this side of silence

‘The dumb go down in history and disappear’ wrote Tony Harrison in ‘National Trust’.

Wattching ‘The Eichman Show’ on TV  last week, what appalled me was to learn of a collective suppression of memory, that there could be more than one kind of Holocaust denial, and that the survivors could be surrounded by a strange conspiracy of silence in the heart of their dreamed-for homeland. The dreadful imagery of what the ‘Final Solution’ actually meant, over and over and over, was shockingly and distressingly familiar. In the late 1950’s as a teenager I’d read books like ‘The scourge of the swastika,’ and watched the BBC’s ‘World at war’ , week after week, for half a year, finally being confronted by the nightmare footage of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British troops. And my father very quietly saying his brother Alec  had been there. He didn’t say anything…