In the daylight for everyone to see

Anyone who knows me knows of my obsession with the village of my birth. I’ve talked about it here and here. I’ve been photographing and researching it for at least a decade. A couple of months ago a friend invited me to take part in an art exhibition at a New York City university, with a loose theme around apparitions in the landscape. My central thesis is that the 20th Century is buried just outside the perimeter of that little village, and there are traces everywhere, for those who care to look.

So I said yes, reluctantly.

First of all, I don’t really like my own pictures. Never have, even though I’ve had a bunch of shows. In fact I can barely even look at them.

Secondly, I didn’t just want to show pictures without context. I wanted there to be enough fragmentary evidence for people to begin to do their own excavations. Even publish a little book to accompany the show. Which means, doing a lot more research, fast.

Which is what I have been doing over the last few weeks. Which has become obsessive and painful.

I’ve managed to pull together more information from the village archives, from a distance. I’ve also found, for the first time, people who passionately care about what happened 70 years ago. I’ve been handed the information on the forced laborers who are buried beneath the 665 numbered grave markers. Names, birth and death dates, names of parents, villages of birth.

And that information just breaks my heart. It’s teenagers and young men and women from the Ukraine and Russia. And many of the young people from Ukraine were likely orphans, survivors of the Holomodor – that terrible genocide by famine. They were double victims of the vortex of evil created by Stalin and Hitler. So young. Dying of tuberculosis, mostly. At the rate of one or two a day. In that beautiful countryside.

I asked the question to my informant how the mayor of the town must have felt signing one or two death certificates a day, for boys and girls, for babies, for young men and women. When normally he’d sign one or two a month, for old people.

She surprised me with her answer. She noticed he would always note not only the day but the hour and minute of their death on their death certificates. There was no pattern to the numbers, so they were likely real, not made up. It could have been a Nazi bureaucrat doing his diligent best to do his paperwork. Or it could have been a human being, doing one small thing to honor the humanity of another being, recording the exact time of their death as if it really mattered.

Further excavations

As I have written before, the village of my birth is a place of layers upon layers. Everyone has been here from the Celts to the Alemanni, to the Romans to the Nazis to the Americans. On a recent visit my father told me that the mystical square mile – his hunting grounds (he’s a hunter), where American Nike missiles used to be buried deep in the ground, where a small labor/sick camp once stood, where planes used to take off heavy with bombs during the Second World War – is about to become an industrial zone.

Porsche already has a large storage facility there and other buildings and distribution centers have gradually colonized the area. But the latest wave of development will obliterate, or at least cover up most of the remaining evidence. He also reminded me of old stories about the village, when had was a military airport, that planes would get stored in the woods for protection. American or British planes would bomb those woods and there is still so much shrapnel in the old oak trees that no-one will fell them. The metal in there would ruin any saw blade, so old oaks grow majestically, undisturbed. It is for those mystical oaks that I first set out, to see what I would find in the dark fairy tale forest of my childhood.

This is what I found. Foundations of buildings, with cellars beneath them. Trees with damage to their bark. Traces and signs.

My town for many years was home to its small American village. Many people harbor happy memories of their time here. But after the Iron Curtain came down many military bases were closed down and dismantled. Few traces remain of the radar towers, the barracks, the compound, or the place where missiles facing Russia were buried deep underground.

Soon, even fewer will be left.

I also tried to find out more about where the camp once stood but did not find out anything further.

Actually, I just found the map that would have pointed me in the right direction

I did however notice a gravestone for the camp’s Jewish unofficial doctor Adolf Levi (who died there, like so many others in 1944), among the gravestones of people who died in the final days of the war.

As I walked back to my father’s house, musing on how inside village limits everything looked as if forgotten by time, a strange apparition entered from left field. A young black man on a unicycle, wearing headphones and a baseball cap. What could it all mean?

Lost in London

Given the gloomy nature of German weekends London’s came as a relief. This was in no small measure due to the fact that bus fares on Sundays were 30p, no matter the zone or distance (this generous pricing scheme has, of course, long been discontinued). Bus outings on Sundays therefore were mini-vacations for the very poor such as myself.

As I wasn’t very familiar with the sprawling metrolands of London, I’d fairly randomly pick destinations on the outer fringes and take  the bus there, always sitting in the smoky top at the front, get out, explore a little and then take the bus back to whatever cold little room I was living at the time. So I’d go to Harrow, or Brent Cross, Highgate, Peckham, Richmond, Kew, Wimbledon, Southall, Greenwich or Seven Sisters, slowly forming some kind of idea of London as a whole, rather than just a few central tourist destinations.

The other method of exploration was driven by my interest in cemeteries. I’d found a book in the library that listed all of London’s many cemeteries and I made it my mission to visit the most significant ones. Brompton was an early favorite, as much for its busy double life as meeting place for Earls Court’s clone scene as for its beautiful monuments. Highgate I liked too, for its famous inhabitants and hilly location, but soon I discovered Nunhead, Kensal Green, Abney Road and – forever my favorite – Tower Hamlets. London Cemeteries were not well kept then and many had turned into quasi-Amazonian jungles, wonderful places to hide in during the summer, with their soothing promise that however miserable life, rest was within reach.

I did not know many people, and almost never had any invitations for Saturday evenings. But staying home on Saturday night seemed to me then to be the most shameful thing in the world. That’s why I would go on very long excursions on Saturday nights, through dark London Streets, walking purposefully, as if I had somewhere to go to, but going nowhere in particular, turning left or right at random intervals. I’d come home exhausted, having seen only the outsides of whatever life other people were living, a spectator, window-shopper on reality, hiding in the shadows.

That way London slowly became mine, neighborhood by neighborhood, mile by mile.

The whisperers

I lived in Berlin for a year just before the wall came down, the only time I lived in Germany as an adult. It was a strange time, for many reasons.  But what stood out, unforgettably, were people’s faces. They looked distorted, like George Grosz drawings, as if they had put on a mask, but suffering and fear were breaking through. As if they had lost control of their features. Is this what living in this strange limbo, in a city still physically and psychologically damaged by the war manifested itself in? A sprayed-on normalcy that was peeling off like old wallpaper?

The next time I saw faces like this was in my many visits to Brighton Beach, New York City’s Russian enclave. Emphatic, overdrawn faces that seemed to want to portray indifference but were expressive all the same. It looked like long, difficult fates were inscribed in them, and no doubt they were. Many were Jewish and had been able to emigrate in the 1970s and 80s. Before that, what repression, what shattered hopes, how much putting on a proud face on a hard life, biting your tongue for decades on end, keeping two separate ledgers, censoring what you think.

Orlando Figes, in his wonderful ‘The Whisperers‘ brings to life the repressive atmosphere of the post-war years in Russia, especially for the persecuted and their families, and anyone else with a “spoilt biography”, like many members of the Jewish community.

As someone who is interested in images and their uses, I am fascinated by the new laser technologies that are revolutionizing gravestone design. Here are a few of the faces in Brooklyn’s Washington Cemetery, all members of the Russian Jewish community. Such evocative faces. What are their stories?