Saturday 1 December 2012

Convoy XX- Mechelen to Auschwitz, 1943



This week I read, with some surprise, that during WWII there was only one action to stop a Nazi train filled with Jews and Roma gypsies going to Auschwitz, one, and that train was stopped in 1943 by 3 young Belgians.
On 19 April 1943 the Nazis forced 1631, mostly Polish Jews, onto a goods train (this was the 1st time they’d used a goods train as there had been some escapees from the normal passenger carriages used until then) from the Dessin transit camp in Mechelen.

“Between August and December 1942, two transports with about 1,000 Jews each left the camp every week for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Between the 4 August 1942 and 31 July 1944, a total of 28 trains left Mechelen for Poland, carrying 24,916 Jews and 351 Roma;[1] most of them went to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This figure represented more than half of the Belgian Jews murdered during the Holocaust.”
The doors of these goods trains war tied closed with barbed wire and each carriage had one Jewish monitor who was supposed to keep the people calm and under control. Three young men from Brussels, all school friends from the Atheneum in Uccle, Brussels: Youra Livschitz (Georges Livchitz), Robert Maistriau and Jean Franklemon, decided that they had to try and do something about the awful situation (Livshitz’s brother was in the Resistance and they all had an idea that there was more to these deportations than what the Nazi’s claimed, but no one had any hard evidence.) and decided to stop the next Jewish train to Auschwitz. They discussed their plans with the Partisans who warned them that, considering the ruthless efficiency of the Nazi forces and Gestapo, it was too risky and amounted to nothing more than suicide. At that stage of the war the Nazis seemed invincible and all-seeing. The 3 young men nevertheless decided to carry out their crazy plan.
So, on the night of 19 April, with no experience or equipment, (they had 1 revolver and a lamp) they used a red lamp, placed it on the railway line, just outside Mechelen, and waited for transport XX, which was protected by a special Sichereitspolizei contingent from Germany. To their surprise the train driver saw the red lamp and actually stopped! The 3 young men were so shocked they were initially quite numb.
“Under the command of Georges Livchitz, the group forced the train to stop by signalling it with a red lantern. Livchitz held the engineer at bay with a small calibre revolver, while his comrades, Robert Maistriau and Jean Franklemon, forced open the doors of several cars. They used the German language to get the people to jump out (they knew that most of the Jews were from Poland), the monitor however urged the people to stay. During the ensuing gun battle 15 managed to escape. They were given some money by the 3 young heroes and taken to a nearby bus stop. Unfortunately many of them were subsequently re-arrested and some were shot. But this action so inspired the remaining Jews of transport XX that there was a second, spontaneous escape action on that train (using tools smuggled onto the train beforehand by the partisans of Livshitz) , just before it crossed over into Poland, and all in all 231 people escaped, of whom 90 were re-arrested.

Eluding capture for weeks, Livchitz was arrested, (betrayed by his best friend) escaped the next day, and was arrested a second time on June 2, 1943. The report of his trial described his actions:

“He was the leader of a band of terrorists and participated in the attack [sic] of 19 April 1943 against the Jewish deportation train. The accused admits that after his flight he shot at the soldiers who pursued him. He was arrested for the first time on 14 May 1943 but succeeded in seizing the revolver of a guard in the cellar of a local police office. He grievously wounded the guard and managed to escape. On his subsequent arrest he was sent to Breedonck [a concentration camp in Belgium].”

Georges Livchitz was executed in February 1944 by a German firing squad.
To my mind a real hero - certainly not the stereotype of the cowering Jew, an image which Nazi propaganda spread at the time. He was fearless, courageous to the point of stupidity and executed his plans without thought of personal safety.
Fitting then that the only time a “Judentrein” to Auschwitz was stopped in all those years, it was done by a Jew.

Friday 23 November 2012

Mountains and Marathons



Text Box: Boyes Drive
Initially I started this small piece to write about how I become a marathon runner, but my non-suppressible memory immediately asserted itself and I was bombarded with enveloping associations: streams of pictures and smells, sounds too, but mostly visual hooks and aromas linked to the first days of my attempts at running or jogging. By now I have come to realise that words are pathetically inadequate in trying to recreate the strong memories I am capable of but I cannot help myself, I must try to describe them, so what started out as something on running evolved, no sprinted, into a tapestry of a special place near Cape Town, and the role it and its surrounding wonder-wall atmosphere played in my life at that time, so it became a stage, perhaps a background, to my meagre story on running.

In the fairest part of the Fair Cape, there is a fishing village called “Kalkbaai” (in the language of the fishermen), or Kalk Bay on the tongue of the English who came there in about 1805. Kalkbaai hangs on the eastern flank of the mountains, just about the opposite side of Cape Town itself, separated from the Mother City by the Constantia valley and the rest of the verdant suburbs of Bishopscourt and Newlands. I lived in Kalkbaai, but worked in Wynberg as an attorney, and every time I came home, it seemed as if the village was trying to slip off the mountain slope and quietly disappear into False Bay’s snoek and whale waters, happily and with joy! That was very often the sensation nestling in me as I turned off Boyes Drive (a mountain road which I used, to avoid the traffic on the Main Road - which runs along the ocean-front) and into Gatesville Road, Kalk Bay, (where I lived in a Edwardian stone cottage, see the white arrow, bottom right of the picture above) and sentimentally-named[1]Slampamper’ (a ‘slampamper’ was originally a piece of equipment used on the old Dutch sail ships, (and so, a link to my heritage: my family came to the Cape in 1765, on the VoC ‘Retourschip’, the “Vrijburg), but those of you who have read the poems of C Louis Leipoldt will recognise my cottage’s name in one of his poetic works, “Slampamperliedjies”. One of those “liedjies” (songs) goes as follows:

Vir my sing maar liewers van blomme;
Van al, wat die vlei laat verkleur;
Van al, wat die sonskyn laat spartel;
Van voorjaar en najaar se geur;
Vir my sing maar liefs van die water;
Van duikers, wat draf oor die veld;
Van rotse en branders en wolke—
Maar nooit nie, nee nooit nie, van geld!
[2]

and in this sense it refers instead to a certain casual, relaxed attitude to life - something I unfortunately never managed to achieve for any extended period, myself).  When I lived in Kalk Bay, in the early 1980’s it was already a bohemian type of place, with a rhythm and atmosphere which was so different from that of Cape Town itself, and Cape Town’s rhythm was already considered to be out of sync with the commercialised pace of the other major urban centres of South Africa, so you can imagine just how different Kalk Bay seemed to be to other South Africans. A lot of this came from the easy-going lifestyle and colour infusion from the fishing village, affectionately called ‘the flats’ (in the illustration above of Kalk Bay you can see the last row of buildings in the top right corner) – this is where they lived, the fishermen, (or ‘vistermanne’ as they called themselves) who would go out on their trawlers every morning (many of my mornings started with the smells of fresh coffee and vague diesel fumes of the wave-thumping trawlers, chugging out into rough seas- as you can see from the picture above my cottage was set up quite high and it gave me an understanding, no, a feeling for the sea, for False Bay. In fact it left me with such an indelible impression that as I sit here, 30 odd years later and 6000 km away, I can effortlessly conjure up its serenity, its winds, the clarity and depth of its blueness as though I’d just returned from Wynberg) to return, early afternoon to the harbour quays, stalked by hundreds of voracious gulls trying to scrounge a morsel of the silvery Snoek and Kabeljou on the decks of the fishing trawlers.

How to get an aerial view of the scene? If you sailed some distance into False Bay and then used a hot air balloon to float straight up into the blue, and then turned and looked at Kalk Bay, with next to it the even smaller village of St James, and then a bit further to the right, big brother Muizenberg, you’d see that at the top of the village, in fact the boundary between the mountain and the houses, a road appears that hugs these villages together, and protects them from the mountains: this road is named Boyes Drive.
On the mountain-side of Boyes Drive you have the Cape as it has always been: no houses, no electricity, just mountain streams emitting and ending in tiny waterfalls at the edge of the road, with maybe a hiking path every now and then. You would be stunned by the floral exuberance, the greenness, the softness of the water in your mouth, Watsonias and Erica would be there, pelargoniums and wild sage, proud, and perhaps the queens of the mountains, the Proteas and Suikerbossies (Pincushions), about 1500 different types of floral ambassadors of the Cape Floral Kingdom. But I was always on the look-out for my personal favourites, the white virgins, the ‘Varkore’(Arum Lily) that have the habit of cosying up to really wet spots, next to gentle streams or ponds often found on the edge of Boyes Drive.

Along the ocean-side of Boyes Drive I was always charmed by the secretive and dignified villas, built in an age of elegance and dignity, usually discreetly hidden behind screens of bougainvillea and Stone pines whose shapes had been re-styled by the Cape Doctor into living green sculptures- I went to go and say hello to them again, one last time in 2007.     


However, let’s get back to my original purpose: to tell you about running, jogging, doing marathons, or possibly I should call it the art of interacting with nature in a manner which some call exercise, but to me it was the ultimate act of being alone (mostly) whilst being watched and supported by nature. It gave one an opportunity to ‘close’ your mind to the insistent and clamouring raft of daily problems, to be able to marshal your thoughts and memories simultaneously, the heart working in unison with your brain and soul, propelling you forward to renew your soul and self, at a slow pace - a perfect unison of human motion and emotion.  Running to me, turned out to be far more complex, emotional and self-developing that what I thought it could be. It was all that it was.  It was a constant redefining of yourself, of your boundaries, what you really were, or are.  It made me humble, or at least less egotistical, and it taught me endurance, more so of the spirits than of the body perhaps. I remember, in my first marathon, the Peninsula Marathon in Cape Town, which was run from the centre of Cape Town, through the vineyards of Constantia, the chic lanes of Rondebosch and Newlands, past Pollsmoor prison, and eventually all along the rocky False Bay coast, to Simonstown, listening to the cheers of the crowds lining the road being dimmed by the roar of the breakers as we turned into Muizenberg, just where the route met the sea for the 1st time.  As it was my first marathon, I was therefore completely inexperienced, and as is my wont, over-did things again, and became so exhausted I wanted to stop. A decision fuelled by the shock of having to experience a number of elderly ‘house wives’ (as I thought of them) shuffling past me, no running style at all, chunky and certainly no longer svelte, often with cheaper running shoes than mine, but nevertheless inevitably leaving me behind and with words of encouragement for me, the young (well relatively young!) yuppie god in his brand-new New Balance running shoes (I remember them still, today, all maroon and with a wonderful grippy tread!) This made me determined to push on in the certain knowledge (belief) that I would eventually catch up with them and leave them in my wake.  By the time I got to Simonstown many of these ‘losers’ had already overtaken me and I was in such distress and pain myself, both mentally and physically, having gone beyond my limits, that I never ever denigrated another runner again, no matter their shape, size or age!

This running thing-that-got-out-of-hand began in the early 1980s in Cape Town. I was overweight and extremely unfit (except for the odd squash game) and I was just not getting any exercise.  I was then living in Kalk Bay and had recently become friends with two fellow attorneys who were also practising law in Wynberg, Cape Town, Nigel Boast and Lionel Kramer.  They were both about my age but already serious runners, influenced mainly by Lionel, who, even though he had a heart pacemaker, took his running seriously.  Lionel was an extremely slow runner, obviously because of his medical condition, but very determined, and you could never count him out. Little did I know then, that my running sessions with these two would play a major part in the rest of my life, affecting not only my career, but ultimately, the relationship with my children- it still haunts and stalks me.

Nigel and Lionel had been trying to talk me into joining them on early morning runs, but I had steadfastly refused to do so, until one morning, it was in early February I think, at about five o'clock I was woken up by the sound of someone banging on my front door and found both of them in running gear, waiting for me to join them. They dragged me out, dressed in shorts and squash shoes, and I tried to follow them at a distance, flip-flopping up the hills of Boyes Drive. I remember not being able to complete 2 kilometres that first day. They repeated this kidnapping act though, every morning, for a number of weeks. Of this beginning period, I remember a few things: my bleeding feet, their jibes at my incompetence (‘uselessness’ as they called it), my manliness being repeatedly questioned, my slack stomach, fat arse, and lack of fitness- cries of “come on, get A into G, you fat wanker!” Somehow this seemed to spur me on, instilling a type of stubbornness, determined to do better, not to give in to their taunts.  We were soon joined by some other runners, who all eventually became great friends. What I did not realise at the time was that they had surreptitiously entered me for the Peninsula Marathon, which was to be run about 2 or 3 weeks later- on 4 March 1983, an act of sheer insanity, in retrospect, but because of all the insults and cajoling, and because often my ego outweighs my common sense by the collective tonnage of one hundred elephants, I eventually agreed to do the Peninsula marathon with them, but I told them I would stop halfway. Unfortunately, I only had two weeks within which to prepare, and I remember the first long run we did was supposed to be limited to 20 km, but in the end I felt so strong, we did more than 30km. Somehow the time and pain just did not become an issue on that run because you were with your best friends, people who’d suffered and bled with you, plus the route was just so fabulous (for those of you who have had the insane privilege of running on Chapmans Peak, which connects Hout Bay and Noordhoek, at 06h00 on a sweet silent Sunday morning, with the ocean hundreds of metres below you, speaking, foaming and rushing in blue, and with small waterfalls that await you at every second bend (Chapmans Peak is literally cut into the mountains), I need not say more. On this particular run there was never any need to take along water bottles, when such sweet mountain water was so readily available. We always did Chapmans Peak very early on Sunday mornings so that there would be no traffic around; and it is of those runs that I have the most formidable and abiding memories of beauty and tranquillity - I remember the blueness of the sea, jostling with the even intenser blue of the sky, and in the distance Hout Bay would just be waking up to a very early Sunday morning.  Once we got to the other side of the Chapmans Peak drive, where it met the beach again in Hout Bay we would always stop and have a quick dip in the ocean.


So based on this one 30 km training run I was going to attempt a marathon. The day of the Peninsula marathon came, and despite my suffering, as I tried to describe above, I not only managed to finish it, but even beat my two tormentors, revenge was never so sweet- perhaps it was the burning desire for revenge that kept me at it, all I wanted was to see their faces when they came in at the end, to see me standing there waving at them!

After the Peninsula we started training in a more serious manner and went out, if not every day, most mornings of the week. And, as we all know now (then we just suspected it, and knew it because it happened to us all the time) once you start doing a lot of kilometres, your brain releases endorphins, and in a way, you become hooked on the running- it also helped you get through the pain, or when hitting the “wall”.  In quick succession, i.e. after March 1983, we also ran a few short local races like the Red Hill half-marathon and then the Mother City Marathon, which apparently is no longer done - it was about 50 km long.

The other memorable race, en route to the Comrades marathon, was the Two Oceans Marathon, a 56 km race, quite rightly described as the most beautiful road race in the world – as you can see from the route map it covers all the glory spots of the Cape, from the vineyards of Constantia to the two oceans (actually technically not true, the two oceans actually meet at L’Agulhas, some hundreds of kilometres away, but let’s not destroy the image of the race!). What I remember most of this race, which I ran more than once, was that in the final stages I had to help Lionel Kramer to get over the last mountain, at Constantia Nek, I literally propped him up him up by draping his arm over my shoulder. An ironic image, when viewed against subsequent events, events which destroyed my professional life.

Later that year, in October I think, we also did another interesting race, the Foot of Africa marathon, which is run down in Bredasdorp, in the Southern Cape. It was worthwhile and scenic, and more of a cross-country than your standard road a marathon and it was started by the local mayor, firing a shotgun!

All of this in preparation for the big one, the Comrades Marathon, which was always run on 31 May. I was, of course physically, not anywhere near prepared enough for such a double marathon.  This says something of the obstinacy and foolishness of the long-distance runner that I thought that I could run perhaps the most gruelling ultra-marathon in the world, having only been training since end of mid-February, about 3 and a half months. Insane. The Comrades is a mythical, almost double marathon, about 90 km long, a race of the gods (and not lesser ones either!) which assumed large proportions in my mind, and in my memory because one of its earliest winners, gladiators, was a friend of my father, Wally Haywood, who won it 5 times and finished his last Comrades at the tender age of 81. Of such stuff the true runner is made. Wally Hayward was the only person I ever see my father in awe of.

We travelled up to Durban, where it started that year, all of is in a sort of trance, that is the only way I can describe that trip and the few days before the race, and I only realised it afterwards anyway. This dreamlike state was, I think induced by a profound fear of the 90 km beast, when you would be in the tropical heat for more than 10 hours, non-stop, running, slogging, whimpering, cursing and feeling sorry for yourself, but not that sorry that you would really stop. Oh, you said to yourself, a zillion times, that you were definitely going to stop at the next watering point, but then if you saw your mates still going, you would not shame yourself or your club by stopping. So, you tried to cope with the blood in your running shoes, (in the beginning you’d stop for blister treatment, but in the end you just coped with it and carried on) with the cramps that pulled your legs into Elephant Man-like shapes, with an overwhelming and desperate need to sleep, to be quiet, be peaceful, be stopped. Stopped. Rested. But then you’d see someone in an even worse state than you shuffling up the hill you’d be shamed, and you’d give it one more hill, just another bend. The Jungian part of my brain tricked me into counting bends, and hills, not steps and kilometres- it was as if my unconscious was helping me to survive this psychological onslaught.

Anyway, we all finished it, and in time, more or less. We were all particularly subdued and quiet afterwards, also on the return trip to Cape Town, but the next evening, back in cape Town we all got together and watched the race on television, we were silent, just watching, clutching our beers like security blankets until the 10th runner approached the line, (he would be the last one to get a gold medal), and I remember him so well, he was named Gordon somebody of Oxford Striders, wearing blue and gold. Our eyes were fixed on him intently willing him on to get there in time, as there was another runner closing in on him, we were starting to yell at him, extremely loud, to get going, to get that gold, to not bloody-well give up! We wanted him to get that gold medal so badly, he was doing it for us after all, we were running there, as he approached the line he was a bit wobbly but still had everything under control, still disciplined, and then he made the error for which we could never forgive him, why till today I can still recall that horrible image: he turned around to see how far the other runner was still behind him, and in doing so, he lost all mental control of his muscles- all the iron discipline and courage, all the control, (knowing that to reach the end he had to stay in control of his mental and physical faculties), all gone. Before our horrified eyes he collapsed, dropped like a felled pine tree, 2 metres from the line, and as we watched him trying to get up, first trying to crawl, to put just one foot in front in front of the other, we saw that he could not even use his arms to drag himself across the line, even though he was trying in a desperate manner- all that was still functioning was his mind, clouded red with a desire to get that gold medal. Then followed one of the most embarrassing things I’ve yet experienced: all of us who’d run the comrades just choked up with tears, but it was silent, the silence of the dreamland we were still in, the loss which we’d somehow collectively suffered.

So, running had become so intertwined with beautiful and natural landscapes for me that when I moved to Belgium in 1998 I just could not get the same vital feed-back from the local natural landscape to build the necessary motivation, and so my running days ended for a lack of mountains, land- and seascapes. Now I only run in my memoryscape.




[1] The name ‘Slampamper’ reminded me of the poems of C Louis Leipold who wrote about nature like few others have ever done.


[2] In the same poetry collection there is this piece which fitted perfectly with my stone cottage that hovered on the cusp of the sea:

Gistraand in die maanlig daar buite
Het ek stil op die seestrand gestaan,
En die weerlig het bo op die ruite
Van die vensters geel vonke geslaan.

En ver, waar die see maar 'n lyn was,
Waar die hemel en sterre hom soen,
Waar die vloed kristalhelder en rein was,
En die branders half wit en half groen,

Het ek weerlig gesien op en neer gaan,
As silwer en goud in die lug,
As siele, wat bo na die Heer gaan—
Stil, sonder 'n klag of 'n sug.

Last Post in Ypres



On 1 November all of Belgian stops work and play (it is also a public holiday) and we then salute our dead. What is particularly poignant is the small celebration which is held at the Menin Gates of Ypres.
The Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing is a war memorial in Ypres, Belgium dedicated to the 58 900 British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the Ypres Salient of World War I and whose graves are unknown!. The memorial is located at the eastern exit of the town and marks the starting point for one of the main roads out of the town that led Allied soldiers to the front line-built by the British government; the Menin Gate Memorial was unveiled on 24 July 1927
To this day, the remains of missing soldiers are still found in the countryside around the town of Ypres. Typically, such finds are made during building work or road-mending activities. Any human remains discovered receive a proper burial in one of the war cemeteries in the region. If the remains can be identified, the relevant name is removed from the Menin Gate.
Following the Menin Gate Memorial opening in 1927, the citizens of Ypres wanted to express their gratitude towards those who had given their lives for Belgium's freedom. As such, every evening at 20:00, buglers from the local fire brigade close the road which passes under the Memorial and sound the Last Post. Except for the occupation by the Germans in World War II when the daily ceremony was conducted at Brookwood Military Cemetery, in Surrey, England, this ceremony has been carried on uninterrupted since 2 July 1928. On the evening that Polish forces liberated Ypres in the Second World War, the ceremony was resumed at the Menin Gate despite the fact that heavy fighting was still taking place in other parts of the town.
This is how important it is that we never forget; never allow it to happen again, for as long as you and I pass on this story to our children and grandchildren, those 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers who lie somewhere, unfound in the Flemish soils, their burial sites untraceable, but their souls and the memory of their lives kept forever aflame in our hearts, especially every evening at 20.00 when the Last Post reunites us with them, at peace, thank God at peace.
Listen here to an amateur recording of the Last Post being played by these 4 unknown firemen of Ypres, thanking the dead for what they have today.

I could not resist this video clip of a little Belgian boy saluting a contingent of Canadian soldiers at one of the WWI memorial marches!

evidence



..and when the police eventually found his body there were many suspicious signs, strong indications that there was likely to be foul play at hand. The first was that he was alone, isolated in a way that seemed unnatural to the investigating officers. Then the fact that he was totally undressed, naked, and cold, his limbs though strangely peaceful, almost posed by an experienced fashion photographer in love with a sub-culture that believed that one’s body position could betray an inner happiness, arranging limbs in such a way that it ensured eternal joy and ecstasy.
But what concerned Inspector No Name most was the heavy, purplish bruising on the upper left-side of the victim’s chest. There was enough sub-cutaneous bleeding to convince him that the forensics team had to be brought onto the case immediately as he could not, as a layman, fathom why it would appear that blood seemed to be seeping upwards and outwards, especially as he could not find any gunshot wounds, or any sign of a blade entering the affected area. He went on to his knees, carefully avoiding any disturbance of the victim’s rigor mortis position,  and used his new reading glasses to try and find any tell-tale marks, he even looked for the inconspicuous dots left behind by the stabbing with a sharpened bicycle wheel spoke, a favourite method used in trains and buses to stab a victim when his/her arm was lifted, hanging on a strap in a crowded bus for instance, a swift jab into the arm pit, straight into the heart, but causing so little pain that the victim hardly reacted or realised that he/she had just been given a fatal jab.
After a day or so the forensic investigation was concluded and the local crime lab sent in its normal Form 00z to the Inspector’s detective sergeant, DS Even Less, and reported that they could not find any external wounds, that the internal bleeding was caused by an inexplicable heart defect (the autopsy could not, despite vigorous, and repeated efforts of the coroner, reveal any obvious, normal heart diseases or defects) and that a full scan for poisonous substances or drugs also revealed nothing significant, except that at the bottom of the form the DS saw a hastily scribbled note by a trainee coroner’s assistant in which she noted that she had however found chemical traces of an unknown substance around the eyes of the victim, a substance which did not fit in with any known chemical pattern search or traces, and though she could offer no scientific proof, she felt that it might have been traces of tears.