Robert Fisk: Horrors we have no choice but to forget

Tag : Car Recorder Mechanism


I have a clear memory of a terrible crime that was committed insouthern Lebanon in 1978. Israeli soldiers, landing at night on thebeach near Sarafand – the city of Sarepta in antiquity– were looking for "terrorists" and opened fire on a car loadof female Palestinian refugees.
It took the Israelis a day before they admitted shooting at the carwith an anti-tank weapons, by which time I had watched civildefence workers pulling the dead women from the vehicle, theirfaces slopping off on to the road, an AP correspondent holding hishands to his face in shock, leaning against an ambulance, crying"Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ. I suppose all this is because of whatHitler did to the Jews." Save for his remark, however, all Iremember is silence. As if the whole scene was muted, soundsmothered by the dead.
Yet I was running a tape recorder for part of the time, and when Ilistened to the old tape again a few days ago, I could hear manywomen, weeping, cars passing, honking horns above the shrieks ofgrief. My own original notes state, in my handwriting, that "athrong of women stood crying and wailing". Yet all I remember nowis silence. A child was on a stretcher, cut in half, a girl in theback seat of the car, curled in death into the arms of an olderwoman. But silence.
I was reminded of all this by an especially powerful interviewconducted at Cannes with the Israeli director Ari Folman, who hasmade a remarkable film – Waltz with Bashir – aboutIsrael's later, 1982 invasion of Lebanon and about the "collectiveamnesia" of the soldiers who participated in this hopelessadventure.
Bashir Gemayel was the name of Israel's favourite ChristianMaronite militia leader who was elected president but almostimmediately assassinated. It's an animated film – a film ofcartoons, if you like – because Folman is trying to fill inthe empty space which the war occupies in his mind. Because hecan't remember it.
"I never talked about my army service," Folman said. "I got on withmy life without talking about it, without thinking about it. It waslike something I didn't want to be connected with whatsoever." Inone astonishing scene, Israeli soldiers come ashore in Lebanon– only to find that there is no one there. They are enteringan empty country, washed clean of memory.
Alas, Lebanon was not empty; more than 17,000 Lebanese andPalestinians, almost all civilians, died in that terrible war, andat the end of Folman's movie, the animation turns to reality withphotographs of some of the 1,700 Palestinian dead of the Sabra andChatila massacre, murdered by Israel's Phalangist allies while theIsraelis watched from high-rise buildings. It is Folman's dreamthat this film should be shown in an Arab country – given thedotage and stupidity of most Arab ministers, that is surely a hopethat will not be realised – but it did almost win the Palmed'Or at Cannes.
Amnesia is real. And it afflicts us all. But it is also a block tomemory. Take my old letter-writing friend, poet Don Newton. Hedropped me a note the other day, asking why humans have to createwars and mentioning, at the start, that he remembered the SecondWorld War and, in 1944, Germany's V2 missiles. What grabbed me bythe throat, however, was the penultimate paragraph of his letter,written with an eloquence I cannot match – and whose powerand suddenness will shock you, as readers, just as it shocked me.This is what Don wrote:
"I saw some of my friends killed around me when I was 12, when a V2punched into the road near where we were playing ... I was luckyand survived but ran over the road to find my father lying dead byour front gate. He looked for all the world like a grey, dustybroken puppet with his left arm laying next to him. It had beensliced off just above the elbow by a piece of shrapnel that hadalso cut through the oak gatepost behind him.
"Strangely enough, that sight seems to have wiped from my consciousmind all but a handful of memories of him and those are mostlyunpleasant in their associations, like the time I burst into thetoilet when I was only six, to find him sitting reading anewspaper, and blurted out that my younger brother by a year hadbeen run over. Peter died in hospital the next day without everrecovering consciousness. This 'amnesia' is, I suppose, a defencemechanism but I find it weird and unable to break. I am strugglingto put this problem into a poem and, hopefully, when it is out onpaper maybe the fog will clear?"
I find this letter – horror and the mundane inextricably,unbelievably mixed together – unanswerable. The V2 explosionturns into a father's death, the interruption in the lavatory intoa child's death. And a poem to clear the amnesia? Only a poet couldsuggest that. I didn't see my father die but I was sitting besidemy own mother when she died from the results of Parkinson's. Mymemory is clear – she choked on her own saliva because shecould no longer clear her throat – and I do remember sittingby her body and thinking (and here I quote another Israeli, a fineand brilliant novelist), "I'm next!"
So I turned, of course, to a haiku in Don's latest collection ofpoetry, The Soup Stone, called "Mum's Death, 1982" – the samedate as Folman's Israeli invasion when he (and I) were trying tostay alive in Lebanon:
"Just sitting, waiting,
For your last slow breath.
Suddenly – it's here."
Which is about as close to death as you can get in verse. And therereally is a silence at the end.
Robert Fisk's new book, 'The Age of the Warrior: SelectedWritings', a selection of his Saturday columns in 'TheIndependent', is published by Fourth Estate
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