Unexpected Journeys

The journey started at the Berlin Train station. I was travelling with my family; my son, daughter-in-law and grandchild. Rowan was looking for The Guardian to read; as it wasn’t there, he bought a copy of the New York Times. On the front cover was an article on the separation of children from families on the US-Mexican border. Children as young as 6 months separated from their parents and caregivers, crying, covered in sores and shit and deeply distressed. The smell was so intense that the only way that the people working there could handle it was to become robotic. So expressed a worker who had resigned from his post. News like this is horrific. One wants to do something. Anger, fury, dismay, disbelief, helplessness, such emotions spill through, followed by a bleakness, sitting on the grey platform under the grey summer sky, waiting for the train.

We were catching the night train from Berlin to Krakow. There was in my mind a romance about catching night trains and I was looking forward to seeing Krakow. Krakow was a famous city in the Renaissance, a place of great cultural diversity, it was a city in fairy tales, it was a place where art, philosophy and literature could be explored.

And yet, as I looked out the train window absorbing the Polish landscape, farmhouses, beech forests and the gold colouring in the pine forest that caught the evening light; I found myself thinking of the Second World War and its aftermath. And as the night progressed I realised that this same train track would have been used to take the Jews to Auschwitz from Berlin. And over and over in my mind's eye I saw people stripped of all dignity, shaved, starving, deprived of water, crowded, bodies, eyes and emptiness. I was on an unexpected journey as the train slowed and stopped and rattled. Disrupted sleep as conductors checked tickets, and empty train stations were announced as we slowed and paused and moved on through the early hours, until we finally arrived at dawn in Krakow.

These visions through the night stayed with me but I did not delve into them. We were randomly wandering through the old city, looking for a place to eat breakfast, to settle before exploring the city further. Daniela and I wanted to see the modern art gallery and our wandering drew us through the old Jewish quarters, where we came across a Jewish bookshop. We browsed through books on Jewish mysticism, which I love, and as I picked up books of Gershom Scholem’s I discovered Elie Wiesel and started looking through Night. Night is the first book of a trilogy that Elie Wiesel wrote about his experience in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In Night everything is inverted, every value destroyed. There is also a Jewish tradition that the beginning of a new day begins at night. Elie Wiesel wrote: “In Night… everything came to an end – man, history, literature, religion, God. There is nothing left. And yet we begin again with night.”

I was starting to piece together the journey I had begun on the train as we crossed the river and arrived at the modern art gallery. It was here that my emotions got ripped open with an installation called Violence and Memory. I stood still, surrounded by another installation of Motion as the Stuff of Art, with clocks and sounds and blood-covered knives moving up and down; and there on the wall to my left was image after image of Polish children. These children were separated from their parents as part of an anthropological and ethnic study for German authorities during the Second World War.
I had to go outside and there was such a release of grief, and I was grateful to the art to touch the emotions. It is the emotions that express the complexity that the intellect cannot grasp.

There is another part to this unexpected journey. Because we were uncertain of how long we would be hiking in the mountains south of Krakow, we didn’t book our return train journey. In so doing we managed to get another night train back to Berlin, this train would take fifteen hours, leaving Krakow at 10.15 pm and arriving at lunchtime in Berlin. It was during this night, particularly in the early hours of the morning, that I put my head in the seat and curled up my legs with a sleeping bag over my head and couldn’t stop crying. The sound of the train became like a rocking, moving, rhythmic beat. The crank of the wheels as it slowly moved over the tracks as if it was no longer a modern train. I had a vivid and extraordinary vision of my mother holding me as I felt the terrible separation between mothers and their children. Through my emotion I experienced broken parts reuniting as if small lights that had lost their shine gathered momentum and joined with each other. We were in a compartment in a carriage going back. Arriving at a beginning again, reconnecting the pieces.

As I moved into the grief I also glimpsed the New Zealand native plant Fuschia, kotukutuku, its rainbow of magenta, blues and purples. Feeling is a subjective realm, where experiences lie in the present, there is a connection of mood and colour, our inner world of our feeling like an inner rainbow. The way kotukutuku works through colour and its essence enabled me to stay with the feelings that rose up in me without losing my sense of my own inner being. In the train coming back, as the early dawn light started to seep into the darkness, the feelings began to shift and settle, peace and home.
There was a repetition in this journey, a repetition of numbers, such a random and odd connection. We were in the same carriage as we had departed Berlin in, number 262, and in the same compartment and the same seat numbers. Numbers are important in Jewish mysticism, and in Auschwitz as part of the extreme stripping of identity people were given numbers. Later, as Daniela and I researched numbers, we found Block 66 – a children’s labour camp separated from the rest of the Buchenwald concentration camp by barbed wire.

In reflection, this unexpected journey was a land healing of people, land and journeys, the grief of separation of families, the cutting off from life, the dark night where all values are destroyed and the simple ability to attend to one’s self is taken away so there is nothing – the unknown destiny and unknown destination. All these pieces are layered and connected, that is how it is in these journeys. We need to enter into the feeling, for as a society by entering through this pain we are able to connect rather than become robotic in our responses. Art might enable us to open the door to the complexity of feeling. So did the slow movement of the train, so also does landscape.