In the playground, thinking of Joachim’s fate at Auschwitz

THE German author, Winfried Georg Sebald, once said no serious person ever thinks about anything else except Hitler. Most of us, I’d imagine, do spare a thought for other things occasionally, but you can see Sebald’s point: there are times when it’s hard not to think about the monster of the 20th Century. Every weekend I take my four-anda-half-year-old daughter to her kids’ yoga class in Rathgar. While she is there, I take her 20-month-old brother to the park down the hill by the River Dodder.

Last weekend, while my little son was happily running around the fields like a lamb, I was thinking of Hitler. I had read online earlier that morning that on October 6, 1944, a seven-year-old Jewish boy, Joachim Hirsch, was murdered in the gas chamber at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. (I visited Auschwitz in 2006 with my father and sisters. Hard to put it into words.)

Joachim’s murder occurred 75 years to the day last Sunday. His life could have been saved. Joachim was two when he was one of the 937 Jewish refugees from Europe on board the St Louis when the ship was turned away at the port of Miami in June 1939.

The US Coast Guard, on the orders of US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, told the captain that the St Louis carried an “undesirable element” and would not therefore be allowed to unload their terrified human cargo on the run from the murder-machine Third Reich at that particular port or any other port in America.

On the drive to Rathgar for the yoga class, we always pass by where Tomi Reichental lives. Unlike Joachim and millions of others, Tomi somehow survived the Holocaust.

I interviewed him in 2009 ahead of his RTE documentary, I Was A Boy In Belsen. He had told how, as a nineyear-old in the Nazi concentration camp in Germany, he had memories of Belsen’s crematoria in January 1945 being unable to cope with the vast numbers of corpses.

“The bodies were just left there, lying all around,” he recalled. “The sight was absolutely horrific.”

As were the screams of innocents being beaten to a bloody pulp in the snow, the summary executions, the walking cadavers left to die without mercy, the screaming voices, the endless corpses.

As far as young Tomi could see, in Belsen there were corpses — “and these corpses were rotting and decomposing”.

When the British army arrived in April 1945, Tomi recalled they said that two miles outside of Belsen they could smell the stench coming from the camp.

Yet Tomi and his big brother Miki didn’t even notice the smell. “The kids,” Tomi explained to me, “we were running between these corpses. That was our surroundings.” When the liberation came on April 15, 1945, there was, Tomi told me, “no jubilation”. They felt nothing. Tomi and his brother thought they and a few others were the only children in Belsen. He found out only a few years ago that there were 500 children there. “Beside us was the Dutch block and Anne Frank was in that particular block. I never met her. She got typhoid and she died about two weeks before the British came.”

Last Sunday afternoon after kids’ yoga for my daughter and a run in the park for her baby brother, we picked up Mummy and went to Sandymount playground. There were so many kids running around it was like a scene from a vintage Disney movie.

My daughter went up the big slide and came down it at such speed that I thought she was going to take flight. She enjoyed herself so much that it caused a scene to get off it all.

When the light was starting to fade and it was time to go home, she kept insisting on one more go down the big slide. After about 10 ‘last’ goes, I had no alternative but to scoop her up and carry her towards the exit gate. This attempted exit was accompanied by my little darling protesting in her own cutesy, inimitable style about the injustice at having to leave the playground.

“I haven’t even had a proper go on the swings!” “Can I just have another go on the roundabout?” “I need to have a proper turn on the swings, Daddy!” The poor mouse was such a compelling negotiator that I went back on my earlier position of no more time in the playground and let her have a proper turn on the swings. And the roundabout. And one last go on the big slide. She was so worn out after all that sliding that I had to carry her to Sandymount Strand where we met her brother and Mummy. We were worn out too and couldn’t face cooking and agreed to go out for Sunday tea as a treat. We went to Quattro Woodfire Pizza in Stepaside village for a lovely meal. When I say lovely, I would qualify that by saying the food was delicious. Regrettably, I barely got a chance to digest it because our baby son wouldn’t stay in his high-chair and insisted on being put down to walk around the restaurant. I chased after him.

Our daughter was too tired to run around after all the swinging and sliding. When we got home, she was fast asleep as soon as her angelic little head touched the pillow, and her little brother soon after in his cot.

I went to sleep less soundly that night thinking of Joachim.