Cambodia's Holocaust

A short while ago I gave some personal thoughts about the city of Wrocław and its sufferings during and immediately after World War II and the ghosts which still haunt Poland in 2010. It brought to mind an all too short visit I made to Cambodia in 2007.

I have no wish to deny the pain suffered as a direct or indirect result of WWII , especially but not exclusively by the Jews, but we should not forget that other countries have suffered equally traumatic episodes in more recent times.

Cambodia is a special case in point. The Pol Pot regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia lasted for four years , between 1975 and 1979. During that time a systematic elimination process took place to remove all groups that were considered to be opposed to or more correctly were anathema to the bizarre communist agrarian collectivization ideals of the leader Pol Pot. Estimates vary as to the total number who lost their lives , but the most reliable figure seems to be around 2.2 million of the 8 million total population. The most notable were the mass killings of the members of any group which was considered tainted by Western influences such as teachers, doctors , lawyers and academics. Eyeglasses were as deadly as the yellow star as they were seen as a sign of intellectualism! In addition to the victims of the “Killing Fields” hundreds of thousands died as a result of the complete elimination of all large centres of population. In Phnom Penh even hospitals were cleared of patients irrespective of their condition. Many died as a result of hard labour, starvation and deprivation of all that could keep them alive.

The period is often referred to as the Cambodian Holocaust, however ,its affect unlike the European Holocaust of WW II, is largely out of the spotlight. We are not continually called upon to remember its victims, although in the Cambodian context it was far more deadly than the extermination of the Jews under the fanaticism of the Third Reich. It is claimed that EVERY family was affected in some way; some losing an entire generation.

There is one very significant difference in Cambodia. Whereas in Europe even in 2010 there is still a lot of looking back with sorrowful memories and lamenting what was lost and recrimination about the way it was lost, in Cambodia this is not the case. The Cambodian people have suffered tremendously but do not seem to keep carping about their losses and blaming all and sundry for them , but always have a welcoming smile and cheery disposition.

On one occasion I went on a small boat to visit one of the many floating villages around Tonle Sap Lake, which are mostly populated by Vietnamese and Cham Muslim communities ( two of many groups terrorised by Pol Pot) . The young boatman was very friendly, and at the mid point of our journey we invited him to join us for some refreshment. He talked in very good English about the lakeside communities and told us that this was a summer job for him. He was trying to save enough money to go to England or America. He touched briefly on his family and told us he lived with an Aunt near the lake ,and said that his mother and father had been teachers – but did not elaborate further.

In Siem Reap I visited a Buddhist temple which was used as a safe storage location during the Khmer Rouge period for statues of the Buddha rescued from the many temples that were destroyed at the time of the Killing Fields. The young caretaker showed us the temple and its store of Buddhas, but also told us that the temple was an education centre for the many young boys from the broken families of that awful period in the country’s recent past

I was born in England in the small mid-Sussex town of Haywards Heath on 24^th May 1941. I was a wartime baby if that is of any significance? I suppose it was significant, but perhaps more significant was the fact that Haywards Heath is a rural spot and was barely affected by the increasing war activity. I may have sensed that daily life was not quite as it should have been, but if it was a way of life that I had always known I could not be expected to think it should be different?

My parents were married just after the outbreak of war, and my father volunteered for service in the RAF and seems to have been posted in the Middle East soon after, so his periods of home leave were rare. I never really got to know him until after his ‘demob’ in 1945. We lived with my maternal grandmother, in her “front room”.

I do not propose to give a chronological account of my early years during the war: I couldn’t if I tried, but just a few random memories that have always stayed clearly in my mind.

Haywards Heath was not near any major targets for enemy bombing, but the German flying bombs often missed their targets and one such ‘doodlebug’ fell in the local recreation ground. There were no casualties but the blast took out my Gran’s kitchen window. We were always reminded of the event years afterwards because the wartime replacement glass was poorly produced and the broken panes always distorted everything seen through them.

A more momentous event took place when my mother was walking with me in the pushchair in the local countryside. We were on a footpath alongside a farmer’s field and suddenly an aircraft approached very low. I don’t suppose it was an enemy plane, but I do know that my mother grabbed me from my pushchair and threw me into a furrow at the side of the field and crouched over me while it passed. She was evidently very frightened , but I don’t think I registered any danger.

Two events which were more directly redolent of the worrying times were the construction of a Morrison “Table Shelter” in our already overcrowded front room, and more frightening to me the issue of gas masks. My mother and Gran had the standard issue black ones , but I had the children’s red “Mickey Mouse” design. I have always hated any clothing near my face and I remember my mother struggling for hours to try to get me to put it on! She finally got the hook and eye fastening clipped together behind my head and I could not get it off, couldn’t breathe and was in a total state of panic. A little later when I started at primary school I carried it to school in its box: fortunately there was never an occasion to put it on.

I never knew my grandfather: he had been killed in action in France during the First World War. All I knew was that we shared a birthday: Empire Day 24^th May. My grandmother had “a lodger”. Nobody seemed to know where he came from, or at least they never talked about it! Alec, or Uncle Alec as he was to me, became the principal male influence in my early years. I don’t think I liked him very much, and the feeling was probably mutual, for he always called me”Little Bugger”.

Before she was married my mother had worked as cashier in a small, rather smart department store in the nearby village of Lindfield, and one day when we were out walking a very smart lady, apparently a former customer in the store greeted my mother and turned to talk to me in my pushchair. “ And what do they call you, young man?” she asked politely,“ Little Bugger!” I replied.

As I have said, Haywards Heath was a fairly sleepy backwater in those wartime years. It had yet to see the sort of expansion that was to come soon after the end of the war, due principally to its greatest asset: a major station on the London to Brighton railway line. Shopping facilities were limited, as of course were things to buy in them, especially things like children’s toys Gran had a big tin of buttons of all types and sizes, recovered from discarded garments over the years, and my mother threaded them all on a string for me to have as a plaything . That string of buttons went everywhere with me until one fateful day, walking along South Road, the string broke! No attempt was made to recover the buttons!

A final anecdote! Dad came home on leave from foreign parts bearing gifts, among which was a large hand of fresh bananas. This little boy had never seen a banana before and fled the room in terror!

Wrocŀaw - A Personal View

I came to live in the Polish city of Wrocław about eighteen months ago. I had been to Poland several times before, but significantly, never to Wrocław. Before arriving here I did the usual things one does before moving to an unfamiliar city , including some extensive reading about the history of the city and a detailed look at its architectural and cultural monuments. Everything seemed to fit together quite well and promised to provide a stimulating city in which to live. Upon reflection I now realize that I failed to take into the reckoning a very significant fact : everything I had learned from my researches was about the German city of Breslau and certainly not about the Polish city of Wrocław!

It might well be argued that any European city one could name is a palimpsest of those events in its history which gave it its present character and ethos, and this more particularly for the cities in Central Europe. The seeming fluidity of frontiers which came as a result of different periods of suzerainty ( Bohemian, Austro-Hungarian, French etc) and culminating in the excesses of the Third Reich have all left their distinctive marks in areas of architecture , language and culture generally.

Wrocław, and the present region of Lower Silesia was affected by these historic shifts of power, but exceptionally by the two most recent episodes, Nazi Germany followed by integration into the Soviet sphere of influence. Whereas prior to 1945 the situation of Wrocław could be regarded as broadly similar to other cities in Eastern Europe, in so far as the power shifts were concerned. Changes were more akin to gradual assimilation. Rulers changed, customs were modified , but the people remained the same, and they kept their sense of attachment to their towns and cities. After 1945, as a result of the post WWII agreements by the victorious allies Wrocław, and to a lesser degree the other formerly “german” towns in what the Polish people referred to as the “Recovered Territories”were put into a totally different situation from previous dominations by foreign powers. The predominantly German population was required to move into the newly formed socialist German Democratic Republic and their places were taken by Poles and others from all over Poland and particularly those who were also “moved” from the area around the city of Lvov, which found itself outside of former frontier of Poland, in Ukraine.

No small wonder then that the new population of Wrocław had something of an identity crisis! Polish citizens with widely differing,( even if all Polish) backgrounds thrown together in what was formerly a very prestigious German city. Not just any city, but one that was regarded as a gem in pre war Germany: a city with a great cultural tradition, but predominantly a German cultural tradition.

In the period of Soviet domination, Wrocław grew into what was to become Poland’s fourth largest city, but it was rather out of touch with the predominant heartland of modern Poland centred around Warsaw and Kraków. Post war reconstruction saw a steady reconstruction of the heavily damaged city centre but what was being rebuilt was essentially a German city. It must have seemed odd that the rebuilt heart of this beautiful German city was so at variance with what was being built on the outskirts: the drab concrete slabs of a modern communist state. Furthermore its out of the way location did and still does hamper its progress as a modern city, situated as it is nearer to the capitals of the Czech Republic and the re-unified Germany than to Warsaw.

I think this isolation is still very much present in the Wrocław of 2010 a good ten years after the fall of communism. The changing of the German street and place names after 1945 did not transform Wrocław from a German city into a Polish one. Stand on Rynek and look around you and you see replicas of wonderful pieces of Germanic Gothic Architecture, walk down to the Odra and the University. Yes, it is today one of Poland’s premier centres of learning, but go inside and you enter the great spaces of the Baroque University of Breslau for which Johannes Brahms composed his wonderful Academic Festival Overture which quotes the famous student song “Gaudeamus Igitur” The ghosts of former German glory still pervade this city whatever the current Polish population may do to assert its Polishness. This situation is not helped by the stiil existant antipathy towards anything or anybody not Polish: and more particularly even if understandably, against anything German. Most of the great cities of Europe have had their city names “translated” by usage into other languages, but with Wrocław it is a little different in the case of German. All major routes leading into Poland from Germany still refer to Wrocław as Breslau although the latter ceased to exist as a place name in 1945! I still hearGerman speaking Poles refer to their city as Breslau!

What then is the future to be for this frontier city in Poland? It is not to belittle Wrocław’s efforts to be recognized as a major centre of European culture, but it seems to me that other cities around the fringes of the former communist central Europe have done far more to assert or even celebrate their internationality. They did not have to endure the same sort of problems that faced the people of Wrocław in 1945, and it could be argued that their eyes and attitudes were always directed towards the west. Perhaps Wrocław needs to finally shake off its past animosities with its western neighbours and take up a position to rival Prague, Bratislava or Budapest. In the Polish language the word for the German language is niemiecki – a corruption of nie mówić meaning “Not speaking” referring to the fact that in past times people from Germany did not speak the Poles language ( it was non-slavik, as opposed to the languages of all the other countries that bordered Poland). Wrocławians must get away from this old myth and look outward to their EU partners and stop living in the past.