There's already been a fine blog about the famous Duke Ellington classic 'Take the A Train' this week, so I'm not going very far down that line, except to say my favourite version of the tune was recorded in 1939 and I'll post a link to it at the end of the blog.
I said I wasn't going to dwell on the NYC/Duke Ellington connection, so enjoy the picture and let's move on.
The A train, also known as the 8th Avenue line, runs from Manhattan to Queens in New York and is part of the city's rapid transit system, the fastest way to get around. As a result, the phrase "take the A train" has come to mean "get here (or there) quickly" or "don't delay".
 |
| New York's A Train |
My good friends at Penguin Books have recently published a trio of works by Aharon Appelfeld. I picked up both 'Katerina', which I'd never read before - it is beautifully written - and 'Badenheim 1939' which I first read forty years ago but have just finished for the second time. It was this latter, Appelfeld's brilliant satirical allegory about the shipment of Jews to Poland by the Nazis, that gave me my slant on this A Train blog, the A in this case being Auschwitz, if you hadn't guessed.
As if the Second World War wasn't bad enough on all counts, the genocide that the Nazis perpetrated in parallel on the non-Aryans in their clutches (mainly Jews but also other ethnic groups) still beggars belief. The 'Final Solution', a plan to eradicate eleven million men, women and children on mainland Europe purely on the grounds of ethnicity, is surely the most evil scheme ever devised - and ironically, it was the continent's railway network that made it logistically feasible.
The ghettoising of Jews within Germany had begun of course in the mid-1930s after the National Socialist Party swept to power. It began in other territories in 1938 when the Nazis annexed Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia. Then in October of that year the mass expulsion of German Jews with Polish nationality commenced. They ended up in refugee camps inside Poland. Of course when Germany invaded Poland in 1939 (and formal war was declared by the British and French) the Nazis were in a much better position to control and direct their horrific ethnic cleansing scheme with brutal efficiency.
The first step was to forcibly dissolve any Jewish settlements that were not adjacent to the railway infrastructure. The second was to build a number of large camps (variously termed concentration, internment or labour camps) and to move Jews in Germany to these camps. They were run by the SS and the internees had to pay for food, rations et cetera. You will recognise some of their names: Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau. As Germany advanced into Denmark, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, so the Jews in those countries were liable to be rounded up into concentration camps in the occupied territories.. The same fate met Jewish communities in Italy, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Greece, Ukraine and Romania. By 1941, there were over thirty of these concentration camps across mainland Europe, populated by people brought to them by rail, in third-class carriages if they were lucky, more often in freight trucks.
The final phase began in 1942 with the decision to build the infamous death camps (extermination camps). The majority were in Poland (though there was one in Belarus) and their names now sound a roll of horror for the terror that was the Holocaust: not just Auschwitz but Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sohibor and Treblinka. But at the time, the 'Final Solution' was top secret. The story was that the Jews and other ethnic groups who had been held in the concentration camps were being resettled in the east, moved to spacious new labour camps in German-occupied Ukraine. The Nazis made the Deutsche Reichsbahn responsible for the final railway journey of millions who were heading in reality to those Polish gas-chambers. To keep up the pretence, they were made to buy their own tickets for this journey on the A train to a better place.
They were shipped east just as fast as the gas-chambers could process them and the railway stock and network could accommodate them. By the time Germany was finally defeated, over six million of the targeted eleven million Jews had been exterminated. The scale of the atrocity should make us all shudder for evermore really.
The photograph above purports to show Jews boarding the very last death train to Auschwitz in September 1944. They look at worst like refugees, at best almost like holiday-makers with their packages and suitcases, totally unaware of the terrifying end that awaits them.
 |
| Last Train to Auschwitz |
Appelfeld (a Holocaust survivor himself who after the war went to live in Palestine) describes the SS in his novel as the Sanitation Department and 'Badenheim 1939', which I urge you to read, closes like this:
An engine coupled to four filthy freight cars emerged from the hills and stopped at the station. Its appearance was as sudden as if it had risen from a pit in the ground. 'Get in!' yelled invisible voices. And the people were sucked in. Even those who were standing with a bottle of lemonade in their hands, a bar of chocolate, the headwaiter with his dog - they were all sucked in as easily as grains of wheat poured into a funnel. Nevertheless Dr Pappenheim found time to make the following remark: 'If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go.'
It's a while since I've attempted a poem in the form of a pastiche, but here I've taken W. H. Auden's famous 'Night Mail' (apologies, Wystan lad), written in 1936 even as the ghettoising of Jews was getting under way in Germany, and I've turned it into something infinitely darker. I make no apologies, it is intended to shock. It's a good job we won the war. But it's concerning that the shadow of fascism is creeping across the face of Europe again. We don't need a new world order, thank you.
The A Train
This is the A train crossing the Oder
Bringing in truckloads of human fodder,
Jews who were rich, Jews who were poor
Out of the synagogue and the shop next door,
Dragged from their beds as midnight chimed
Ghetto-cleansing in overtime.
The North German Plain has never felt colder
Deserted fields and icy polders,
Lit by moonlight as she passes
Silent miles of stunted grasses,
Crows overhead as she approaches
Cry on the wing for her death-rattle coaches.
Though built of steel, she knows remorse
Is shamed she cannot change her course,
As she passes towns she applies the brakes
Though in their beds no German wakes.
Dawn stirs in the east, her job is done
Down into Auschwitz she descends
Towards the barb-wired final solution
Towards the gas chambers, the furnaces
Set on the stark plain like a vision of Hell.
The guards wait for her
In dark uniforms, with hard blue eyes
They thirst for Jews...
Jews of rank and Jews from banks
Jews with locks and Jews with stocks
Jews in hopeless situations
Jews who were hidden by relations
Jews from every walk and station
Jews upon Jews from all the nations
Jews circumstantial betrayed by friends
Jews financial stripped of funds
Jews with faces creased in pain
Jews who died while on the train
Jews with wild thoughts of escaping
Beautiful Jews ripe for the raping
Jews of every shade and hue
The pink, the brown, the white and the blue
The proud, the cowed, the weak, the strong
Clever, or stupid, and right or wrong
Officially they don't belong
Their names are printed but misspelt
They've been relieved of all their gelt.
So millions are put to eternal sleep
Dreaming of demons, men become monsters
A country that turned at the bark of a madman,
But their shades still shift sleepless through Sohibor
Mournful over Majdanek, ghosting round Chelmno
Troubled at Treblinka, agonised in Auschwitz
And we who are lucky to be alive and awoken
Should listen to the warning when it knocks
For what happened ought never to be forgotten.
By way of lightening the mood, here's a rendition of Duke Ellington's classic tune, recorded as I said in 1939. Just click on the title to play Take The A Train.
Thanks for reading, S ;-)