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People who think they’ve heard too much about the Holocaust possibly haven’t come across these stories. It would be a shame to leave them in ignorance.

67. Henry Greenbaum:

When Mr. Greenbaum… tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.

But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number – A188991 – tattooed on his left forearm.

In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.

First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.

Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.

68. The figure 42,500:

Thirteen years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

69. Ari Rath:

“The most terrible thing was not the way hundreds of thousands of Austrians celebrated Hitler’s arrival, but the enthusiasm with which they dispossessed the Jews,” recalled Ari Rath, a Holocaust survivor who fled Vienna at the age of 13.

Rath… was back in the city of his birth speaking to a group of schoolchildren about his experiences, as part of a parliament-sponsored education project.

“We went from being people to non-persons overnight,” he said in fluent German, a language he suppressed for decades.

70. Tomi Reichental:

Reichental lost 35 relatives in the Holocaust. As a boy he was profoundly traumatised by his experiences after being uprooted from the family farm and forced to go on the run.

In late 1944, the Gestapo cornered Reichental and his brother Miki in a shop in Bratislava. They beat the boys and captured the rest of the family. Their next ordeal was Bergen Belsen. Reichental describes it as “hell on Earth”. Here he saw his grandmother Rosalie die of starvation and her body dumped on the piles of rotting corpses that ringed Belsen in the spring of 1945. For 60 years Reichental couldn’t speak about the horrors he lived through.

71. The figure 11,343:

Bulgaria has expressed regret that more than 11,000 Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps from areas under Bulgarian control during World War II.

A Bulgarian parliament declaration did however praise Bulgarians for having blocked the deportation of more than 48,000 Jews during the war.

It said it could “not be disputed that 11,343 Jews were deported from northern Greece and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia”.

Most Jews sent to the Nazi German death camps in Poland died.

Referring to the 11,343 deported, the MPs’ declaration said “we denounce this criminal act, undertaken by Hitler’s command, and express our regrets for the fact that the local Bulgarian administration had not been in a position to stop this act”.

72. Efthymios Kontopoulos, witness:

It was spring in northern Greece, 1943. Efthymios Kontopoulos, 13, had come to Thessaloniki for the day when he saw Nazis rounding up the city’s Jews.

“My father brought me into town,” Kontopoulos, who is not Jewish, said. “We saw them being taken away. They were with their [yellow] badges.”

On March 15, 1943, the Nazis began deporting the Jews of Thessaloniki. Some 4,000 people were loaded onto cattle cars and shipped off to Auschwitz. Eighteen more convoys followed. By August, the Jewish community of the city, known as the Flower of the Balkans and a major center of Sephardic Jewry for 450 years, was no more. Of the 55,000 Jews in the city on the eve of the war, 49,000 were deported. Only 1,950 survived.

This month, as the remnants of the Thessaloniki Jewish community prepare to mark the 70th anniversary of the deportations, Kontopoulos believes he has a powerful symbol of the community’s destruction: four of the railway cars used in the transports to the death camps.

(For an index to the whole series, see here)

The word is going up over here for ‘a new party of the left’. Its central aim would be to put a stop to austerity policies that are ‘destroying all the social and economic gains of ordinary people since the second world war’; would be, on the contrary, to ‘improve the lives of ordinary people’. For Labour isn’t now a suitable vehicle for doing this.

I’m guessing that many will make up their minds about whether or not to sign up for this initiative once its stall has been properly set out – by way of central programmatic aims and policy proposals. In the meantime, however, one thing one can do is to look at who’s commending the intitiative. Here it’s Ken Loach, Kate Hudson and Gilbert Achcar. Hmmmm…

Ken Loach is, of course, a famous film director, but he must count among his lesser achievements his statement that the rise of anti-Semitism is ‘perfectly understandable‘ (on account of Israel). He also stood as a candidate for Respect and supports an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Kate Hudson was on the steering committee of the so-called Stop the War Coalition when in October 2004 it issued a statement recognizing ‘the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary’ (my italics); this was at a time when such ‘necessary’ means accommodated out-and-out crimes against humanity. And Hudson has other form as well. Gilbert Achcar is on record as thinking that, while Holocaust-denial in the West is an an expression of anti-Semitism, in the Arab world it primarily… isn’t.

Speaking for myself, though I am very much in favour of improving the lives of ordinary people, I’ll be giving this new party a wide berth. The above-recorded items are only symptoms, but you know what they are symptoms of, don’t you? Gimme a V, gimme an E, gimme an R… etcetera.

Patrice Hannon is the author of Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine’s Guide to Life and Love and 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Jane Austen. She has also just completed a novel and hopes to have news about its publication soon. In this post Patrice discusses J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Patrice Hannon on The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings was my favourite book from the time I was around twelve years old until I was in college (that is, university), at which point it wasn’t officially replaced in that role by another book, but I stopped reading it again and again as I had done. In fact, I didn’t pick it up again for over two decades, when I learned that a film version was in the works. I wondered if I would find The Lord of the Rings as utterly enchanting as I had found it in my youth. After all, I had in the meantime earned a PhD in English, which meant I had studied a great deal of difficult, ‘serious’ literature and literary criticism and theory. Was The Lord of the Rings also serious adult literature?

I’m happy to say that the book enthralled me once again, though it struck me that I had not remembered that it was so very, so unrelentingly, sad. Melancholy is by far the dominant tone, interrupted almost exclusively by terror. The Lord of the Rings is a continual alternation between these moods, which are only rarely interrupted for moments of lighthearted humour or heroic grandeur. Fear (in all its variations – dread, horror, anxiety, etc.) drives the many scenes of flight and pursuit and battle. The sadness is in large part expressed in and evoked by the many ancient tales that are recounted. It is found in the ruins, skeletons, graves, and songs of lamentation that are everywhere, and in continual farewells to the many people and places that are never to be seen again. That ‘never again’ is a refrain encountered very often throughout the book. The histories and legends and songs are almost all elegiac, full of longing for a lost paradise that was itself, as William Empson said of Milton’s Eden, ‘inherently melancholy’, and not so only after the fall. When these narratives are recounted they arrest the rapid forward movement of the action before us, and they frequently do so in the very midst of that action at its most furious. These continuous elegiac moments establish and maintain the dominant note of melancholy in the book.

I did not expect much from the film version of ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’, and was pleasantly surprised by how good it was – how good all three movies turned out to be. Nonetheless, for the most part they do not convey this extraordinarily powerful aspect of the book. The emphasis tips the other way, towards the plot and particularly the many physical engagements with the enemy. The book’s language in the dialogue and the narrative, though often formal and slightly archaic, is what gives the action power by reminding us – indeed, by establishing – just what ideals are opposed in this war, and what has been and will be lost no matter which side triumphs. Éowyn’s exchange of words with the Lord of the Nazgûl is as thrilling as any exchange of blows in the story.

The Lord of the Rings is certainly a page-turner but the suspense created in its pages is secondary to the sense there conveyed of present action slipping into or already become part of an irrecoverable past. What was so vivid and urgent becomes frozen in a tableau, part of a vanished world, accessible only through memory or elegy. A surprising note of finality abruptly ends even a comic scene like Bilbo’s disappearance during his birthday party: ‘he was never seen by any hobbit in Hobbiton again’. And then: ‘Mad Baggins, who used to vanish with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of jewels and gold, became a favourite character of legend and lived on long after all the true events were forgotten’. And so the events and characters that seemed so immediate are removed from before us into a remote past, separated from us by an unbridgeable chasm. This movement does not – and perhaps could not – occur in the film, but it recurs with great frequency in the book.

During the filmed siege of Gondor, as in the written account, the heads of the slain men of Gondor are catapulted into the city. The image of the severed heads is gruesomely realistic on the screen:

For the enemy was flinging into the City all the heads of those who had fallen fighting at Osgiliath, or on the Rammas, or in the fields. They were grim to look on; for though some were crushed and shapeless, and some had been cruelly hewn, yet many had features that could be told, and it seemed that they had died in pain; and all were branded with the foul token of the Lidless Eye.

So far, the images faithfully reflect the written words. However, this line of Tolkien’s follows:

But marred and dishonoured as they were, it often chanced that thus a man would see again the face of someone that he had known, who had walked proudly once in arms, or tilled the fields, or ridden in upon a holiday from the green vales in the hills.

In the midst of battle, the horror of the severed heads recedes and elegy takes over. It is the lost idyllic past, not the horrific present, that holds the most power in The Lord of the Rings and continually has the last word in this way. In the films, images of death almost always evoke fear and revulsion rather than what Tolkien in his great essay on Beowulf called ‘that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote’.

In my re-reading of The Lord of the Rings I cried several times: once, during the scene at the end of The Two Towers when Sam, thinking Frodo is dead, makes the wrenching decision to take the ring from him. The scene goes on for several pages, during which Sam looks not so much forward as back as he considers his choices: he hears echoes from Hobbiton and from Rivendell; he recalls Lothlórien and the Barrow-downs. This moving scene has been cut out of The Return of the King film (where the Shelob episode was relocated) for the sake of suspense: it has to go, evidently, so the audience doesn’t learn just yet that Sam has taken the ring. For a short time it appears that the orcs must have taken it. Fear and anticipation and then a moment of surprise – some in the audience must be surprised – are thereby substituted not only for the sadness of the present, with Frodo seemingly dead, but also for the powerful emotion, evoked by the memory of events and words whose value was unfathomed until that moment, that comes flooding in on the grief-stricken Sam.

What I found in re-reading The Lord of the Rings after so many years was that something of the effect suggested by Tolkien’s phrase, the ‘echo of an echo’, was not only intrinsic to the work but magnified by the distance between my last youthful reading and my adult experience of the book. The built-in nostalgia moved me in a way it could not have earlier; ‘the touch upon the heart’ of its elegy was even keener. Not to sound too sombre about it, though, re-reading The Lord of the Rings was great fun and I urge anyone else who once loved the book but has not picked it up for many years to read it again. A great treat is in store.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

Last Saturday I was in Bury St Edmund’s at the annual conference of the Federation of Children’s Book Groups, which was advertised as being about ‘The Power of the Page’. I’d been asked to give a seminar and decided to take these words literally. I’d talk, I thought, about the physical page – the power of real books and what they can give you that the very best digital devices cannot.

I am not a Luddite, nor a hater of techonology. I am devoted to my new iPad Mini and write my novels straight on to my laptop. I am an addicted Twitterer and a very prolific writer of emails. But when it comes to reading (and I read a great deal) I’m not in the least attracted to the idea of curling up in an armchair with anything other than a real paper book.

Love of the page starts young. Remember how it felt when you were a tiny child to have a huge expanse of paper which you were allowed to cover with coloured paint? How did you feel every September when you were issued with lovely new exercise books, all nicely lined and sometimes, excitingly, with pink margins? Can you still sniff the particular smell of the stationery cupboard? How about Post-its? Aren’t they delightful? Don’t you just love tearing one off and sticking it to something? That’s pages for you: ready to take whatever marks you’re going to make, ready to become almost anything.

Anyone who is a stationery freak like me will know the seductive power of the page. Even though I write books straight on to the computer, I still have whole drawers full of pretty notebooks. There is something powerful about the handwritten word, which accounts for how moved we are by seeing, say, a page of a Dickens manuscript, or a Keats poem with the corrections made by his pen still visible. Pages are fragile. They can be destroyed, burned, damaged in many ways, but somehow they abide and when they do we are grateful for it.

Now imagine a very small child reading a very large book. Picture books are often big. They have smooth and sometimes shiny pages. They are full of beautiful images.

The child is sitting on the lap of the person who loves her and whom she loves. Behind the child is a body. Around the child are arms, and hands holding a book up for her to see. The child is surrounded. The world depicted on the page is one in which she can immerse herself. She can be swallowed up, so to speak, in what the illustrator and writer have created for her. I believe that any child who is introduced to books in this way will grow up associating reading with pleasure and that’s the way to create future readers.

Another child likes to look at details. He’s fond of small books, child-sized books, such as the Beatrix Potter stories or Maurice Sendak’s Nutshell Library. He likes to pore over every creature, every flower, every small thing that’s there on the edges. He likes to turn the pages, to move about in the physical book. He likes to be able to hold the book as he walks around. He can put it in a bag, or under his pillow at night or by his plate at the table. It’s practical, handy, and of all the objects I can think of, the one most suitable for the purpose it was intended for.

Not all books are picture books, however. Later on, children read stories. Surely it is of no consequence how they read them? If they’re enjoying the narrative does it matter that it’s digitally conveyed? In one sense of course it doesn’t and if there are children out there who devour books on a device, then good luck to them and I would never try to stop them. But when you’re on an iPad, let’s say, it’s very easy indeed to press a button which will transport you instantly away from the words on the page to music, videos, games and emails etc. The temptation to press that magic button if your attention wanders for a bit is huge. I can already hear people saying, ‘Oh, but you can put a book down and close it’, and that’s true. I’d still contend that closing the book and going to do something else deliberately, after some thought, is different from skipping at will between several different pastimes. It’s surely much easier to lose yourself in a book if the physical book is there, in your hands, far from other distractions. Also, paper books never need recharging, never need a WiFi connection, never don’t work as they should.

There is, too, the beauty of the book in front of you. It has an elegant font. The pages have heft and texture. The paragraphs make a pattern on the paper. There is a cover that you like the look and feel of. There might be paper engineering. And best of all, when you’ve finished reading, your book can take its place on the bookshelf and sit there for ever. Not only ‘furnishing a room‘ but also acting as a memory box. Who gave you the book? Where were you when you read it? What does it bring into your mind when you take it off the shelf years later? Every single book has its own ‘life’, and its physical presence in your house reminds you of what that might be.

Steve Barlow was there at my second seminar and he made the point that each successive manifestation of the written word was frowned upon by the one before. Monks, he said, were unhappy about printing. Makers of scrolls didn’t think much of bound books… and so on. He’s right of course, but I would say this in response. The digital method of reading is fine for many things, especially for students. I have no objection to all textbooks being downloaded on to a Kindle and presented to every Year 7 child. But the beauty and power of the paper book is still there and will always (I think, I hope) survive. It’s not accidental that books which are doing well these days and better than their digital counterparts are gorgeously-produced hardbacks. The page rules. (Adèle Geras)

[First illustration by Jane Ray. Second illustration by Emma Chichester Clark]

Do you live in a blue country or in a red country? No, it’s not what you think (whatever it is you do think); it’s about whether your country is more (blue) or less (red) welcoming to foreign visitors. This is according to data collected by the World Economic Forum. Iceland, New Zealand and Morocco are the most welcoming, and Bolivia, Venezuela and Russia the least welcoming, countries. Enlarged map here; story here. Make of it what you will. (Via Sarah.)

Here is Mark Kleiman:

If you wanted to write a hagiographic study of Noam Chomsky and a denunciation of his critics as character assassins committed to destroying a great man’s reputation to silence his dissent from “orthodoxies,” you’d have four options for dealing with Chomsky’s holocaust-denial about Cambodia (and denunciation of those who complained about it while it was happening):

1. You could deny that Chomsky said what he said.

2. You could claim that Chomsky was right on the facts.

[Chomsky’s own strategy seems to be a combination of these two.]

3. You could admit that Chomsky was wrong on the facts but argue that he was justified in supporting the Khmers Rouges, and in doing some violence to the truth in the process, so as not to give aid and comfort to Kissinger.

4. You could admit that Chomsky was wrong on the facts and figure out some way to make that an excusable mistake.

Or, if you were really, totally, completely shameless, you could just pretend the whole thing never happened, passing it over entirely in silence.

Guess which strategy Glenn Greenwald chose? Twenty-six paragraphs, in which the word “Cambodia” does not appear.

This is via a post at Jeff’s place discussing ‘the Chomsky problem’. About Glenn Greenwald’s attitude to Chomsky’s critics it speaks quite forthrightly.

This one comes from Canon Chris Sugden, a member of the General Synod, and is to be found in today’s Times (£). Watch for the trick:

The arguments advanced for the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill are based on one claim. That claim is that feelings of being discriminated against for homosexual behaviour must determine what everyone else is allowed to do. So the law must be used to suppress the traditional understanding of marriage – that it is between a man and a woman, especially for the benefit of children – because that makes homosexual people feel excluded.

If gender is taken out of the definition of marriage through these proposals, marriage will cease to be marriage and any view that homosexual behaviour should not be the norm for society must be excluded. Even to say that marriage is between a man and a woman is held to stigmatise those who believe that marriage should be without gender. These views will have to be banished from society by the State. Holding such views will be made illegal.

Gender is being taken out of marriage on the ground of equality. This is a new sort of equality – no one must be given any reason for feeling unequal to anyone else. This new equality trumps everything. The State is then asked to use the law to enforce its view of genderless marriage.

This is why this Bill, which had its second reading in the Commons last month, gives no reasonable accommodation to public servants such as registrars who would not wish to conduct same-sex marriages.

Later in the piece, Sugden writes, ‘In a few months’ time we will not be allowed to express the view at all in public that marriage is between a man and a woman.’ And his trick is to conflate the fact that the law on marriage is to be changed with the claim that what people are permitted to think about marriage is henceforth to be subject to legal control.

But that is false. If Canon Sugden, or anyone else, should want to retain what he calls ‘the traditional understanding of marriage’, he’s free to do so, as he is to go on arguing for that understanding. However, if the law permits couples of the same sex or of the opposite sex to marry, then it’s quite proper that registrars should not be free to discriminate against the former. Would the Canon have been happy to see registrars, under the old legal definition of marriage, opting to marry same-sex couples willy-nilly? I doubt it. That’s what the law on marriage is for – to regulate which marriages are and which aren’t recognized as legitimate, and which may therefore go ahead.

To suggest, on the other hand, that marriage law coerces thought and understanding is a nonsense. Sugden and whoever else can devote their lives to campaigning for the return of the old legal definition – as they would not be able to if what he writes here were actually true.

Further to this post on Philip Roth at 80, here are two more links about the great man: James Wood chooses him as his hero, and refers in doing so to one of the funniest moments in Roth’s work, from The Ghost Writer; David Remnick gives an account of the 80th-birthday celebration for Roth, featuring along the way the word ‘paralipsis’ and examples of the type of speech-act to which it refers. (Both links via @bombaylychee.)

I’d like to add a more personal connection I have to Roth. As I’m limited for options, I’ll use the only one I’ve got, beyond having read his books. (Well, it is late afternoon on Saturday.) I met Philip Roth the other day. It was in a dream. But it was really him and we really were meeting. I couldn’t believe it. Suddenly there he is, standing right in front of me. ‘It’s you,’ I exclaimed. He just smiled. The thing is, though, we got on a treat; so much so that we were going to meet again later for a meal. And then I woke up.

It doesn’t often happen to me that I’m sorry to wake from a dream. My dreams usually express worries of one kind or another, translated into semi-coherent narrative form. But on this occasion, gee, was I disappointed! It was the first time I’d ever met a world-famous writer while asleep. I expressed my dismay to Adèle, who was both amused and sympathetic. If you’d been there and seen how vivid it was – which isn’t true of all dreams, let’s face it – you would also have sympathized. Anyway, that’s Philip Roth and me.

Not me, you understand. I was never not tired of them, thinking them a thoroughly bad lot even when my acquaintance with what they stood for was as fresh as the mountain dew. No, tired of them are villagers in southern Afghanistan:

An uprising against the Taliban that began last month in this southern Afghan village has now spread through dozens of others, according to residents and Afghan and American officials, in the most significant popular turning against the Islamist insurgents in recent years.

Since early February, when villagers joined with police forces to begin ousting Taliban fighters from this region of rich vineyards and orchards southwest of Kandahar City, hundreds of residents have rallied to support the government. Nearly 100 village elders vowed at a public meeting Monday to keep the Taliban out as the new fighting season sets in, and Afghan flags are flying from rooftops in the villages, residents said.

Isolated uprisings against the Taliban have been reported in several different parts of Afghanistan over the past 18 months. But the revolt in Panjwai is considered significant because it is the first in southern Afghanistan, in the spiritual heartland of the Taliban movement, where the group’s influence had endured despite repeated operations by American and NATO forces.

Though no one is claiming that the Taliban are forever out of the fight even in this district – the insurgents have vowed a vengeful return and in the past week killed two men in the area – the Panjwai uprising has given an example of what can be accomplished when local resentment over bullying by militants is accompanied by reliable government support.

The report later traces the origins of this development:

The spark came in early February when the Taliban commander of the area, Mullah Noor Mahmad, 35, came to arrest men in this village. He called on the house of Hajji Abdul Wudood and demanded the handover of two sons he accused of spying for the government.

“They wanted to slaughter my sons,” Mr. Wudood said in an interview last month in his home. “They wanted to take them to the desert where they had a court and a base.”

Mr. Wudood, a 60-year-old former mujahedeen fighter against the Soviets in the 1980s, had had enough. He and his eight grown sons decided to make a stand.

Several villagers who had lost relatives to the Taliban joined them. The village had already been starting to boil: Three days earlier the same Taliban commander had beaten up farmers who were clearing undergrowth from the village irrigation canal.

Mr. Wudood turned for help to the district police chief, Mr. Mohammad, an old mujahedeen associate and a relative by marriage. Together they hatched a plan to ambush the Taliban.

You can read the rest here.