Tom has filed this last heartfelt postscript reflecting on his eventful week in the Big Apple and has discovered that there is still a big heart there too.
Thursday 12 November
Last day in New York. I’m packing my bags in The Maritime Hotel with big
views across the Hudson River to Hoboken. The hoots of ferries bringing the
first commuters of the day bounce off the warehouses in the Meat Packing
District. A public utility engineer choreographs instructions on the
intersection. Squalls of splattery rain corkscrew along the streets and howl up
the avenues. Pedestrians lunge after their umbrellas. The city is plunging
towards winter.
I get to JOURNEY in Washington Square around midday. It looks bedraggled and adrift, like a container ship afloat an ocean of puddles. Our volunteers huddle behind piles of damp T-shirts, stamping feet and rubbing hands. A steady flow of visitors brave the elements. Helen greets people who approach the desk but she is pale, cold and hungry. Rain drips down the backs of our necks. Campaigning in this weather is a young person’s game. Helen is 84.
I spirit Helen away to a
café round the corner on the NYU campus. We find to our delight that the
special is onion soup. Hot bowls of steaming goodness arrive, and as Helen eats,
her cheeks blush, and she returns to her usual bubbly self. We fish for strings
of cheese and she describes being presented with the Inspiration Award by The Dag Hammarskjöld Scholarship Fund for
Journalists at the United Nations yesterday. Emma introduced Helen to
a hall packed with journalists, ambassadors and the Secretary General, and
spoke of the need to tell the stories of hidden people. Helen talked about her
life devoted to listening to survivors, setting up the Foundation, and made the
link to present day survivors such as the women represented by JOURNEY.
The voices in the café
reflect numerous nationalities. Almost everyone is on-line, on cell phone, on
iPod, creating an expansive 21st century buzz. Helen describes growing up in the
grim days of 1930s London when Mosley’s Blackshirts were orchestrating hate
campaigns against the Jews. An aunt helped the communists set up the barricades
in Cable Street. Her father helped refugees escape from Nazi Germany. She says
how these experiences shaped her decision to work in Bergen-Belsen after the
war counselling survivors. She talks of the lonely journey out there, the sense
of hopelessness. “The bodies had gone,
but the smell of crushed geraniums was pervasive.” Helen had a profound
encounter with a dying woman. “She was like
a piece of material. She grabbed me, dug her fingers in and vomited obscenities
of the things that were done to her.” Helen said, “I cannot undo things, but I can be your witness.” The experience
gave Helen the sense of agency - not just to help - but to tell the stories of
those whose voices will never be heard.
My godmother Anne Hilb was
smuggled out of Germany to England just before the war. Every member of her
family was murdered in the camps. Anne settled in London and worked as a dietician
in various hospitals. She was the victim of anti-Semitic attacks for the whole
of her life. Her cars were scratched. She received poisonous hate-mail. Anne
loved New York and had many friends here. The 1950s and 60s New Yorker Albums she
gave me for birthdays inspired my stint as a Fleet Street cartoonist. I think
of Anne’s ebullient impatience and barely suppressed fury, but also her
overwhelming compassion and infinite generosity and wish she could be sitting
with us now. Helen sighs and says this trip feels special. “New York is so open and accepting. People want to know. It is a
melting pot of survivors. I have a feeling that many strands of my life are coming
together.
We order coffee and gaze out through the steamed
up windows. A drenched cop stands at the junction of Mercer and West 14th
directing traffic with a day-glo table tennis bat. Helen is dried out, fired up,
and game to go back to JOURNEY for the rest of the afternoon. We wait for the
check. Helen mentions Perico Rodriguez - a close colleague she and others liberated
from the Argentinean military junta 30 years ago. Perico and his family recently
helped me translate a Colombian poem for an assignment with International PEN.
Perico was one of the ‘disappeared’ - depicted
so vividly in Imagining Argentina -
the film Emma made with Christopher Hampton. Perico was tortured for three years at the delightfully named
concentration camp La
Escuelita (the little school). Helen
says, “It was such a tragedy. A
generation destroyed.” He went back to Argentina in 2008 to give evidence
against the perpetrators at their trial. “So
many of Perico’s comrades never made it. They were tortured to death or thrown
out of planes. Perico says that trafficking is just another form of
disappearing. Victims are betrayed, stripped of their dignity and beaten into
submission. Denied family access and legal representation they become invisible.”
This striking analogy emphasizes the Foundation’s mission to reach out to a new
generation of survivors.
We have brought JOURNEY
to New York in the week that marks the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, and
20 years since the breach of the Berlin Wall. Located in the heart of the university,
many of our visitors have been students. We have made extraordinary contact with
the next wave of politicians, clinicians, social workers, judiciary, lawyers
and human rights activists. Before hailing a cab to the airport, I walk through
JOURNEY NYC for the last time and take this picture which seems to sum it all up.
