The political power of murals

Last night I was privileged to be part of a panel at the Tate Modern holding a discussion with each other and the audience on “What can murals do?”. Each panelist gave a 5 minute presentation. This was mine.

I’Il tell you what I don’t like. I don’t like statues. They literally place one person on a pedestal for achievements of the many. But I love murals as a beautiful expressive form to celebrate collective struggles. They use the everyday urban fabric to remind us: something momentous happened here. They summon us to action today.

Three examples are especially meaningful for me, but I hope they will resonate with you too, in these times. They are about courageous uprisings from below – the dignity of resistance against oppressors, persecutors, exploiters and fascists.

The first commemorates  the iconic clash of fascism and anti-fascism on 4 October 1936, when thousands of uniformed, jackbooted fascists, inciting violence and hatred, sought to invade the streets where tens of thousands of working class Jews eked a living, They tried to win the local Irish Catholic community against the Jews. On the day the most bloody clashes were in Cable Street, where many Irish united with Jews to build barricades, to physically stop them. The fighting was with the police, ordered by the Home Secretary to facilitate the fascists free speech and movement.

The mural graces the side wall of St Georges Town Hall on Cable Street.  It was commissioned In 1976 after a campaign by local writers, poets, artists who hatched their cultural creations in the basement of that building.

Every 5 years there is a memorial march. In 2016 I was convenor of Cable Street 80. We marched from Altab Ali park in Whitechapel – named for a young Bengali sweatshop worker murdered in a racist attack in 1978 – to a rally near the mural. The artwork is so dramatic, you can almost hear it. One commentator wrote: “Every space has action, perspective is a whirlpool.” For me It is a clarion call for resistance today.

Also in 1976, when work began in Cable Street, an industrial dispute broke out in a photo processing factory in Willesden, mostly staffed by poorly paid “citizens of Empire – South Asian migrant women plus Irish and Caribbean workers. When one worker was dismissed for allegedly working too slowly, some fellow workers immediately came out in solidarity.  When a  manager compared workers to “chattering monkeys”, Jayaben Desai  replied ‘What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo.  In a zoo, there are many types of animals.  Some are monkeys that dance on your fingertips, others are lions who can bite your head off.  We are the lions, Mr. Manager’. She led a walk out of 137 workers. An uprising.

Union groups across Britain came to the picket lines – the most remarkable, miners from Yorkshire’s white monocultural pit villages gave solidarity to Asian women migrant workers. Postal workers boycotted the company. Students came too. I nursed a large bump below my knee on the way back to Leeds Uni after a policemen kicked me. This fight for union recognition won great community support.

In difficult times, economically, the two year strike ultimately failed but inspired campaigns for change. It is celebrated in two murals unveiled in 2017 – one in a small backstreet opposite the factory site, now converted into flats. But on the main road, Dudden Hill Lane, is a stunning 28metre-long mural created in community workshops facilitated by artist Ann Ferrie. Participants  included families of the strikers and schoolchildren. Archive photographs from the strike became stencils that were screenprinted, photographed, then digitally composited into artwork and printed on to boards. People of all artistic abilities saw their work in the final piece.

We travel eastwards for my third example in the heart of what was the Warsaw Ghetto from 1940-43. A mural on a school building by, Dariusz Paczkowski, depicts a defiant Marek Edelman, a daffodil in his fist, and a brick wall. Edelman, a Jewish marxist, and anti-nationalist, was Second in Command in the three-week uprising of a few hundred starved combatants with improvised weapons against  the armed might of the Nazis. He wrote a searing memoir called The Ghetto Fights and always stressed it was a collective uprising whose participant had already survived two and a half years in the  ghetto through a culture of mutual aid and countless quiet acts of daily resistance by so many.

I met him briefly in 1997. Last year I was in Warsaw for the 80th anniversary of the ghetto uprising. I took part in the alternative ceremony led by grassroots anti-racist and anti-fascists, in contrast to the militaristic official ceremony, brimming with Polish and Israeli flags.

Edelman died in 2009. He pioneered these alternative ceremonies, knowing that this history belonged neither to Polish nor Israeli nationalists. He said “we fought for dignity and freedom not for territory nor for a national identity.”

The words in Polish on this mural could not be more apt today. “Hatred is easy. Love requires effort and sacrifice.”

Who is remembered and what is understood on Yom Hashoah? Critical thoughts…

I have taken part in Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations, on 27th January, marking the day that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, since 2001, when it was established in Britain. But the Holocaust commemorations I was first regularly attending and participating in, from the early 1980s, were organised in London’s East End by the Friends of Yiddish.

These took place on April 19th – the anniversary of day the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began – and were conducted through readings, memories, poetry and song in the language spoken by the majority of its millions of Jewish victims. These small, very emotional gatherings –usually around 25-35 people – included Holocaust survivors who were ensuring that the memory of those who were exterminated lived on in their own precious language.

What also struck me powerfully was that the chair of this event and lead-speaker, Majer Bogdanski a bundist (Jewish socialist), whose wife, Esther and most of his family were murdered, would always honour, in addition to the millions of Jewish victims, the “tsigayner” (Gypsies/Roma), whom he reminded attendees “were murdered in the same way for exactly the same reason”.

Yom HaShoah – Israel’s national day of remembrance of the 6 million Jews who were murdered –which falls on a different day here each year as it is marked according to the Jewish calendar – leaves me with different feelings: uneasy feelings.

Every year, when it comes around, I have two quotes in my head. One is from Boaz Evron, a left wing Israeli writer who died a few years ago, who wrote a brilliant and controversial essay in 1983 which began: “Two awful things happened to the Jewish people in the present century: the Holocaust – and the lessons drawn from it.” The other is from Marek Edelman, the Bundist Polish Jewish socialist and lifelong anti-Zionist, Second in Command during the Warsaw ghetto Uprising. He said: “We fought for dignity and freedom… not for a territory, nor for a national identity.”

In his essay, Evron rails against narrow nationalist and mystical interpretations of the Holocaust which locate it outside of history, and focus on it as an exclusively Jewish event, which Israel’s leaders (who had recently conducted the horrific war in Lebanon) have tied to Israel’s national fate, as seen through their eyes alone.

During that war in Lebanon, in which you had the first significant refusal to fight by many dissident Israeli army reservists, the murderous ultra-right-wing government of Begin and Sharon described the Palestinian leader, Yassir Arafat, under siege in Beirut, as “Hitler in his bunker”.

Boaz Evron

Edelman stayed in Poland and remained a resolute anti-nationalist, and an internationalist who called out racism and human rights abuses wherever they occurred, and he too gave the lie to the dominant Israeli historiography. He was treated as persona non grata in Israel, abused through its media, and, through the intervention of Holocaust historians at Yad Vashem, was denied honorary degrees for which he had been proposed at Israeli universities.Both Evron and Edelman are no longer alive. How much we could do with their collective wisdom today! You can find Evron’s article in this edition of Shmate “an American journal of progressive Jewish thought:

Marek Edelman

By chance, this year, in our calendar here, Yom HaShoah coincides with International Roma Day (the 50th anniversary of the first World Roma congress in Orpington, Kent in 1971). Events of the last week have done so much to heighten consciousness among progressives of the continuing oppression of Gypsy, Roma, Traveller communities

And tonight, who is the guest speaker invited, shockingly, by Liberal Judaism organisers in Britain? Tsipi Hotovely, Israel’s new and current ambassador in Britain: an ultra-nationalist, supporter of racist settlers, an advocate of ethnic cleansing, who labels and condemns Israeli-Palestinian love relationships as “miscegenation”, and describes the most catastrophic event in Palestinian history – the Nakba – as an “Arab lie”, “a made up story”. What, indeed has been learnt and understood?

Hope for a different future on Warsaw’s streets

Warsaw 19^th April, 2019, 12 noon. Crowds gather either side of the 11 metres high Ghetto Fighters’ monument made of granite that, ironically, was sourced by the Nazis. They intended to build a monument to mark their victory in Warsaw. They never did. Warsaw was a city of resistance. They would have had to build it on rubble in any case. Their only way of suppressing the people of Warsaw, ultimately, was by destroying large sections of it. They ghettoised the Jews who had made up a third of the city’s pre-war population, and deported most of them to the death camp at Treblinka. They put down a remarkable, three-week long guerrilla campaign by hundreds of barely-trained fighters aged from 13-40 years of age. They terrorised Warsaw’s non-Jews, defeating the uprising they led 16 months later. Small numbers of Jews who survived the burning of the ghetto in 1943 were hidden but emerged to fight in the ’44 city uprising.

Sirens blast out for one minute, during which we are united in silence, but the ceremonies on either side of the memorial are remarkably different.

On one side, armed soldiers, uniformed choirs, and the national flags of Poland and Israel, two countries whose current governments are themselves part of a tide of ultra-nationalism that threatens to bring back the dark days of the 1930s.

On our side of the memorial, the hope for a different future manifests itself. A bright pink/purple banner has the slogan “We will outlive them!” in several languages including Yiddish – the mother tongue of Warsaw’s Jews that Hitler’s forces tried to to bury with the Jews. But on this day, nearly 75 years after Hitler died, Yiddish words are again sung on Warsaw’s streets.

Our flags and banners are internationalist and anti-nationalist. Red flags with the symbols of the Jewish Socialist Bund, who fought for better lives for oppressed workers from their inception in 1897, and who, together with other left-wing currents, were the backbone of resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland. Alongside the Bund flags is one with the International Brigade colours celebrating those who left Poland to fight Franco’s fascists in Spain. One side of the banner is in Yiddish – underlining the role played by internationalist Jews in the Naftali Botwin company of the Dombrowski Battalion.

I am there myself as part of a contingent of the Jewish Socialists’ Group (JSG) in Britain acting to express international solidarity and to strengthen our own links to the Bundist past and present. We have spent a study week in Warsaw, choosing this particular week so that on the Friday we could be part of this alternative ceremony.

After a short initial speech from Zuzanna Hertzberg – one of the key organisers – a choir from a Warsaw school that emphasises its multicultural curriculum, sings resistance songs in Yiddish. Few, if any of them, are Jewish but their diction is perfect and their identification with the meaning of what they sing shines through. Some songs are familiar, others new to us. We had spent the previous evening  with  “Warszawianka” – a revolutionary choir who led a workshop with us in the working class district of Praga.

Britain’s Jewish establishment disdain Yiddish in favour of Hebrew, representing Israel’s national culture as “Jewish culture” in the diaspora too. They help to repress the fighting history of the Bund in favour of “heroic” Zionist narratives. But we return to Britain with new Yiddish songs, learned in Poland from the revolutionary choir and the school choir.

In contrast to the strict and militaristic order being maintained by the more static “official” commemoration, ours is free-flowing. When we move, it is like a gently moving wave, which flows outwards then together again along our route to several stopping points. People, young and old, are wearing ordinary clothes. Friends greet each other warmly. Our own improvised JSG placards, made an hour before the ceremony, attract lots of positive attention.

We stop on the corner of the square that holds the Fighters’ Monument, for more songs before we move over to the sculpture of a shattered world to represent the courageous Bundist, Szmul Zygielbojm who committed suicide in London as a political act, having read of the final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the allies’ failure at the Bermuda Conference to propose drastic rescue action. This monument is particularly poignant for us, as it was our group working together with Bundist survivors, who established a plaque for Zygielbojm in London in the 1990s. Here the cracks in the shattered world are soon crammed with daffodils, the flower resembling the Yellow star in bloom, which Nazis made Jews wear in Germany, and some other lands under Hitler’s regime. The Bundist, Marek Edelman, the last surviving member of the command group that led the Ghetto Uprising, brought daffodils to such ceremonies until he died in 2009

There are poems and readings in Polish. A young choir performs “Es brent” – “It is burning”: a call to arms, written by the Krakowian songwriter, carpenter and socialist, Mordkhe Gebirtig, in the wake of pogroms committed by Poland’s National Radical Camp in  the 1930s. Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party is today working to rehabilitate the reputation of the National Radical Camp of the 1930s. And here by Zygielbojm’s monument the authorities have placed the flags of Poland and Israel. Zygielbojm was as fierce a critic and opponent of Jewish nationalism as he was of Polish nationalism. He would be turning in his grave if he could see them.

From there we move towards the stark monument on a small hill at Mila 18, where most of the exhausted and hungry survivors from nearly three weeks of battles with the most powerful of armies, were trapped in a bunker surrounded by the Nazis. They did not let the Nazis have the pleasure of killing them: they killed themselves, but a group led by Marek Edelman dissented and sought to escape through the sewers. As we walked towards Mila 18 we were found among the crowd by Hania Szmalenberg,  who earlier in the week walked us through the memorials and showed us how she had re-landscaped the original memorial and and added one in English, Polish and Yiddish closer to the road.

Here, the choir sing Zog nisht keynmol as du geyst dem leytstn veg, (Never say you are going down the last road), and powerful poems and readings are performed. The crowd probably some 400 or 500 strong by now winds round into Stawski Street and ends its walk where thousands upon thousands of ghetto Jews of 1942 were forced to assemble – at the deportation point, the Umshlagplatz – whose beautiful memorial was also designed by Hania. More songs and meaningful words fill the air, including a recording of Marek Edelman reading Zygielbojm’s suicide note, before the crowd gradually disperse.

It had been the most incredibly powerful act of remembrance, empathy and solidarity. To see the symbols of the Bund on flags and t-shirts and hear the words of Bundists sung and spoken by a new generation of activists, 70 years after they finally disbanded their organisation in Poland under pressure from its new rulers, was truly moving and uplifting. As one of our placards read: Zol lebn der Bund! Long live the Bund!

Farewell to “Kazik” – the last of the ghetto fighters

Rapoport monument

In Warsaw there is a very moving trail of memorials to the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. It starts at the huge monument, designed by Nathan Rapoport and erected in 1948, and ends at the umschlagplatz  where the inmates of the ghetto – hundreds of thousands of Jews, and between 1,000-2,000 Romany Gypsies – were deported to the death camp of Treblinka, mainly in 1942.

Along this trail, individual memorial stones  recall individuals among the resistance led by the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa  (ZOB – Jewish fighting Organisation). Formed in 1942, it was an alliance of competing left-wing political organisations in the ghetto – Bundists, Communists, Zionists – united in a common struggle for freedom and dignity, or as one of their leaders put it, “to choose our way of death”. When the Uprising started on 19 April, just a few hundred fighters were still alive, all between 13 and 40 years of age.

Simcha Rotem – “Kazik”

On 30 April, while the battle was still raging, two of the fighters  left the ghetto through a secret tunnel. They were Simcha Rotem, a Zionist, known to his comrades as “Kazik”, and Zalmen Friedrych, a Bundist. They had been sent on a mission by their commander, Marek Edelman, also a Bundist, to reach ZOB resisters hidden outside of the ghetto, and to arrange a way of rescuing the fighters who were still alive by evacuating them through the sewers. They found their contacts and obtained maps and guidance from non-Jewish Poles who had worked in the sewers – part of the Polish Underground in every sense. Kazik organised the rescue of dozens of fighters, and, together with Friedrych, found hiding places for them in the forests, and in the city. He was just 19 years old at the time.

Zalmen Friedrych

Yesterday, 22 December 2018, Kazik, the last surviving fighter of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, died in Israel where he had gone to live after the war. Friedrych had been killed by Gestapo and German police when he was taking a group to a hiding place in a village called Pludy in 1943. Those he was taking were murdered too. Edelman, the last surviving member of the Uprising command group, and who helped to lead the fighters through the sewers, died in Poland in 2009.

They spent 48 hours in total in pipes just 28 inches high. They had reached the planned exit on Prosta Street, beyond the south-western edge of the  ghetto, at night, but the truck that Kazik had organised to collect them could not get there safely at that time because of a curfew imposed by the occupying Nazi forces. He had arranged for a truck that moved furniture. The driver was told that he would be moving the contents of a house. He was shocked to see that instead of furniture they would be loading people emerging from a sewer manhole.

A crowd had gathered around this remarkable scene, amazed at the sight of Jews emerging from the sewer-hole with sub-machine guns strapped to their waists. In his memoir, The Ghetto Fights, Marek Edelman wrote:

“…the trap door opened and one after another, with the stunned crowd looking on , armed Jews appeared from the depths of the dark hole… Not all were able to get out. Violently, heavily, the trap-door shut. The truck took off at full speed”

Edelman and Kazik were part of a unit of surviving ZOB fighters, hidden by non-Jews, who took part a year later in the general Warsaw Uprising led by Polish resisters in 1944.

The section of Prosta Street, where the fighters emerged, is a wide thoroughfare, overshadowed today by tall glass towers recently built by business corporations. It is far from the memorial route of Jewish martyrdom which crosses the north of the ghetto. Many visitors to Warsaw, following that memorial route in order to gain an insight into the history of the ghetto and the courageous resistance that fought there, do not reach this remarkable installation, unveiled in 2010, that stands where the fighters emerged from the sewers. It portrays a sewage canal rising vertically from the ground with disembodied hands symbolically climbing their way to freedom.

Next to it is a prism-shaped monument that lists those who escaped and survived the war, including Cywia Lubetkin, the sole woman among the uprising command group. It also lists those who escaped but died in combat during the war, and those who never made it out of the sewers.

The final panels commemorate Kazik (Simcha Rotem) and the group he collaborated with to achieve this incredible rescue operation, including the Polish sewer workers, Waclaw Sledziewskie and Czeslaw Wojciechowski. As we remember the heroism of Kazik and give thanks for his remarkable life which ended yesterday, we should remember too, all who fought for freedom and dignity in the uprising, and all who helped them beyond the ghetto walls.

Who is stepping over a line?

Last night I was outraged by Margaret Hodge’s disgusting abuse of the Jewish experience in the Holocaust to shield her appalling behaviour over a political difference with labour leader jeremy Corbyn on how the Labour Party combats antisemitism.

Today I’ve been getting more and more wound up by her outrageous assertion in the same interview (or rather “platform” – because in an interview you might be challenged), that there is “a very thin line” between supporting Palestinian rights and antisemitism.

She claimed that Jeremy Corbyn had crossed that line ( slandering him again as an antisemite, with the same lack of evidence but more self-control).

What an insult to the Palestinian people, living as refugees in exile or under occupation for so many decades, to believe that their assertion of their rights and their campaigning for human dignity might, at any moment, tip into antisemitism.

What a clear example of how the dubious IHRA examples will work in the Labour Party should they be accepted – any open campaigning for Palestinian human rights among Labour members will be forensically scrutinised, and have to continually prove that it wasn’t antisemitic. Guilty until proved innocent.

The only line connecting support for Palestinian rights and antisemitism should be a line of solidarity – for one, and against the other – as the fight against antisemitism and for Palestinian rights are actually part of the same fight… if you believe in equality.

But then again, I’m not convinced that advocates of Labour Friends of Israel such as Hodge and her backing vocalists Berger, Smeeth and Austin, and their transparent propaganda to defend the indefensible actions of the Israeli military under both Labour and Likud governments, have any conception of equal rights for Palestinians.

The Holocaust clearly features high in Margaret Hodge’s consciousness. It must do  because she keeps mentioning it in her political squabbles. I wonder, then, if she has heard of Marek Edelman, Jewish socialist, internationalist and anti-Zionist, second in command in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising?

He fought against fascist hooligans in Poland before the war, was incarcerated by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, fought in the guerilla battles of the Uprising for three weeks, escaped through the sewers after the Nazis burnt the ghetto to the ground, and hid with non-Jewish Polish socialists in Warsaw until the end of the war.

He came out of hiding to fight alongside other ghetto survivors and with fellow socialist Poles in the ’44 Warsaw Uprising.

Staying in Poland after the war Edelman held fast to his principles of equality and internationalism and was a fighter for human rights not jsut for Jews but for all, for freedom and dignity for all peoples, until he died in 2009.

And he absolutely detested Zionism – what it did to the Palestinians and how it continued to oppress them. He made contact with Palestinian students in Poland, and through his professional life (as a cardiologist) with Mustapha Barghouti, a prominent Palestinian doctor and human rights activist in the Occupied Territories.

Edelman saw no distinction and no contradiction at all between fighting for peace with justice and full equality for Palestinians, and fighting to his last breath against any expression of antisemitism. He did both courageously to the best of his ability at every stage of his life.

His motto for Jews was “Always with the oppressed. Never with the oppressors”.

I wonder if Hodge would have dared to suggest to this Holocaust fighter and survivor that his support for Palestinians might at any moment cross “a very thin line” into antisemitism?