Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Founder of the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture, dedicated to helping survivors of torture.
On the island
Eight records
Song Without Words, Op. 62, No. 1 in G major
It really is about my mother, who was an unhappy and unfulfilled person, but who had many gifts. She played the piano beautifully and sang well, and she also had the gift of being able to be very elegant in situations of absolute chaos, and my memory of her is sitting at the piano during air raids, looking extremely elegant, with her hair piled high and with a whimpering, miserable dog at her feet.
Glenn Miller and His Orchestra
I think what I want to remember about the war is something about the dancing. Because the dancing that we did was taken so seriously. It was an affirmation of resilience, of companionship, of giving something to somebody who perhaps was just about to go off to the war, and who you may you may never see again, who may be killed.
Grosse Fuge in B-flat major, Op. 133
But the person I really want to commemorate, and would love to remember, I think, on the island, is a very courageous German woman who taught me so much. ... She loved Beethoven, she taught me a lot about Beethoven. And so f I'd like to remember a courageous German woman in the midst of all that.
Ballade von der Judenhure Marie Sanders
It's a strange piece. I don't think I'd listen to it very often. But I would want to remind myself sometimes why I do or did what I did. It's a story based on the Nuremberg laws. The Nuremberg laws decreed that no Jewish woman could sleep with a German man. And th this is a story about a woman who did that. And for me, this sums up everything about state-sponsored racism that we have to be so careful about.
The klezma musicians were a band of Jewish musicians who wandered from town to town playing music ... And he composed a lot in honor of the people who had died in the Holocaust. But on this occasion he wanted to honour the forgotten people who died, the Roma and Sinta, who we call the gypsies who died, so many of them in Auschwitz.
El Cant dels Ocells (The Song of the Birds)Favourite
I want this really because it is such a beautiful beautiful piece of music.
Go Down, Moses (from A Child of Our Time)
Damon Evans, London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Richard Hickox
He wrote this really at the very dark days of the beginning of the war. It was really in response to the Kristallnacht. and what he saw coming. But he uni I think he universalized his work, and I would like the spiritual of anger, which I think speaks for all oppressed people throughout the world.
I think it says everything. I think it says that we can do it. However ordinary we are, we can do it. We can make change.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:01Were you surprised when you discovered how many countries were still practising these abhorrent things [torture]?
I think that my difficulty arose when I began to realize ... at the emergence of Amnesty International, that people were still being tortured. I, like so many other people, had tried to deny it. I wanted to believe that everything had rested and ended in Belsen for me. That it you know, that Germany was the beginning and end of it, which was childish. It wasn't.
Presenter asks
5:28What is it do you feel in your background that led you to become a champion of the oppressed and the tortured?
I think it was largely to do with my father and my father's um vision of a world in chaos. and a people being destroyed. and his early activity in trying to help refugees to leave Nazi Germany and to find a place To flee to.
Presenter asks
6:37Did it weigh you down, this knowledge [of Nazi atrocities as a child]?
Do you know, I don't know. I think it was rather like I holding a vessel that I carried around with me, filled, and it it sort of every now and again I put it down and tried to be like everyone else. But I don't think I really succeeded, and I think I went on holding this rather brimming vessel of something that was always going to cascade.
The keepsakes
The book
Richard McKane
Some are sad, but they're about life, they're about resilience, they're about love. And I could just pick up a poem now and again and read it and find something that's going to help me to survive another day.
The luxury
I listen to the world service every night in bed. It would give me a sense of continuity.
Presenter asks
10:30Had you any idea when you signed up [to go to Belsen] the sorts of things you were going to witness?
We didn't go in immediately we were not allowed to go over immediately, for reasons that I've never quite understood, and we waited patiently to go as soon as liberation took place, and it was some months afterwards that we went in. I suppose people, yes, people were still dying. And people were still emaciated and people still needed to tell their story and still clung to you, wanting to say what happened to them.
Presenter asks
11:52There must have come a time then, and still now, when you just get and got overwhelmed by it all, that suddenly you felt I can't listen to any more of this. You are, after all, only human yourself.
You know, it's very Very strange. I d I didn't get overwhelmed by listening, but I think what did overwhelm me was the banality, the kind of what I call casual brutality of people who really become bystanders who don't want to know, who don't want to listen. ... as the people got better and became vocal and wanted to leave the camps, they became a nuisance, they became stronger, and then attitudes changed, and it was that that overwhelmed me, and I began to understand something about The act of denial.
Presenter asks
21:04What is your view? Do you think it's always right that justice should be done [to Nazi criminals fifty years on]?
I think you Justice should be seen to be done, yes, but I'm not sure that victims necessarily want punitive punishment. What I think many people would like to see is somebody made To face the charges.
“I think that my difficulty arose when I began to realize ... at the emergence of Amnesty International, that people were still being tortured. I, like so many other people, had tried to deny it. I wanted to believe that everything had rested and ended in Belsen for me.”
“I felt quite helpless and inadequate until I slowly realized that the act of taking that information had a value. Because they need to know that somebody has heard it, that someone ... has borne witness to what happened to them.”
“If we say that because they are old they must not face their crimes, then we are saying grow old and you may escape. And I think what we have to say is there is no escape from from justice.”