TREBLINKA

TREBLINKA: 05 2012

I am on a train coming home; coming home through the honey evening hills from Edinburgh. I have been at a consultation event, where we have been trying to talk about the future of the organisation that has authority over my detention.

I am well known in this tiny place and in this tiny field of work and, when I put up my hand to talk of the humiliation I feel when I appear before a tribunal. When I put up my hand to talk of feeling demeaned the last time I had to argue the case for my death and how all the energy and all the beans leave me at such times and I giggle with sick embarrassment. When I did this talking; people looked around and nodded approvingly, most especially because I can praise the people who detain me and most especially because, being who I am, carries with it a tattered dignity that some people admire.

I am meant to be working on the train now because there is so much work to do but by the time I reach home and sit up in bed to read by lamplight, I will be wishing for whisky and uninterested in turning peoples’ stories into lessons for our helpers to learn from.

I am meant to be writing about drugs and alcohol and tobacco and mental health and, for the effectiveness of my report; I want to bring in the story of people I met and spoke with. A member’s father who drank and smoked with all the miners from long ago in that brash bravado that ultimately resulted in his death. I want to talk about the woman who would sell her body for drink and the man who came back from an alcohol haze of oblivion and now only wants to give back. I want to talk about the heroin addict who said, once he would have killed his own son, if only it could have given him his next fix. I want to show how wonderful those that survived now are; how much they should be free from the ready judgement so many of us give to such people.

As I write, I look at my neighbours on the train, who are mainly reading thrillers about death and murder for their entertainment and who wish to escape the tedium of a journey on British Rail. As I write, I pause occasionally to look out the window where the fields are golden and green, where small streams twist in the meadows and cows lie on the grass and, as I write, I think vaguely whether I will have tea tonight and whether I will ever again join myself to the life and warmth of another person.

But to my side is the book I have just put down. It was given to me by a good friend and is the story of the life and death of one of her closest friend’s father . It is a book that talks of Treblinka; where 800000 people were murdered and how he was one of only 70 survivors. He escaped in a revolt, that filled my heart with joy as I read about it, only to be captured again. In the book he has just been transferred to Auschwitz Birkenau and soon he will be transferred to Dachau and later he will marry and have two sons and then later still, he will kill himself and leave his two sons with a legacy that means they both try to kill themselves in their turn.

As I read, I think of my world of lamplight, honey and beans, for no particular reason. I think to myself beans are such an ordinary commodity to me that I do not know why I want to talk about them, except that I must have about two weeks supply of them, in tins in my house. I think of honey and remember I have two jars slowly going off in my cupboard and that life is full of honey and, of lamplight, I realise that when I walk into a charity shop and see a bedside lamp, I ignore it because I have a surfeit of lamps.

Then I think of my recent conversations with my psychologist; the one who keeps on going off sick. I think of a friend who was arrested for downloading child porn and my own horrified delayed reaction when at the same time, I started telling my psychiatric nurse of the teacher who liked pretty young boys like me and wouldn’t stop touching us and of the teacher who followed me everywhere to photograph me and loved tying me to the bannisters at school; of being called a wog and a greasy dago because my mum was called Costa, of being ostracised and called a poof because of those teachers. The memory of the whiteness in your stomach when you could not hug your mum goodbye when away to school again.

As I recount these stories and others to myself; I remember my nurse and my psychologist saying that these experiences were abuse; that the sadness of that part of childhood explains why I keep razor blades in the cupboard; why I sometimes wish, with all my heart, to die.

I remember their attempts to decrease my anger at my hatred of my weakness because I suffer in my life. This guilt about feeling weak, first came when I met another man from Auschwitz. He was my boss when I lived on a Kibbutz; a man who had been locked in a cupboard for all of his childhood until being taken to the death camps and who, when he was liberated, experienced the death of his only son in war and his wife from alcohol, he befriended me, but rarely talked; was a grim, stern type of a man.

I remember them saying I set standards that are too high; that I am allowed to accept the way I am meant to have suffered without guilt or shame; and I say I am not. I am not because this is not suffering; this detention is a triviality; this sadness is a wee glister of cold snow on a sunny day.

But also I remember my relief when they said that and now, reading that book, I do not harden my heart against myself anymore, though I wish to. But I do think of Rwanda and Somalia. I think of the myriad unknown places where death is everyday; a routine you do not remark on. I look around me and think of the rise of the National Front in France; of the barriers of hatred that we all build to protect our insecurity and identity and I think of what that does.

I realise my barrier, my echo of division and insecurity, is my hatred of myself and that I do not have to understand it; the slip, the slide of chemicals for whatever reason, the inevitability of genes and failed dreams all these different, hyped and disputed causes. It is the same dark discrimination and though I blame the professionals, I also know I need to take some responsibility too.

I think; I think above all, in memory of those who did and still do suffer in ways I will never understand; that writing this is good.

I am tattered, I am honey bathed in lamplight. I am always spilling the beans of my life and my sadness haphazardly. Yet I am alive and allowed to grow, to sleep, to walk in the company of friends and think, with surprise, that death is an inevitable occupational hazard with no safety regulations but that life can be so good that it is better without them.

Life is honey; I am so incredibly lucky to have it and I still don’t realise it. But I do know I can let that guilt fall if I choose to or at least I hope I can. I can stop trying to explain and understand and reason. There is no need for it. I want to taste the honey and I want to stop writing and look out the window; maybe see some deer or sheep, look at the heather, the mountains.

(Photo: Garden of Rememberance: Hermitage Park, Helensburgh 11 2020)