Learning from the past ~ lessons for today - Holocaust Education ...

The Holocaust and the Arts in Ireland
The Holocaust as an inspiration for writing…
Micheal O’Siadhail, poet, author of The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust
What motivated you to
write about the
Holocaust – in fact, to
write a whole book
about it?
A decision to devote
years to such a book was
not taken lightly. I think
there is both an emotional
and intellectual level. I believe that the Holocaust was never
fully confronted and only in facing it can we hope to avoid
repeating such genocides. The general crisis of belief in
humanity in the wake of the Holocaust overshadowed my
youth. I felt it was the right time for a poet born just after
the war to try to distil the story in poetry for another
generation.
Do you feel that art has a responsibility to respond to such
things?
I think of poetry as a ‘ministry of meaning’, an attempt to
make sense of the world we live in and to prepare it for
those who come after us. I certainly felt called to try and
retell how at the heart of civilised Europe six million
people were systematically killed and to understand how
that incredible event affected the ethos of our times.
At one point you link Irish history with the Jewish story:
Depths of survival. Klezmer or jazz or céilí,
A story squeezes at the edge clamours of music;
Out of darkest histories, profoundest gaiety.
To what extent was your engagement with the Holocaust
that of an Irishman?
Well, as your quotation suggests, in some incommensurable
way, all great human tragedies resonate with each other,
whether it’s the wiping out of eastern European ghettos,
slavery or famine. The fact that I’m Irish and conscious of
the story of the Great Famine may, of course, predispose
me to an imaginative understanding of the unspeakable
suffering the Holocaust involved.
What in your view is the relationship between art and
history (or testimony) as regards the Holocaust?
I spent many years reading about the Holocaust and even
so could only cover a portion of the overwhelming amount
of testimony, historical study and imaginative literature. A
work of art can distil both the personal and communal and
allow us to interweave the intellectual, the spiritual and
the political. It often occurs about sixty years after
historical events, as say in the case of the Waverley novels,
or War and Peace or the Gospels. Another generation tells
the broader story before the last eyewitnesses die. It’s the
crossover point between history and story.
You depict the evil of the Third Reich as a volcano giving
rise to ‘black sun’, and talk about inexorable shifts of the
earth, yet this is balanced with examinations of the
individuals involved in perpetrating the Holocaust. Why
did you choose to include these two forms of
representation? And in terms of responsibility, were these
individuals victims of inexorable forces or personally
culpable, or both?
It seems to me that all history happens at the nodal point
where social forces and individual responsibility meet. If
we allow only for inexorable forces of history then we
utterly diminish ourselves as human beings. On the other
hand, all of us act within a social context. Geological and
volcanic imagery suggest the momentum of history, while
telling the individual stories of victims, resistors, survivors
and perpetrators reminds us that every action counts.
Much of The Gossamer Wall is
written in quite formal verse.
Why did you choose the
particular verse structures
you used?
Any poem is a combination
of content and form,
however strict or loose. The
content of each section and
often every separate poem
demands discernment and
choice of form. For instance the pivotal section, ‘Figures’,
which deals with the concentration camps, is a series of
sonnets. Sonnets are often associated with Elizabethan
love poems. It seems that overwhelming experiences,
whether it’s love or suffering, often need to be held by a
strong form.
How would you characterise the way the Holocaust is seen
in modern Ireland?
The worrying thing is that it may not be deeply considered at
all. We’re flooded with stimuli but the trivial can so often
drown out the significant. However, I was heartened by the
thoughtful reaction of many people to The Gossamer Wall. I
was struck by how for many it resonated with Irish history.
The final section, ‘Prisoners of Hope’, seems to ring true to
how we all cope with trauma. Evil does not have the last
word and in order to refuse the narrowings of any ideologies,
we embrace the fullness of life in all its richness:
A raucous glory and the whole jazz of things…
We feast to keep our promise of never again.
Interview by Alicia McAuley
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