Genocide: Why It Is Important To Bear Witness

Hello, welcome back to Conversations with Stephen Kamugasa. This is the first of six podcast episodes on genocide. The goal is to break the overwhelming silence around the problem of genocide in our day and age. There are a lot of reasons why so many of us remain silent even in the face of mounting evidence that a new genocide may be occurring somewhere in the world right now. Today's guest is Dr. Maria Chamberlain. Dr.

Chamberlain is an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh and the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. She was born in Krakow, Poland. and emigrated to the UK with her parents in 1958 at the age of 11. The family settled in Edinburgh where she still lives. Maria pursued an academic career as a biologist researching plant and fungal biology and teaching undergraduates at the University of Edinburgh. Following her retirement from full-time teaching, Maria

put pen to paper, researching for several years, and meticulously piecing together the story of her two Jewish families in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. The result is a book, Never Tell Anyone You're Jewish, My Family, the Holocaust, and the Aftermath. The book is a powerful, compelling and personal testimony and witness which we will all do well to read and reflect upon. In this episode, we discuss the topic, genocide, why it is important to bear witness. Dr.

Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm honoured and

On page 212 of your book, Never Tell Anyone You're Jewish, you write, and I quote, "The other thing that Nela taught me on our walks in the woods was the joy of foraging for mushrooms. As a country girl, she was an expert and knew not only which ones were good and which poisonous, but also the best ways to cook and preserve them. It was without a doubt this early experience with her that later inspired me to study fungi professionally and to continue to consider foraging as one of

my favourite pastimes." Please talk to us about Nela and your early childhood experience in Poland. And how have these childhood experiences with special reference to your mother and father colored the I had a really happy childhood in Poland. My parents both worked and when I was three, they hired Nela. Nela was a country girl. I called her Anielcia. And she looked after me while my parents worked. But unlike my parents, whose lives were tainted by trauma, Nela was a breath of

fresh country air. She cleaned, she baked, she looked after me, and I loved her. Every summer, my parents would dispatch Nela and me to the foothills of the Tatras. That's the mountains near Krakow. And it was there that Nela introduced me to mushrooms. Finding a set, even now, never fails to bring me joy that's almost visceral. It's such fun. Nela also taught me to read the landscape. As a country girl, she really knew her trees. She knew her mushrooms

and she knew quite a lot of flowers too. And she taught me to read the landscape. And it's a skill that I try to now instill in my students because we townspeople now seem to have lost it. I also describe in my book an incident which describes Nela, but it also describes the situation in Poland at the time. One summer when we were lodging in the foothills of the Tatras, in a guest house with a fiercely antisemitic landlady. The landlady said to Nela, that child, is she Jewish? And

Nela said, no, of course not. Okay, so on her walks, on our walks in the woods, Nela taught me the Polish Catholic prayers. And I had to recite them back to her. And as we walked, looking for mushrooms, I recited the Catholic prayers. I was good in those days at learning verse and prose and poetry, probably not so good at it now, but I didn't mind. I thought that was a good idea to recite some prayers.

Anyway, at night, when we came back to the landlady's house, Nela bid me to kneel at the foot of the bed and recite those prayers that children have to recite on their way to bed. And she opened the door wide and I recited them loud. And the landlady heard them and I never had any trouble after that. And strangely enough, of course, she never asked me to recite prayers when we came back to Krakow. So

In the prologue of Never Tell Anyone You're Jewish, at page three, you write, and I quote: "At last, we are finally free, said my mother. But you must never, ever, tell anyone you're Jewish. I leaned over the rail of the cross-channel ferry that was bringing us to England. In the churning water, a piece of detached seaweed danced, turned, and then floated past. I remember feeling like that seaweed, infinitesimal, uprooted, adrift." Maria, please dramatise for us, as best as you can,

the feeling you allude to. And what exactly did it mean to you in that particular moment as Well, it's interesting that both you and I were uprooted at an early age and you'll probably agree that this has consequences. Anyway, the injunction, my mother's injunction, never tell anyone you're Jewish. Never tell anyone about my past and heritage. It was very isolating because being Jewish was what I felt with every cell in my body. Those

were the first words I learned as a child. I didn't understand what they meant, but I knew they were very important. For us, it seemed that Jewishness was not defined by Judaism, about which I knew very little, but by the Holocaust. And this injunction to never tell anyone, coming to a new place in a new language, never tell my peer group, how was I going to make friends if they didn't know this very important thing about me? So, I felt uprooted and adrift, and I anticipated a new

friendless future. Anyway, I consoled myself as 11-year-olds might. I consoled myself looking forward to three things in no apparent order. To eat a banana, to meet my uncle, and to see a working television These are three things, three Again, at page three of your book, you write, and I quote, "When I read Anne Frank's diary to my grandchildren, and they watched the film of the boy in striped pyjamas, they said, how sad, without

realising the scale of the operation. I was recently outraged to find out that my granddaughter's GCSE history curriculum, while concentrating on the 20th century, seems to have somehow missed out the Holocaust altogether." How crucial is it that history be taught truthfully? And why do you believe that the world is ready to hear about

I think that history syllabus, at least here in the UK, is full of kings and queens and military battles. And even now, the Scottish history curriculum, both at National Fives, which is equivalent to GCSEs, and Highers, which is a sort of pre-A level qualification, misses out the Holocaust altogether. The Holocaust is airbrushed out. Why? I don't know why. Next week, I am honoured to speak at an awards ceremony at which awards will be handed out to 12 special

schools that teach the Holocaust. and they teach it with the help of a special organisation called Vision Schools Scotland. And what I don't understand is why these schools have to be singled out. Why is Holocaust education not mandatory in Scotland and the world over? It's a puzzle. Is it Israelophobia? Maybe. Anyway, since writing my book, I've been repeatedly told by readers that they really didn't know

about the Holocaust. They knew that six million Jews died and what happened to Anne Frank, but not what really happened. Obviously, they didn't go to any special visual schools. I think the Holocaust, this one, my Holocaust, one might say, the one that happened during the Second World War, the main one, needs to be talked about. And maybe because people don't, that other Holocausts have Regarding teaching history, truthfully, you said the following on page 155 of your book, and I quote, "The

name Belzec seems to be relatively unfamiliar to my friends, hardly any of whom had ever heard of it. The few nights my father spent at Auschwitz never failed to impress. But when I tell people of my grandmother's death in Belzec, their eyes glaze over with incomprehension. One of the reasons for Belzec's obscurity is because almost no one survived to tell the tale. Another reason might be because it was never liberated by the British. Along with Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, Belzec was

liberated by the Soviets in the summer of 1944. But by then, there was nothing much left to liberate. The 500,000 Jews it had processed were dead and the killing machinery had already been dismantled." Maria, please discuss with us Belzec's special status as a factory for killing. Furthermore, how crucial is it that we are aware of

Well, Belzec or Belzec, as it's pronounced in Polish, was a factory and death was its product. Interestingly, music played at Belzec as people were led to their deaths because music or muzak helps productivity on a factory floor. And yes, when I say the name to people, some think I've made a mistake. Do I mean Belsen? No, no, I don't mean Belsen. Belsen was another camp

and there were no gas chambers there. But the reason that nobody's heard of Belzec is because it was small and highly effective death factory. It was small because people didn't go there to sleep. They went there to die. Half a million. Half a million is roughly like the population in Edinburgh, where I live. All murdered in 10 months. If you do this calculation, that's like three per minute, three per daylight minute.

Three per daylight minute. We would do well to remember that when tempted to apply the word genocide to today's situation. Anyway, the camp Belzec was dismantled and its use as a murder factory disguised in 1943. All that was left were the bones, including those of my grandmother. and her foster child Romek, a little four-year-old boy

that she had been looking after. It's unthinkable, but in my research, and there was so little to research, really, I repeatedly accompanied my grandmother and little Romic on that one-way journey. Turning back to page 150, you write thus, and I quote: "While

she waited to be propelled onto the train, she did what she was always good at. She read the guard's faces. There were two of them, she thought, who looked more kindly than the others. She smiled at them and she thought she detected a flicker of response. She was almost on the steps of the train when a cart full of skeleton-like prisoners

drew up. As the guards started to load this human cargo onto the train, the attention of the Gestapo men was diverted and in the commotion that followed the guards, unintentionally or maybe intentionally, let her slip through. Unnoticed, past her of David torn and discarded, she walked feigning confidence across the platform and slipped into the station cafeteria. But she was not entirely unobserved, because standing at the door was an elderly waitress who said to her softly in Polish, I

know where you have come from. Discreetly, she led my mother into a dark corner of the cafe, placed a cup of coffee before her and a cigarette between her fingers. Then, lifting from her own neck a chain with a medallion of the Virgin Mary and the baby, she hung it on my mother's neck. Hold on to her tight, she said. She will save you. So, when the Gestapo came in, there she was, a saved Christian girl, a friend of the waitress." Please talk to us about the power of

human love. And while you are at it, kindly talk to us about your mother's kindly German boss at Yes, so this is a really good news story because my mother survived. My grandmother didn't, but my mother survived, and this is how she survived. And this pivotal moment in my mother's story has stayed in my mother's mind and also my own as proof that goodness and humanity do and can exist

even in the midst of hell. The waitress's act, kindness, humanity, probably gave her the strength to carry on in the dreadful days that followed this incident. So, the waitress was one honourable, good person to whom my mother owes her life. But the other person who was instrumental in enabling my mother's escape was her German boss. Her German boss was a Volksdeutscher, which means he was native German but living in Lwów. He spoke both German and Polish. His name was Dr.

Bauer. And Dr. Bauer was the director of the glass factory where my mother worked. And he had always been very kind to my mother. Once when the Nazis came to the factory looking for her, looking for Jews, because very often Jews that were engaged in factories were winkled out on special days to perform some hard labour like scrubbing floors or something. Anyway, Dr. Bauer didn't know why they were looking for her, so he hid her in some packing cases. So, my mother knew that

Dr. Bauer was a good man. And when she was rounded up by the Nazis on 10th of August, 1942, she thrust a note into the hands of a passing stranger. And on the note, she had written a message to Dr. Bauer. Please come and save me. I've been taken. Well, miraculously, the stranger delivered the note and Dr. Bauer did turn up at

the railway station looking for her. In those days, Nazis, and he was meant to be one, wore their insignia on their uniforms, and there he was with all his Nazi insignia, parading up and down the street platform, looking for her, and he found her. And then he led

her back to live to a safe house. Of course, both these people, the waitress and Dr. Bauer, the German boss, could have paid for their actions with their lives, And, what this story illustrates is that survival depended on random acts of kindness as well as happenstance luck. And of course, one

On page 166 of the book, you write, and I quote: "The only story that remains from that particular train journey is of a child who screamed and screamed as children do, particularly when they are hungry. My mother's blouse had a breast pocket in which she had hidden a sugar cube. She took it out and offered it to the hungry child. I remember that story because that's how she was. Kind, always generous, always giving. My son, Martin, when he read this bit in draft form, said, yes, of

course. Now I understand. That's why she always stole a few sugar cubes from cafe sugar bowls and stole them away for later." Maria, please tell us about your most treasured memories of Yes, I pinpointed that memory because she was always generous and warm and easily moved to tears by films and books. And by the way, my son Martin doesn't like that quote because of the word stole. But it would have been too long-winded to say she appropriated them

because she had not used any when they were offered. So, well, she stole a few sugar cubes. But I suppose my most treasured memories of my mom were with my children and grandchildren because On page 216 of your book, you quote your mother when she wrote the following in her memoir, and