‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times).
‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times). You’d have thought we were about to hear a particularly raunchy play, or some horrific accounts of death by torture, murder or old age. Behind Enemy Lines (Radio Two, Saturday) was shocking at times, and needed to be. That was the point.
John McCarthy, the Beirut hostage who was held captive by Islamic Jihad for almost five years, talked to others who had been imprisoned not for crimes committed but because of political hostilities and race hatred. We heard from Valdemar Ginsburg, a Lithuanian Jew who remembered the Sunday when his family, all 14 of them, spent the entire day arguing about whether or not they should leave their home before the Nazis arrived. They decided to stay on, hoping that it would be easier to survive under Nazi rule than in a Russian slave labour camp in Siberia. They made the wrong choice. He is the lone survivor, but carries within him horrific memories of when the Nazis surrounded the hospital in the ghetto, boarded up all the doors and windows, poured on petrol and set it alight knowing that all those inside would be burnt alive. ‘Our killers,’ he recalls, ‘were our Lithuanian neighbours; young men who volunteered to join the Nazis and who were prepared to do their dirty work.’
He was himself taken away to Dachau, where ‘we lost all our compassion. We became callous and selfish.’ But from that experience came his determination to survive so that he could bear witness to a terrible truth, ‘How easy it is to turn people into evil.’
Was this what we were being warned against in that cautionary trailer?
Or were we being protected from the appalling witness of Ibbi Davidowitz who had been interned in Auschwitz? She took pleasure in the luxury of having a shower for the first time in days, although she did think the soap had an unusually greasy feel and a peculiar smell. Only later did she discover that it was made from human fat, gathered from the ovens whose chimneys she could see at the other end of the camp. It was then she realised, ‘The air was saturated all the time with the smell of burning flesh.’
McCarthy himself was bundled into a sack and dumped in the boot of a car on several occasions as he was moved between safe houses by his captors. What he experienced, as did all those he talked to, was an intense psychological battle. As Alan Johnstone, the BBC reporter most recently held hostage by Palestinian militants in Gaza, explains, ‘They had everything in their hands…absolutely everything was in their hands and the only thing I had left was to attempt to control my own state of mind.’
Johnstone and McCarthy coped with the ordeal because of their ability to face it with determination (and their love of radio, listening to the World Service). The poet Lemn Sissay’s response to a solitary childhood spent with a series of foster parents and then moving between children’s homes was to spend a year refusing to wear shoes. He walked everywhere barefoot, in the hope that someone, anyone would ‘care enough to force me to put shoes back on’.
In Child of the State (Radio Four, Monday) Sissay took us through his attempts to retrieve the files that the state kept on him; files that might contain photos of him as a child, of which he has none. Five months later he is still waiting for them to be found by Wigan Social Services. ‘If no one is there to confirm my childhood memories, how can I be sure who I was, or who I am?’ he asked in a programme (produced by Jo Wheeler) that resonated with quiet courage.
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