The moment had come.
Well, we had to begin by watching a video of the Edwin Starr song, WAR! What is it good for? That was easy, that was fun.
Then we got out the plastic globe. The best way of throwing the absurdity of war into sharp relief is to try and explain it to infants. Especially the First World War. It took only a few seconds of looking at Europe on the globe to baffle all three of us. How could such small and closely packed countries start killing each other? But they are such pretty colours on the spinning globe! Infants' understanding of right and wrong is both naive and perfect. They are constitutionally incapable of understanding colonialism, empire and war. Unless you brainwash them accurately. We turned to the iPad and found out that more than twice the population of today's London were killed in that war. Wide eyes. Adding to the their bafflement is the fact that they have very important and much loved people in their lives who come from Bosnia, Serbia and Germany.
Soon we got on to the Second World War. That was easier to explain. I think everyone finds that one more straightforward. Solzhenitsyn called it Europe's last moral war. But it was inevitable that the conversation would turn to the Holocaust. They didn't take it in, or perhaps it will come out later, in tear-jerking questions at bedtime. But I've never seen their eyes so open as when hearing for the first time about Anne Frank and her diary. "But what does it say, Mummy? Read it to me! I want to know what it says!" Somebody please pass me a heavily edited version.
Soon, I had to explain how their own grandparents survived the Holocaust. We talked about dangerous journeys taken by people who faced certain death at home. That there are people making such journeys today, hiding in ships, under trucks, trains, risking everything just to escape. I said, hugging them, that I was so glad that their great-grandparents had escaped, because otherwise they wouldn't exist.
There is a photo on the wall of my great-grandfather's funeral in Lithuania. He died relatively young, in about 1925. No-one alive knows why the photo was taken. Gathered around him are thirteen mourners, wringing their hands: with cold? With despair? Was it even possible to distinguish between the two? There is no way that anyone present would have owned a camera. They barely owned a coat, and only one of them is wearing gloves.
I took it down from the wall. I said to the children, this is mummy's family. That is my great-grandfather, he is dead. "How do they look?" I asked. "Do you think they're happy? Do you think they're rich?"
"No," they said, blinking.
"Look outside," I said, "now look around you." We were sitting on the sofa; central heating, soft electric light. Warm, clean bodies in fresh-smelling clothes. "Now look back at the photo - where would you rather live?"
"Here, mummy," they said, patently perturbed that there could exist any other possibility for them, least of all one drenched in monotone and misery.
This is the photo.
My great-grandfather's name was Micha Bar-Yosef. And these are the mourners' names (L - R):
Menachem Mendel, Nechama, Elchanan (shopkeeper), unknown, Sotze Herman, Avraham, Beila Isaacson, Glicka, Beila Levitas, Raicha (Avraham's wife), Fruma, Berel Herr, unknown.
This was the family shop, owned by Elchanan Mankowitz:
Lithuania, 1998
I found Micha's grave by chance (there are no records) in the overgrown Jewish cemetery just outside the town. It had been made wonky by wind and subsidence, and the inscription was shallow and hard to read. I rubbed chalk over it to make it easier to read. The surname had been rendered in Hebrew with the letter Yud instead of Aleph, reflecting the contemporary pronunciation of 'Minkowitz,' which I prefer to this day (not least because I would have preferred the nickname Minky to MANKY).
My facial expression, it makes sense. The sun was fierce, and it felt like some eerie enchantment had intervened, because the chances of finding his grave by any methodical means were as slim as a blade of grass. The cemetery, taking up some acres, was more windswept than Lindisfarne, and with weeds so long you needed a snorkel to traverse certain sections. A neighbouring man appeared with a long scythe. I wish I could remember where he came from. Maybe he had been working in a bordering field. The old woman who now lived in the mortuary came out to speak to us, with audible fear and shame shaking her voice - or perhaps there was something darker there. She would have been a young woman in the 1940s. In such a setting it is not possible to restrain the mind from asking awful questions. The mouth can be shut at will.
The percentage of the Jewish population that was murdered was higher in Lithuania than in almost any other country: around 94%. All of my family who stayed were murdered. The Germans didn't need to build any large Auschwitz-style concentration camps there, because a sufficient number of local people - and imported thugs - rolled up their sleeves and massacred their Jewish neighbours, mostly between 1941 - 1944. Drive on many a Lithuanian highway and you will see signs pointing off the road to a 'Jewish Genocide Site.' You follow the sign to a clearing in the forest so beautiful that only birds should sing, and there lies a mass grave, beside it a euphemistic and aggrandizing Soviet monument, then trash from picnickers, sunlight through pines and silence, silence. Someone told me that some locals are worried that Jews who come back in search of their history may try to reclaim the property that was stolen and redistributed when their (grand)parents were murdered. Me, I saw my grandparents' villages. Haters can keep the hovels! I'm staying in north London.
Perhaps the man with the scythe was part of the family who now called the Jewish morturary home. Deferentially, he hacked away at the wayward weeds.
Micha could breathe again.
Here is the sun setting over the cemetery that evening. You can see the mortuary in silhouette.
Meanwhile, back in London, 2015, it is January, and the sun sinks fast. But the soft lights continue to shine, and we are still on the sofa, warm and together. How happy to be right here, right now, and not standing bereft in a cold Lithuanian field, wanting desperately to stay alive, yet gazing at a dead man, perhaps with envy.
To the lucky, a warm sofa.
To everyone else, a safe journey, towards a warm sofa for the next generation.
I wish Micha and the mourners could sit here with us.
