The Tattooist of Auschwitz – Sky Atlantic

  There’s been a lot of moaning in certain quarters about this series, on the grounds that the Holocaust shouldn’t be used as “entertainment”.  I beg to differ.  Yes, there are now dozens of Holocaust novels and numerous films, and I think that it’s all getting a bit much and arguably a bit exploitative; but the book on which this is based was one of the first, and it’s telling a true story.   As for “entertainment”, that’s the wrong word.  What it’s doing is rehumanising people whom the concentration camps dehumanised.

A few years back, someone moaned that Anne Frank shouldn’t be seen as the “face” of the Holocaust because most of her diary was trivial stuff about arguing with her family, finding Mr Dussel annoying and fancying Peter van Daan.   Of course she should, and of course it was.  That’s the sort of thing that teenage girls write about.  She was just an ordinary teenage girl, and Lale Sokolov (formerly Eisenberg), the main character in this story, was just an ordinary young man.  Who fell in love.  With an ordinary young woman.   In the most horrific circumstances in human history.  Because they were still human.   So, yes, it’s OK to have a love story set at Auschwitz.  It’s proving that, even after people were stripped, shaved, and tattooed with a number instead of their name, they were still human.

Yes, there are errors in the book.  The number tattooed on the arm of Gisela “Gita” Fuhrmannova, Lale’s future wife, is wrong.  There’s a reference to penicillin, long before it was widely available.  Some of what’s said about Josef Mengele doesn’t agree with other sources.   It’s obviously not great that there are errors; but it was written from an elderly man’s memories of what happened over half a century earlier, not as a textbook.

There’s also been some moaning about the casting in the TV adaptation.  Jonah Hauer-King, as the young Lale, speaks RP English.  Harvey Keitel, as the older Lale, speaks English with an Eastern European accent.  Er, folks, the young Lale would have been speaking his mother tongue (presumably Slovak?), not English.  So he wouldn’t have been speaking with a foreign accent, would he?!   There’s even been moaning because CGI was used to “reconstruct” an Auschwitz set, rather than filming at the real site.  How on earth could they have built the set at the real site?

The story’s quite well-known now.   In Bratislava, it’s demanded that one person from each Jewish household “volunteer” to “help the war effort”.  Lale goes, and finds himself being transported to Auschwitz, where he becomes one of those tattooing numbers on the arms of new prisoners.  One of the prisoners is Gita.  At the end of the war, they’re separated, but meet in Bratislava, marry, and later move to Australia.   Decades later, after Gita’s death, Lale tells his story to Heather Morris, who writes a book about it.

I’m not sure how well the decision to show the story as flashbacks worked.   We were shown Lale and Heather, and then flashbacks to Auschwitz; and jumping backwards and forwards between timelines never works that well.   We also saw the older Lale being haunted by visions of friends who’d been murdered, and by an SS office with whom he’d had a lot of interaction, which was also a bit confusing.  But I think that the programme did a reasonably good job of trying to depict the horrors of the camp, even showing black smoke coming out of the gas chambers, and Lale witnessing people being shot dead at random.  It tried.  It’s a very sensitive topic, and any book or film or TV series about it is always going to be controversial.  Sky have really done their best to *be* sensitive, with the series being directed by the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.

A week after the Holocaust memorial in Hyde Park was covered up because of fears that it was at risk of vandalism, and two days after Poland’s main synagogue was firebombed, watch this.  And just watch it.  Don’t drive yourself mad worrying about accents or exact numbers.  Just watch it, and take it in.

 

 

 

 

Pilgrimage: the road through North Wales – BBC 2

  As much as I like North Wales, I wasn’t convinced about the choice of route for this year’s series, purely because it isn’t a historical pilgrimage route like the Camino.  However, a lot of “big” pilgrimage sites aren’t very historical at all.  I’m older than the shrine at Medjugorje!    And this one does include some “proper” historical sites, like Holywell and Bardsey Island.

I must go to Holywell again some time, and wander around in the pool properly, like the “celebs” (I’ve used inverted commas because I’d never even heard of some of them, and I only knew others because they’re related to genuinely famous people) in the first episode is.   There were about three other people there when I stopped off on the way back from Bodnant Garden once, so at least it was quiet!

Bodnant Garden actually features on the pilgrimage route, which is a bit weird because it’s a garden, not a religious site.  But then, gardens are a lot more peaceful than religious sites, so probably a lot better for the soul.

The North Wales Pilgrims’ Way (I am appalled by the lack of an apostrophe on its website) was only “invented” in 2011.  It’s fascinating how pilgrimage routes are becoming a “thing” again.  Honestly, if I weren’t so fat and unfit, and if I got more time off work, I would love to walk the Camino … not because of anything to do with religion, but just to get that bit of time out and getting your head together, in a troubled world.

I was somewhat bemused that Spencer Matthews didn’t know that Jesus was a real person.   What do they charge at Eton these days, about £50,000 per annum?   And they turn out people who don’t know that Jesus was a real person?   That’s really very worrying!   Michaela Strachan, who takes me back to the ’80s, spoke a lot more sense, talking about placing faith in the natural world, whilst Sonali Shah and Tom Rosenthal also made some interesting points.

It’s the sixth series of Pilgrimage now, and the fact that it’s lasted so long shows that there’s genuine interest in this idea of taking time out and thinking about things.   There’s a lot going on at the moment, and we’re all trying to make some sense of the world.   I look forward to watching the rest of this series.

 

 

The 1980s Supermarket – Channel 5

  I’d completely forgotten about Harvest Crunch bars!   I used to have one every day.  The idea was that I wouldn’t be fat because I was eating healthy “crunch” bars instead of chocolate biscuits … er, but it didn’t work.   And those ’80s food and drink adverts!   The annoying cartoon girl singing “I want a Trio and I want one now”.  And “Um Bongo, Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo”, which would cause the woke brigade to have apoplexy if it were made now.

It’s funny how things change.   As the programme pointed out, before the ’80s, buying ready made food was something that only better-off people could afford to do.   Now, it’s gone the other way, and there’s quite a bit of snobbery about buying convenience foods – which I do all the time, because I am a useless cook and I haven’t got the time to cook things from scratch anyway.   I don’t buy supermarket sandwiches, though.  The cost of supermarket sandwiches for a week, never mind a year, versus making your own, is seriously horrendous.

It’s very weird when programmes about the ’80s appear on TV, as if “my” decade were some sort of historical period.  Which obviously it isn’t.   But it was a fun bit of nostalgia!

Royal Kill List – Sky Showcase

  It’s always good to see historical programmes on Sky Showcase, and they did very well to get Joseph Fiennes to be one of the narrators for this one.   Could we just lose the constant swearing, though?   It’s very tiresome.  Having said which, Charles II probably *did* swear a lot, if only to prove that he wasn’t a Puritan!

The theme of this series is the quest to hunt down the regicides, i.e. the people involved in the trial and execution of Charles I, who were excluded from the general pardon given at the time of the Restoration.  Those already dead, including Oliver Cromwell, were dug up and executed posthumously.   Several others were executed, and others were sentenced to life imprisonment.  Some were pardoned, and a few escaped.

It’s not talked about very much, possibly because it doesn’t fit with Charles II’s image as “the Merry Monarch” – lover of many women, father of many illegitimate children, frequent visitor to the theatre and to Newmarket, etc etc.   The fact that he was engaged in secret deals with the French gets overlooked, as well.  I suppose we’re all willing to forgive him anything because the Restoration got rid of the horrendous rule of the Cromwells.   Why Oliver Cromwell so often scores so highly in “greatest ever Englishmen” polls is beyond me.   The man banned Sunday football.  And mince pies.   And closed the theatres.  He also fined people for swearing, so everyone involved in historical programmes on Sky TV would have been very poor if they’d been around in his time.   No wonder that Charles II’s reign is fondly remembered!

But Charles really did go after the regicides, which I suppose is understandable, and this was an interesting take on things.  It also showed the future James II doing a lot of moaning at his brother, and getting very narky about the influence of the infamous Barbara Villiers.   The reign of Charles, like the reign of his grandfather, tends to be overlooked, sandwiched in between the Civil War/Interregnum and the Glorious Revolution.   Despite the fact that half the aristocratic families in the country are descended from his various offspring by his various mistresses!

This went a a bit OTT for a docu-drama, but it was always entertaining – and, unlike the irritating stuff that the BBC churn out these days, made no references to current political events and didn’t include a load of woke drivel.   It was certainly colourful!   But I do think that it was a bit hard on Charles.  It made him look very bloodthirsty, whereas his actions were really quite mild under the circumstances.   Sky’s history programmes often seem designed more to shock than to do anything else.  But, hey, at least they don’t lecture you like the BBC’s do …

Paperboy by Tony Macaulay

This is the author’s account of growing up in the Shankhill Road area of Belfast in the 1970s … with “so it was” or “so I did” added to the end of every other sentence, presumably to give an authentically Northern Irish feel!!   It’s a really interesting book, combining the everyday schoolboy experiences of family, school, friends, girlfriends, football (everyone seems to support United, possibly because of the George Best connection), watching TV, music and, as the title suggests, delivering papers, with the horrors of frequent bombings and having your daily activities disrupted by fires and barricades.   It’s surprisingly funny and upbeat, considering how difficult life must have been at times, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

 

The Gunpowder Plot – Channel 5

  Thank you to Channel 5 for this.  The miserable council have cancelled the Heaton Park bonfire and fireworks display again, and it feels as if Bonfire Night’s getting squeezed out between all the over-commercialised Halloween rubbish and the shops putting out the Christmas stuff four months early.  The failure of the Gunpowder Plot was an important event in our history, and the tradition of commemorating it should live on.  This two-hour programme largely followed the traditional narrative, although just before the end it did suggest that Francis Tresham might actually have been spying for Cecil.  It also made the point that, had the plot succeeded, a large number of people would have been killed in the explosion.  The idea that the gunpowder of the time wouldn’t have been strong enough to blow up Parliament just isn’t true.

You know the basic story.  Guy Fawkes & co – “the gang”, as the programme referred to them, led by Robert Catesby – rented a cellar underneath the House of Lords, smuggled a load of gunpowder in, and planned to set it all off during the State Opening of Parliament.  But someone sent an anonymous letter warning Lord Mounteagle to stay away, and so the plot was discovered.   The programme also went into the lesser-known story of how the plotters were found at Holbeche House in Staffordshire, and Catesby, Percy and some of the others were killed in a shoot-out.   Holbeche House is currently disused after the nursing home which used to occupy it closed down, and there’s some talk of the National Trust taking it over, although I doubt that they’ll want to pay for it.

And so we remember, remember, the Fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot.  I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.   I know it used to get a bit out of hand at one point, but it was always good fun when I was a kid, and I think it’s really mean of the council to cancel the free public events!    Enjoy the fireworks, and eat some bonfire toffee and parkin buns.

 

 

Union with David Olusoga – BBC 2

David Olusoga usually gets on my nerves, but this series, on the history of the union between the nations of the United Kingdoms, looks like being really good.  A lot of what was covered in the first episode was very familiar stuff – Edward I’s conquest of Wales, the Ulster Plantation, Gunpowder Plot, the Glorious Revolution, the Darien Scheme – but it’s not usually all put together in the context of examining the formation of the Union.   We heard about the events, and also about the attitudes of the different countries towards the idea of union.   We also got to hear the opinions of various random people about the idea and history of the United Kingdom, which I’m not sure we needed, but some of what they had to say was quite interesting, and David had clearly made an effort to speak to people with a range of different opinions.

This episode finished with the 1707 Act of Union.   I completed on the purchase of my house on 17th July 2001, and I can always remember the date because it was 17/07.  I know that everyone really needed to know that.

Well done BBC 2.  The BBC’s history series have been a bit off recently, but this one looks very promising.

 

 

Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero – Channel 4

This was horrible; but I’m always complaining that Holocaust documentaries focus too much on the concentration camps and overlook the fact that more Holocaust victims were shot than gassed, so it was very positive – if that’s the right word – to see Channel 4 devoting an entire programme to the mass shootings in Ukraine.  When I went to Ukraine in 2008, I went to Babyn Yar, still better known by its Russian name of Babi Yar, and a lot of people just looked at me blankly when I said that I’d been there.   Over 33,700 people were murdered there in the course of just two days.  Another 70,000 people were murdered there over the next two years.  23,000 people were murdered in two days at Kamianets-Podilskyi.   And they were many more massacres.

The programme showed us a lot of photographs and video coverage from the time, and also harrowing interviews with survivors.   And it didn’t shy away from pointing out the extent of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis, or mentioning the little-known war crimes trials held in the Soviet Union after the end of the war.

It was a difficult hour’s TV to watch, but these stories need to be told. There wasn’t even a proper memorial at Babyn Yar for many years, but a proper museum’s due to open in 2025 or 2026.

These stories need to be told.

British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays 1930-1980 by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  This was an interesting idea, to write a book about how British schoolchildren spent their summer holidays in the days before trips abroad became common and kids were glued to screens all the time, and I thought it was much better than the author’s book about boarding schools.   However, I think she cast her net too wide.  For one thing, a lot changed between 1930 and 1980.   For another, how children spent their summer holidays varied widely according to their circumstances.  The book did try to show that, but it all felt very bitty when you were jumping from a child from an exclusive boarding school jetting off to spend their holidays with parents who worked in some far-flung part of the Empire to a child who spent their summer holidays playing on debris from the Blitz at the end of their back street.

Having said which, it was quite entertaining.   It wasn’t a nostalgia fest for me because I was only 5 in 1980, but I can imagine that it’d be a nostalgia fest for people in their 50s and older.   It was just too bitty, though, and there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on people at the wealthier end of the scale, and not so much on the average family spending a fortnight at a boarding house in Blackpool.   Not bad.  I’ve read better.

Joanna Lumley’s Spice Trail Adventure – ITV

The first episode of this new series, visiting what was once known as the Dutch East Indies and is now Indonesia, was very interesting, although often distressing.  Joanna Lumley does sometimes sound like a character in a boarding school book, with all her “Gollies” and “Goshes”, but she’s an engaging presenter, and she gets to go to some very interesting places.  And, as she said, the nutmeg changed the course of world history, and thoroughly deserved to have an hour’s TV devoted to it.

We started off in the Banda Islands, and heard about the arrival of the Dutch East India Company in the early 17th century – and about the Banda Massacre, in 1621, when they killed around 2,800 of the islanders, enslaved 1,700 others, and expelled all those who remained.   All to gain control of the nutmeg trees, nutmeg at the time being believed to have major medicinal powers.   Horrific.  And, if you’d asked me about massacres in the East Indies in the 1620s, my brain would immediately have said “Amboyna”, referring to the incident in 1623 in which the Dutch East India Company executed 21 people, 10 of them Englishmen, which soured Anglo-Dutch relations for years.   That’s just something that’s in my consciousness in a way that the Banda Massacre isn’t.  Maybe it’s something we all need to learn more about.

We then moved on to the tiny island of Rhun, one of the outlying Banda Islands, where English East India Company island ships arrived in 1616.   Desperate to do anything to protect themselves against the Dutch, the islanders of Rhun swore allegiance to King James, so Rhun was actually the first English/British colony.   As Joanna said, interestingly, in the 1667 Manhattan Transfer it was swapped with the Dutch for Manhattan.  At the time, it looked as if the Dutch had got the better of the deal.   History had a different story to tell!   What she didn’t mention was that, long before 1667, the Dutch had invaded the island, killed and enslaved all the men, exiled all the women and children, and destroyed most of the nutmeg trees to keep them out of English hands.   It really was a cut throat business, and the islanders suffered so terribly.

After Rhun, it was on to Jakarta, where things got a bit jollier and we heard about spice cigarettes, which are hand made locally, and we saw Joanna having a ride round in a rickshaw, talking about how the founder of Coca Cola once sold nutmeg to the US government, and joining in with some local dancing.

Next week, it’s on to India and Madagascar.   This was a fascinating hour’s TV, but it certainly wasn’t comfortable watching.