Gone but not forgotten
Anne Applebaum
KONIN by Theo Richmond Cape, £18.99, pp. 520 As it happens, I have been to Konin. Driving to Warsaw, I once stopped there to eat lunch in a down-at-heel restaurant where they made us pay a deposit on the silverware. My sister was with me, on her first visit to Poland: she wouldn't eat the food when it came, she didn't like the way it looked. All around us, men were drink- ing beer and smoking, staring at us.
To me, Konin seemed like the worst sort of colourless Polish town. Too small to have the energy of Warsaw or Krakow, too big to have the charm of a village: narrow streets, narrow houses, narrow minds. I thought nothing of it — which just goes to show how shallow the impressions of a traveller can be. For although it took some digging and some patience — seven years worth of digging and patience — Theo Richmond discovered that there is more to Konin than first meets the eye: much more, in fact. Hundreds of dramatic stories have been played out inside Konin's streets. At the same time, all of the things that were most charming about pre-war Polish life horse-drawn milk carts, street markets once existed in Konin too.
Or, should I say, small-town Polish- Jewish life. Although he is sometimes interested in the Catholic Poles who still live in Konin Theo Richmond's real focus is its shtetl: of the 13,000 inhabitants of Konin before the war, 3,000 were Jews, among them a handful of his relatives, and a large number of his parents' friends. Both of his parents had themselves been born there, although they emigrated to Britain just before the First World War. Richmond writes that as a child, 'disengaged from the adult voices talking among themselves, I heard a name recur again and again: Konin, Konin, Konin.'
He thought nothing of it, as most children wouldn't — until, 40-odd years later, he took time off from life as a docu- mentary film-maker and began to track down the Jewish inhabitants of Konin. This book tells both of how he found them — in Omaha, in Tel Aviv, in London — and of what they told him: about Konin, about their lives in Konin — and about how they escaped from Konin most of them with nothing but the rags on their backs. The Nazi occupation of Konin utterly destroyed the town's ancient Jewish community, as it destroyed all of Poland's Jewish communi- ties. For that reason, this is neither a short story, nor an easy story to tell.
Yet Richmond tells it superbly. He had two pieces of luck. One was his choice of subject: how extraordinary so many ordi- nary people's lives were between 1939 and 1945! Some of Konin's remaining Jews sur- vived Auschwitz; others fought with the Polish partisans. Others made miraculous escapes, while others witnessed the murder of their parents and children. Most had to make new lives in new countries, and the tales of their accommodation to life in Israel or America are part of this story too. In Dallas Mike Jacobs spends his free time lecturing on the Holocaust (`officially, I've been talking since 1956. Unofficially, I've been talking since I left Mauthausen'). In New York, Motek Mysch still runs the Konin society, and upsets Richmond right at the beginning, telling him, 'you are 25 years late': too many of the 'best' Koniners are already dead.
Richmond was also lucky enough to stumble upon a subject which was bound to invoke nostalgia. These are people who know that when they die, the memory of an entire way of life will vanish with them: they were as anxious to speak to Richmond as he to them. Indeed, he often feels that he is racing against time, that his most important sources are dying before he has had the chance to extract from them the details that only they can know. Was he right? Was I too late?' he keeps asking himself.
But what makes this book truly unique is its honesty. Richmond does not approach his interviewees with any preconceptions about Poles or Jews, America or Israel, about the Holocaust or communism or any- thing else. His Konin in not the mytholo- gised 'native land' which so many immigrants invent for their own purposes, and his descriptions are very straight-' forward. When he is painfully bored, at a meeting of Konin survivors, he says so: 'I come away despondent, feeling trapped in my Englishness . . . . ' He is not lacking in emotion: this is his own history too, after all, this is the town he could have grown up in, these people are his parents' milieu, their fate could have been his own. But he never lets his own sentiments prevent him from being genuinely interested in what really happened, what people really felt, what they really remember now. He never tries to fit their ideas into a scheme of his own.
It seems not to have been an easy jour- ney, as one incident will illustrate. Late in the book, when Richmond has finally gone back to visit Konin itself, he meets a Pole — a member of the Polish resistance who witnessed the brutal mass murder of many of Konin's Jews in a local forest. The meeting is fraught with difficulties: the man is deaf, his wife makes the interview diffi- cult, there are language problems. The scene is terribly sad: Richmond struggles with the knowledge that he will never really know what happened in the forest, that he will never make real contact with this man who was actually there.
Finally, though, Richmond gets up to leave, feeling that at least 'I had gained from being in his presence.' The former resistance fighter gets up too, bows and speaks in Polish. His wife translates: 'He says you have great luck that he, the last, the only one who still lives of those who saw those terrible things, is still here — and he says you are the first to come and see him.'
One guesses, somehow, that Richmond will be the last as well.
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