is an excellent foreword by the English historian Laurence Rees, who is a BAFTA-winning historical documentary filmmaker and a former Head of BBC TV History Programmes.  Rees’s area of specialism is the Holocaust and the history of the Third Reich.  He points out that the “very point of this book is that it should upset you” and he hopes that the reader will come to realise “how the majority of people most often act in their own narrow self-interest” (p. 1). He further goes on to stress that even in the camps, such narrow self-interest almost always came first.  After all, self-preservation lies at our very core.  He recounts one survivor of the death camp of Sobibor telling him that “nobody really knows themselves” (p. 2). What this survivor meant, Rees explains, is that practically every human being will be reduced to acting in sheer self-interest and self-preservation when stripped entirely of their dignity and humanity.  Culture and manners, it would seem, are only skin deep.  Rees says we will never know why only the tiniest minority of us will act morally with kindness and courage in extreme situations like those recounted in this book.  He talks of the amazing luck that a minority survived the sheer hell of the concentration camps while millions died appallingly in their dark maw. The world, and all that’s in it, is random and fragile.  The terrible reality is that evil happens and is extremely random: “And it’s this terrible reality that makes this book more important than any popular work of fiction.  In this book, the good people – the ones the reader should be rooting for – are often killed arbitrarily and unjustly.  Such things, as a rule, do not occur in fiction, which is why history can be so much more important” (p. 3).

Let us take a sample of voices from these two books and allow their testimonies to penetrate our hearts as well as acknowledge them with our cognition.

One Jewish man, John Laurence, remembers that when he was a sixteen-year-old boy in Vienna: “I was arrested on Easter Monday, 1938, and taken to the local barracks. I was butted with a rifle and made to lie beneath a mattress on the springs of a bed, and four of them jumped on the mattress.  I was taken up to the top floor, by which time they had stripped me to my underpants. They held me out of the window. ‘Shall we let him go now?’ they said.” (p. 45).

Now for a feminine voice.  Hedy Epstein, a schoolgirl from Kippenheim reported that the day after Kristallnacht 8/9 November 1938, that the attitude of most Germans towards the Jews had changed drastically for the worse: “Classes started as they did every day and then about half an hour later, the principal walked in and gave a long talk… and at some point while he was talking he pointed his finger at me and he said, “Get out you dirty Jew.”

The last eye-witness account I will record here is that of Danny Falkner, a Polish Jewish survivor from the Warsaw Ghetto, because it recounts the story of one of my favourite educator-heroes, the famous Dr Janusz Korczak. He was a great humanitarian, a paediatrician, an educator, and a children's author as well as a much-published author on all matters child-related. In this last regard, he was an early children's rights advocate who, in 1919, had drafted a children's constitution.  

Our witness, Danny Falkner, recounts the story of Dr Korczak, who was director of an orphanage of nearly 200 children, leading them bravely to the Umschlagplatz from where they would be shipped like cattle to their collective deaths at the infamous Treblinka camp: “In the ghetto he found it very difficult to maintain the orphanage because there were no funds for it, but he used to go round with a sack to collect food for the orphans.  He was prominent in science and education circles…. He was approached by a German before entering the Umschlagplatz, telling him he could save his life, but the children would have to go.  He refused the offer, he said, ‘Where my children are going, I must go as well.’ And of course he perished in Treblinka.” (p. 122)

Now, let us listen to a sample of three voices from the second book, We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth.  This book is a collection of essays describing what it is like to be a Palestinian in Gaza from 2015 to the present.  These are stories that are written in English by their Gazan authors, all of whom have been mentored by a native English-speaking writer.  They are all voices of young people who were once full of hope, like any of us setting out on our journey through life.  They were all born under Israeli occupation and blockade.  And as a result, they are victims of an ongoing genocide.  Naomi Klein – the Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses, support of ecofeminism and organised labour, and criticism of corporate globalisation, fascism and capitalism – says of this Sunday Times Bestseller: “An extraordinary symphony of testimony… This book is a jailbreak – and a miracle.” Daisy Johnson, the young contemporary British novelist and short story writer, stated that she felt “not only deeply moved by this book but transformed.  Its importance cannot be understated.” 

I took the quotations in the above paragraphs from three Jewish Holocaust survivors, so I will balance this brief post with three Palestinian voices.  The young female student, Haya Abu Shammala, writes in 2015, a reflection on fear, entitled “An Ode to my Roof, the thin line between Life and Death”: “What is worse than expecting to die at any moment? Sometimes I envy the dead because they don’t have to wait anymore.  Fear is a more effective weapon than rockets; it leaves its victims haunted by the possible scenarios of how and when they will be killed.  Every night I asked my roof; Will you ever collapse on me? (p. 18 – 19).

Also, from as far back as 2015, Ismail Abu-Aitah recounts that: “an air strike, which had targeted our neighbour’s house, had badly damaged my own home and killed five of my family members: my mom, Jamila; my dad, Ibrahim; my two brothers, Mohammed and Ahmed, and my four-year-old nephew, Adham.  Ten other family members were wounded… When I was finally discharged from the hospital, I returned to my home to see what had become of the place of my youth.  Shocked at what I saw, I sat down in the middle of the street and sobbed.  When I entered the house and saw blood everywhere, I collapsed” (p. 34 – 5).

I will finish this post with an account from a more recent time, from Wednesday, the 29^th of February 2024.  A young man, Ahmed Dader, who has changed homes over nine times, who has lost countless family members, who also once spent three days buried under the rubble of his house with his wife, losing therewith his eight-month-old unborn daughter: “On that Wednesday, my father and I travelled to find food for the nineteen children in our house… Finally, the trucks with food arrived to a cacophony of cheers.  Thousands of desperate souls rushed towards the aid vehicles.  Despite the rush of people, I managed to secure a bag of flour and began to make my way home.  But then suddenly, out of nowhere, came a fusillade of bullets aimed at our heads and the upper parts of our bodies.  Many people who were hit bled to death, since no medical crews or ambulances could reach them. It was like a battleground… I remember well a young man who was carrying a bag of flour.  Suddenly, a tank advanced and crushed him, smashing both him and his bag of flour into the ground…. I will need years for the seeds of that night to fade in my memory; the blood of hungry Gazans flowed like a river in the streets.  The death toll was 130 and around 800 were injured, most of them seriously” (p. 302 – 303).

The terrible beauty of eye-witness accounts lies in their naked truth, and they nearly always demand no commentary at all.  Indeed, who could add anything of value to what the three Jewish witnesses recounted or to what the three Palestinian witnesses averred? It would be a brave but insensitive soul who would do that! Any constant and loyal reader of these posts will know that I avoid politics like the plague and that I prefer to write my reflections on life from a wide existential and humanist perspective.  Like my favourite philosopher, Iris Murdoch, I prefer my philosophy to be lived in, to be rooted in human experience, to avoid reductionism of any kind, which polarises human beings into categories, into blacks and whites, into saints and sinners, into friends and enemies, into opposite poles or irreconcilable dichotomies.  Humankind is far too complex, and the world which it inhabits is often more living nightmare than paradise to allow for simplicities and simplifications to possibly and probably heighten all apparent differences into bloody conflicts.

I will conclude this post with some sentiments from Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, the great humanitarian who saved thousands of lives from the Nazis in Rome during the Second World War.  Loyal readers will know that I reviewed Joseph O’Connor’s two novels in which he plays a part as one of the central heroes in the immediate two posts to this.  O’Flaherty has been acknowledged as often stating, “God has no country.  God has no flag. God has no passport. God is God.”

If only we humans could listen to one another in an effective and healing way, we would then understand O’Flaherty’s words.  Sadly, I almost always feel that history teaches us otherwise, that it teaches us that we are deaf to so many of our brothers and sisters, and will continue to be.