I spent most of the day Thursday finishing up reading for Shakespeare. Before I went to class I wanted to stop by STA Travel to see about going to Paris when Stephen and Krystle come to visit me in March. First I stopped off next door at the Acorn Management office to see if I had any packages and the one my Grandma B. sent me ages ago finally got here! I now have a new scarf, dark chocolate M&Ms :), hot cocoa mix, and best of all - a whole batch of snicker doodle cookies! And, thank goodness, they weren't stale yet!
PS - a note about shipping me packages: 1) make sure you send it to Lauren Bailey, c/o Acorn Management, 19 Bedford Place, London WC1B 5JA and 2) write "Not for Commercial Use" on the package so it doesn't get held up in customs
STA told me that Stephen, Krystle, and I could get round trip tickets on the Chunnel to Paris and back for 53 pounds each, and a hostel for about 19 pounds a night each. We'd be going the morning of my birthday (the 8th of March) and returning the evening of the 9th. I checked later on the Eurostar website and found round trips on the Chunnel for 49 pounds each, so I booked that instead. I'm still looking at hotels/hostels but most of my flatmates when to Paris this weekend, so I'll ask them about their accommodations when they get back.
Thursday morning we had to meet our art teacher, Kathy, at the Imperial War Museum at 10:30. We spent the first hour looking at WWI and WWII art (for, unbeknown to me previously, they have an impressive collection). Then this old man, Roman Halter, who was in the Holocaust came and spoke to us about his experience. He is an artist now and after telling us about his life, he told us what each of his paintings in the room we were sitting in meant. He is really incredibly talented.
The Following is Roman's story - very interesting but long - I will mark it in a different color in case you don't feel like reading it.
Roman grew up in Poland in a town that had 800 Jews, 950 Germans, and thousands of Poles. When he was 12 he remembered his grandfather talking about a speech Hitler made in 1939 about how they "must find a solution to the Jewish problem in Europe" and how in the future there would be no Jews in Europe. Roman says he was confused and thought, "Where will they all go?" because there were 3.3 million Jews in Poland at the time. After this, if a Jewish person had enough money he would pay 100 pounds to go to the US or 50 pounds to go to Britain. Yet given that this was on the tail of the Great Depression and inflation in Germany had risen so high so fast that almost everyone's savings were lost, not many could afford this route.
After the Germans invaded his town the antisemitism got much worse. The Germans made a list of all the potential leaders (Jewish and Polish), rounded them up, took them away, and shot them. They took certain students to train as SS men, including one of Romans school friends. By the end of the murders of leaders and the murders of other random Jews who somehow displeased the German invaders, there were 360 Jews left in Roman's town. That is when they were all rounded up and sent to Łódź Ghetto. The ghetto was very crowded and so they could only accept 120 of the people - the other 240 were taken away and shot.
The ghetto was split up into pie-shaped pieces, and you could not leave your quarter unless you had a special pass. Roman was 13 and pretty strong for his age, so he was used by a higher official to fetch butter milk outside the ghetto every day. He had to carry the buckets on his back with a yoke. One day on his way back to the ghetto he heard shooting from a field he knew well. He went closer to see what was happening, and there he saw the boys training for the SS, including his former friend, shooting people. He knew if he was discovered, even with his pass, he would be shot too, so he ran back to the ghetto as fast as he could. He never told his family what he had witnessed.
Łódź Ghetto became a productive center for German goals. Once they could no longer keep any more people, they brought in families from many other European countries, tortured them until they told where they had hidden their valuables, accompanied them to said place, and then killed them. Many people in the ghetto starved to death as rations were very scarce and poor - it was up to the children to sneak out of the ghetto and beg for food. If they were caught they were either beaten or killed. When Roman arrived in Łódź with his family there were over 220,000 Jews in the place, but they were slowly sent away to work or extermination camps so by the end there were only 70,000 left. Usually, the SS would round up the weak, sick, and starving to take them for extermination.
Once, Roman and some of his family including his mother were rounded up and put on an open cart to be taken out of town. His mother knew where they were going, so she told him (who despite being very thin, could run quite fast) to run and not stop no matter what until he got to the other section of the ghetto. She told him to jump the fence and be safe. Then she kissed him goodbye and he ran. He never saw her or the others on the cart again. He was soon taken to a metal factory to work with many other child laborers. They made metal plates for the heels and toes of German boots. He became quite skilled and was sent to many different departments, including the engraving department where German money was made. 500 of these metal workers were later shipped to Auschwitz to do metal work there.
There were 35 cattle trucks with 80 people per truck and it took several days with no food, no water, no bathrooms, and barely any air. By the time they arrived, half the people were dead, and the other half looked close to death. The man at Auschwitz who decided who was immediately sent to death and who was sent to work issued the whole lot of them to go to the gas chambers, but the Jewish man who had been the head of the metal factory had a paper saying that they were skilled workers and not supposed to die. He was screaming at the top of his lungs despite the SS beating on them, but he managed to get the attention of a supervisor who looked at the note and corrected the mistake. They were not killed that day. Roman says he remembered on the way to the gas chambers how all the people were hugging, crying, and praying. The man next to him was praying the same prayer over and over in Hebrew, but Roman had had very little formal education and could not understand what he was saying. He asked the man what it was, and the man said it was Psalm 31, vs. 5: "Unto him I commit my spirit; for you are my redeemer, O Lord, God of truth."
Eventually Roman was moved again, this time to Dresden. He said when he saw that beautiful city, he knew from that moment on he wanted to be an architect. He said it was one of the most beautiful cities in Europe; however, not long after it was fire bombed by the British and though they escaped by running to the river, the entire city became an inferno. To this day, it is still being rebuilt, and looks as though the destruction happened a few weeks ago, as opposed to over 50 years ago.
Before the war ended and Hitler started realizing they may not win, he ordered the evacuation of many camps, and Jews all over Europe were sent on death marches (forcible movement between Autumn 1944 and late April 1945 by Nazi Germany of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, from German concentration camps near the war front to camps inside Germany). Roman was on one of these marches from Dresden toward the interior of Germany when he escaped with two others. He said before they got away, they passed many bodies of those who died from starvation along the way or those shot for not keeping up. Roman was helped by a German woman until the end of the war. The British government said that they would find a place for 1,000 Jewish youths who had no family left to come to England, but they could only find a little over 700. Roman was among this group.
He arrived in England when he was 18 where he went to a recovery house. He could not speak English, he knew very little Hebrew, rudimentary Polish, and some German. Overall, he was quite uneducated; yet he still dreamed about becoming an architect. He studied at night and worked during the day until he won a scholarship to study full time. He started his own business, and his architecture firm, Roman Halter & Assoc., did amazing work. At 74 he said he wanted to get out of the business because he wanted to paint and write. His colleagues thought he was crazy. Roman did not speak of his experiences in the Holocaust until that time. Not even to his wife and children. Yet he had made a promise to his grandfather on his deathbed that he would speak out and clearly about what happened to them, for "all people have a right to live - different birds with different feathers all have a right to live." His grandfather who was also his best friend died in the ghetto from a cold and starvation. His brother was hung in front of him. Out of his whole extended family, only he and three sisters survived. Out of the 3.3 million Jews in Poland, only 300,000 survived. Out of the 800 in his town, only 4 survived including him.
At 74 one of Roman's daughters helped him write the story of his life, since writing English is still a bit of a struggle. That is also when he started his art, which is incredibly full of talent and haunted with his memories and dreams. One of his pieces was called "Woman Wearing Mantilla" and was of his mother. He said that the fashion of wearing a Spanish mantilla to Synagogue was adopted in Poland (probably when the Spanish Jews were exiled from Spain in the 1400s). Throughout the painting there are images of mothers and children, and then fainter images of the same to represent the ones who died. He also had a painting called "Starved Face." Roman said the Nazis had three goals in starvation: 1) murder, 2) getting rid of the weak, and 3) making Jews look physically different from Aryans to prove that they were, in fact, subhuman. Roman said all the faces end up looking the same, and it is only in the eyes that you can read sadness, despair, compassion, and hope.
After listening to Roman's story, I had lunch in the cafe at the museum and then went to see the WWII exhibit and the Holocaust exhibit in the museum. The Holocaust exhibit was very moving and thorough, and helped explain some of the things Roman talked about. I was nearly moved to tears several times, especially when I saw a clear, tall, rectangular shaped box filled with shoes from Auschwitz. Looking at them, you knew that their owners were all killed, and then you notice little tiny pairs of shoes, and one cannot help but have tears for the terrible loss of innocent young lives. That exhibition took about 2 hours or so to walk through and I read many, many placards, listened to TVs running clips of survivors' stories, and went inside a real cattle car from the time. The horror simply cannot be imagined.
I was heading out the doors at 4 pm when I ran into Ashley on the way out. Apparently she too had stayed and looked thoroughly at the WWII stuff. It was nice to have someone to come back with.
After I got home I made some dinner and had to get ready to go to my figure drawing class. It is only about a 10 minute walk from my flat in the London School of Economics building. I left at 6:30 and despite not being able to find the room for a while, I arrived at 6:50. They even had refreshments while we waited for the room to free up! The class was packed - at least 25 people. I had a feeling it was a nude figure drawing class, but I wasn't sure - until this old man took off his jacket and stood butt naked in the middle of the room. Not exactly a glamorous person to draw naked, but it develops skill more quickly drawing imperfect bodies than perfect,
wrinkleless, young ones.
I realized how much more urban and open-minded London is than anywhere I've been in the states. Most of the people there to draw were college age or a bit older, but no one blinked an eye when the guy started posing for us. I was not only proud of the maturity level in the room, but also very impressed with the model. I wish I had that kind of bravery - to just stand around naked for two hours of the sake of art. Although I guess once you're that age, you don't have as much modesty as you probably once did.
First he did 4 three minute poses, then 2 ten minute poses, then 2 thirty minute poses. At the half way break I talked a little bit to the guy next to me who is a web designer who is going to school to become a counselor. He said he started drawing about a year ago but mostly did faces so he wanted to start working on whole bodies. He was fairly good, though you can tell a newer artist by how hard they apply the pencil when drawing the outlines of the figure. We chatted some as we walked out and he reminded me a bit of my cousin Michael, so I think we may
become friends. Besides improving my art, I also joined this class hoping to meet more British people.
So, that has been my last few days. Today my flatmates left for Paris (except Ashley and one of the guys) so it is rather quiet around here. I already did some laundry and may go to Big Ben or Tower Bridge or Westminster Abbey today. Tomorrow if it isn't gross out, Ashley and I will go to Hampton Court Palace.
