Reminding young minds of the horror of the Holocaust
If you are in Colombo, there is perhaps no better way to observe the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust than in the company of Anne Ranasinghe. Her poetry retains its ability to startle and shock the listener into feeling, to evoke the suffering of an entire people, to remind us that only unceasing watchfulness and great determination will keep us from reaching that Dark Point again. Anne herself embodies courage and faithfulness; by resolving to not flinch away from the memory of the holocaust, she does her part to prevent such horror from descending on the world again.
Anne: Embodiment of courage and faithfulness to a memory. Pix by Indika Handuwala
Last week, on January 27, the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) Colombo organised a school day programme to mark the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. (The day also commemorates when the Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland on January 27, 1945.) Divided into two segments, the event consisted of a session at the UN Compound where an awareness programme included a screening of the documentary film ‘Blinky& Me,’ based on the life story of Yoram Gross, a Holocaust survivor and iconic Australian animator. The children, recruited from different schools in the city, were then ushered across to Anne’s home on Rosmead Place where the poet greeted them with copies of ‘At What Dark Point’ and a session of poetry reading, prayer and music.
Born Anneliese Katz, Anne grew up in Essen, Germany, the only child of Jewish parents. As a young girl, she was a witness to Kristalnacht (The Night of the Broken Glass) when the synagogue in Essen was attacked and burnt to the ground by the Nazis; she also saw her father arrested and transported to Dachau – when he returned he was a devastated man. In 1939, when Anne was 13, her parents sent her to England to escape the Nazis. She was sponsored by a relative, an aunt she was meeting for the first time and then later sent off to a school where she found a home among strangers and began to learn the language she writes in so fluently now.
Within months, World War II broke out but she would not learn the fate of her family, their confinement in the Lodz Ghetto and their death by lethal gas in Chelmno, till many years after. Having met and married a Sri Lankan post-graduate and settled with him in Sri Lanka, Anne became a Sri Lankan citizen in 1956. She would study journalism, raise a large family and eventually make her debut as a poet in 1971 with a slim volume of poems titled ‘And the Sun That Sucks the Earth to Dry.’
The programme that evening began with music, with Hasitha Pathirana playing the theme from Schindler’s List on the oboe. Hasitha, Ashok Ferrey, David Rose and Anne herself then took turns reading from ‘At What Dark Point’ reading not only the title poem but some of the collection’s most memorable pieces including ‘Memory is Our Shield,’ ‘You, Father,’ ‘Well, I’m Sorry’ and ‘A Happy New Year.’
A particularly moving element in the programme was the recitation in English and Hebrew of the Memorial Prayer for Victims of the Holocaust by David Rose. It cries out for justice and succour for the ‘six million Jewish men, women and children, who were put to death, slaughtered, burned,starved, buried alive’ and asks that their resting place ‘be in the Garden of Eden,’ where ‘the Master of mercy will care for them.’ A candelabra, with six candles, each representing the six million lives lost, was lit. Anne herself lit a yahrzeit candle that would burn for the next 24 hours in memory of her parents.
Addressing her young audience, a soft-spoken Anne explained, “I as you know have lost my whole family.” She went on to charge them with a duty to “stand up for yourself and to be watchful, all the time” so that this kind of thing would “never, ever, ever happen again.” In response to questions from her guests at the end, she said “sometimes a country falls asleep,” adding that the only way to prevent the recurrence of such an enormous tragedy was for citizens to be ever watchful, well-informed and engaged with the politics of their country.