Preparing the way
First days in Germany
A teddy bear in a museum/gallery in Celle Synagogue reduces me to tears. A childhood under the shadow of the swastika. An empty room with a tin bath and a teddy. A child’s toy bears witness. The bear materialised my tears. The squalid last days of the war, one town helped death marchers escape and hid them, in another, coerced or complicit, locasl people chased down and shot or captured escaped prisoners. The Celle Hare Hunt. The rounded up survivors were death marched to Belsen perhaps along the same route we had driven.
The Celle Synagogue: it survived Nazi thug axes and was never put to flame as it would have set the town alight. Here new life and recovery began as Belsen survivors reclaimed the building in 1946. In the street outside polished by snow grip grit, rain and foot fall, my first Stolpersteine, ‘stumbling stones’ peoples remembering places for the people that once lived there, old people who fled to Holland but were brought back to Auschwitz to be killed, others disappeared and one my mothers age dead before she could be a mother. Here remembered.
This afternoon we are seated in the Zuhlke garden centre alongside Hambuhren Tiger orchids. Here we meet with Julius Krizsan our local fixer and former Green Party MP, as avuncular and no nonsense as I had expected from our email exchanges, local historian Irmlinde Florian, eye witness Hans Ovelmann and Herr Zuhlke, owner of the garden centre that sits at the edge of the Waldeslust site. The walk was toasted with light bulb glasses of Irmlinde’s red home brew. Prost.
Later we tour the perimeter of the site and view the remains of Waldeslust, what horrors and squalor has that building seen. We see some things that Esther may have seen and we look on. Try to imagine and can’t. The tall trees are recent, the big one perhaps a sapling 71 years ago. A Narnia lamp in a thawed landscape, darkening trees and evergreens, the absence of snow adding to the macabre.
We are overwhelmed already, immersed. Tomorrow checking day two of the walk, the long haul through the woods to Belsen.