The Duchess shone a light on the darkness of the Holocaust
Aren’t those photographs of Holocaust survivors and their grandchildren by the Duchess of Cambridge wonderful? Kate used her art historian’s eye to create Vermeer-like portraits in which the darkness, experienced by both Steven Frank, 84, and Yvonne Bernstein, 82, when they were still children themselves, is illuminated by the love radiating from their young descendants. Such adoration, such shining innocence in the eyes of Trixie and Maggie Fleet and Chloe Wright, set against a backdrop of the deepest, darkest hatred.
Steven holds a tin pan that his mother kept with them in multiple concentration camps, foraging for scraps to make a paste to keep her two small boys alive (“I never saw her eat a mouthful herself ”). He also chose a tomato to feature in the picture because, during his time in the notorious Theresienstadt ghetto, he helped another prisoner grow tomatoes. The man taught him how to pick out the side shoots and water the plants. When he was shipped off to another camp in Poland (almost certainly to his death), the man asked Steven to take care of the tomatoes. “I was so proud to be asked – I was only eight”. (Eight!) Seventy-five years later, Steven says every time he tends his own tomatoes he feels that he’s watering that man’s plants for him.
During Holocaust Memorial Day this week, it felt impossible to make sense of the mass slaughter, the epic cruelty. The only possible way in for us is through the survivors’ stories. None of us has known starvation, but we can all understand Steven’s mother going hungry to give her sons a better chance. Even in the direst circumstances, a man passed on the cultivation of tomatoes to a child and he, in turn, lived to grow them himself so, one day, his granddaughters could pick them. Millions have no one who remembers they ever existed. These are the lucky few.
Another survivor I heard about has just one relic of her mother; a piece of skin tattooed with her Auschwitz camp number. Imagine that. In The Windermere Boys, a wonderful BBC drama about Jewish children rescued from Nazi camps and taken to the Lake District for rehabilitation, a young lad was asked for his name and he barked his number instead. The story was about giving those damaged youngsters back their names – and the humanity which had been stolen from them.
At the very end, we met the “boys” as they are today, in their 90s, all having forged successful lives and families in Britain. Old men in tears. That will always do it for me. I was sobbing on the sofa.
The Duchess of Cambridge said that, “despite unbelievable trauma at the start of their lives”, Steven and Yvonne were “two of the most life-affirming people” she had met. Her photographs prove that the poet Philip Larkin was right: “What will survive of us is love.” That and watering tomatoes in memory of a man with no name.