The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [103]
I remember a tram stop with a clock next to it where, before the war, my mother and I used to wait. The clock had little lines instead of numbers. It disturbed me so much that there were no numbers on that clock, just anonymous little dashes, as if time meant nothing and simply lurched on endlessly, meaninglessly, anonymously. I used to try to predict when the minute hand would jump forward. I tried to count the seconds, to guess when it would suddenly seize the next little line, but it always got ahead without me. While we waited at that stop for the #14 tram, my mother would comment that it was really a very foolish place to put a clock because it always reminded you how overdue the tram was and how long you'd been waiting and how late you were. I remember the feel of her wool coat against my cheek as I stood beside her, her sure fingers around mine. That little hand on the clock jumping forward without me is the symbol for me of how my mother disappeared …
A wall does not separate; it binds two things together.
In the ghetto, a woman came to visit my mother. She was an old schoolfriend or a relative; I don't remember, yet for my mother the nature of this relationship would surely have been the heart of this story. I do remember her hat – a pie-plate contraption tilting over her ear – which she didn't remove all through tea. I waited for it to fall off and land in her cup. I sat on the chair in the corner next to a little wooden table with my cup of ‘fairy tea’ – hot water and milk. The woman gave my mother some photographs taken when they were children. After she left, my mother and I sat together and looked at them. The season in the photographs was summer, yet outside our window that afternoon it was snowing. I remember thinking about that fact, the first time it occurred to me that weather was preserved in photographs. And because the sun was so bright, there were many shadows. In one photo in particular my mother's shadow was very pronounced beside her and I couldn't keep from looking at it, that shadow lying across the pavement almost as tall as she was. And in another, there was the shadow of someone who had obviously been standing near to her, but who was outside the frame of the picture. I couldn't stop thinking about it afterwards, that my mother had stood next to someone – a quarter of a century before – whose identity I would never know and yet whose shadow was recorded forever.
Photos from those years have a different intensity; it's not because they record a lost world, and not because they are a kind of witnessing – that is the work of any photograph. No. It's because from 1940 it was illegal for any Pole, let alone a Polish Jew, to use a camera. So any photo taken by a Pole from that time and place is a forbidden photo – whether of a public execution or of a woman reading a novel quietly in her bed.
German soldiers, on the other hand, were encouraged to bring their Kine-Exakta or Leica with them to war, to document the conquest. And quite a few of those photos survive in public archives, such as those of Willy Georg, Joachim Goerke, Hauptmann Fleischer, Franz Konrad … Others remain in family albums, photos sent home to parents and sweethearts: the Eiffel tower, ghetto streets, the Parthenon, public hangings, an opera house, a mass grave, gas vans, and other signs of German ‘tourism’ … These photos were sent home, where they were kept next to the family photos of weddings, anniversaries, birthday parties, lakeside holidays. Although there were certainly photojournalists whose job it was to shoot for propaganda, many of the photosoldiers remain anonymous, their snapshots part of the great pile of images that make up the twentieth century …
I used to spend many hours watching from the window in