Twilight Zones

Abstract

No room has ever been as silent as the room Where hundreds of violins are hung in unison. (Michael Longley, ‘Terezin’, Gorse Fires) All these facts that I have given you are absolutely true. Folks in Ireland have been slow to believe such things. They need to be badly shaken. (Letter from Irish officer in Irish Times, reporting on Belsen, 15 May 1945) Ten years ago I started to research the subject of Irish treatment of Jewish refugees in the Second World War. The picture that emerges in Ireland in relation to perceptions of the Holocaust is a fragmented and shadowy one. Yet in the private sphere in the world of literature, poetry and the arts, the Holocaust has had a distinct influence on Irish writers. Quite a number of poets and a few novelists have been compelled to write either obliquely or directly about it. Theo Dorgan believes that poets of his generation are concerned with the barbarities of the twentieth century, and the Holocaust is one of the most extreme examples of that failure of civilisation. Of those who have sought to describe the indescribable Michael Longley's Gorse Fires, Micheal O'Siadhail's The Gossamer Wall, and Gerald Dawe's The Morning Train come to mind, along with the powerful eyewitness account by Helen Lewis, A Time to Speak. (A Time to Speak has also spawned a dance piece called Abii Ne Viderem (I turned away so as not to see).) As Lewis affirms, her primary role is as a mouthpiece for the dead. ‘Only the dead know the whole truth and some of those witnesses who survived have taken upon themselves the painful task of speaking for them. It is our task to listen and never to forget.’ There were also Irish witnesses to the Holocaust, some of whom wrote about their experiences. The main witness testimony comes from a man now almost entirely forgotten. When he is recalled it is in connection with his pioneering work combating TB in Ireland. His name is Dr Robert Collis and he worked to rehabilitate Shoah survivors at Belsen just after the war. In 1947 he published with an English publisher, Methuen, Straight On: Journey to Belsen and the Road Home, an account of his work with the Red Cross in Belsen. The book contains explicit descriptions of what happened in the camps and also includes searing images and drawings by camp inmates. Another account of the camps by an Irish witness is Denis Johnston's allegorical war memoir, based on his experiences as a BBC war correspondent, Nine Rivers from Jordan (1953). Part allegory, part based on fact, at one point in the narrative the protagonist meets an American officer who tells him: ‘I guess you don't know much about this war until you've been down that way.’ The road leads to Buchenwald. Despite the fact that Irish neutrality and political posturing seemed to create the atmosphere of living in a cocoon as far as the atrocity of war was concerned, Irish writers and poets have not remained at one remove from the barbarity of the Shoah.