How was that possible?
I first heard about it from my mother who had watched the same newsreel in the Capitol cinema on the Antrim Road in north Belfast. People thought at first, she said, it was some kind of a B-list horror movie, ‘made-up’, and then as reality dawned, others got sick, screamed, left the cinema in a state of shock and revulsion.
When she told me about it I must have been about the age she was (or a little younger) when she saw that newsreel, and it stuck with me — her impressionable youth, in the house of dreams, where she and her girl friends went twice weekly, before and during the war, when Belfast had a palace of dreams on every main road, where that Pathé film made the impact it did, caught between horror and disbelief. In ‘Autobiographies’ Derek Mahon imagines a similar time:
Gracie Fields on the radio!
Americans in the art-deco
Milk bars! The released Jews
Blinking in shocked sunlight …
John Montague likewise records in his sequence of poems, Time in Armagh, heavily influenced by World War 2, the older poet’s view of his growing up ‘at the periphery of incident’. The sequence is scored with war — ‘A bomber’s moon’ that brings destruction to Belfast (the Blitz of 1941) or, in ‘Waiting’, ‘the camp where German / Prisoners were kept’, ‘the guard towers rising, aloof / As goalposts’, leads, ‘years later’ to ‘another camp — / Rudshofen, in the fragrant Vosges —’
The stockade where they knelt the difficult,
The laboratory for minor experiments,
The crematorium for Jews and gypsies
Under four elegant pine towers, like minarets.
In his recollection ‘The smell of woodshavings’ … from the German prisoners of his childhood ‘plugs / My nostrils’ with the adult experience of ‘a carrion stench’.
Elsewhere in Time in Armagh history stalks the corridors of memory only to emerge in ‘A Welcoming Party’ with the starkest of images of human degradation and the pitiless vision of ‘That final newsreel of the war’:
From nests of bodies like hatching eggs
Flickered insectlike hands and legs
And rose an ululation, terrible, shy;
Children conjugating the verb, ‘to die’.
The contradictory beat of Montague’s poem captures the dual life of that time — as war comes to an end, the civilian victims of the Holocaust are released but life cannot return to normal:
That long dead Sunday in Armagh
I learnt one meaning of total war
And went home to my Christian school
To belt a football through the air.
‘A Welcoming Party’ is a powerful, humbling poem in its truthfulness, depicting the meaning of ‘our parochial brand of innocence’ as ‘all we had to give’.