Praying through poetry and with USPG: 27 January 2023

The train tracks in Auschwitz-Birkenau (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Christmas is not a season of 12 days, despite the popular Christmas song. Christmas is a 40-day season that lasts from Christmas Day (25 December) to Candlemas or the Feast of the Presentation next Thursday (2 February).

Throughout the 40 days of this Christmas Season, I have been reflecting in these ways:

1, Reflecting on a seasonal or appropriate poem;

2, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary, ‘Pray with the World Church.’

I interrupted that pattern for the past week to mark the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which came to an end on Wednesday.

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, and the theme for this year is ‘Ordinary People’. It focuses on the idea that it is ordinary people that facilitate genocide – and that those who are persecuted are ordinary people who belong to a particular group. My choice of a poem this morning is ‘Testimony’ by the Israeli poet Dan Pagis (1930-1986).

Dan Pagis was born in a German-speaking Jewish family in Bukovina, Romania (present-day Ukraine), and was interned in a concentration camp as teenager before escaping in 1944 and emigrating to Israel.

He wrote in Hebrew, a language he learned only as a teenager, and his first poems about the Holocaust appeared 25 years after the events. He also taught mediaeval Jewish literature at the Hebrew University.

His poem ‘Testimony’ draws attention to the experience of the victims of the Shoah, not the perpetrators. The perpetrators are just ‘uniforms and boots’; instead we are drawn the survivor’s voice.

Like so many survivors of the Holocaust and other traumas, the poet’s life is changed. He is more like smoke than a human being – a shade or shadow, in the central stanza, rather than an ‘image’.

In the Hebrew original, there is wordplay between these two words, as they differ only by one crucial letter (‘tzelem’ and ‘tzel’ are the words for ‘image’, and ‘shade’, respectively). Being a ‘shade’ or a shadow is a poignant and troubling description of life after trauma, and fits with this year’s theme for Holocaust Memorial Day.

Life does not simply return to ‘normal’ after events like those Pagis experienced. Moreover, the poet, who did nothing wrong, even feels the need to apologise to God in the last stanza – an example of the survivor’s guilt that has been well-documented amongst survivors of the Shoah and trauma in general.

The poet’s shadow-like existence is a challenge to the closure we seek in art and literature. Although the poet has lived to tell the tale, there is no happy ending here, no easy comfort. A simple contrast between light and dark is not appropriate here; the shadows persist even in the light of liberation.

The poem also voices anger at humanity: ‘No, no, they were definitely human beings’, reads the first line. The perpetrators were not monsters or animals. They were created in the image, they were humans like us.

The humanity of the perpetrators is a reminder of genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur. The only hope is that human beings ‘be the light in the darkness’, not the perpetrators of violence.

This poem directs our attention to the victims, in empathy, and to our shared human nature, in resolve. It is, perhaps, this journey as readers from smoky formlessness to anger and resolve that is this poem’s hope. Even so, the shadow-like existence of the survivor is a haunting and significant image.

A Holocaust memorial at the Jewish cemetery in Berlin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Testimony, by Dan Pagis (1930-1986):

No, no: they definitely were
human beings: uniforms, boots.
How to explain? They were created
in the image.

I was a shade.
A different creator made me.

And he in his mercy left nothing of me that would die.
And I fled to him, rose weightless, blue,
forgiving – I would even say: apologizing –
smoke to omnipotent smoke
without image or likeness.

The gates of Auschwitz (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

USPG Prayer Diary:

The theme in the USPG Prayer Diary last week was the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The theme this week is the ‘Myanmar Education Programme.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday with a reflection from a report from the Church of the Province of Myanmar.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (Holocaust Memorial Day) invites us to pray in these words:

Let us pray for the Rohingya people, denied citizenship in Myanmar and persecuted. May we never forget the Holocaust and work ceaselessly for justice for all ethnic minorities.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued Tomorrow

The Holocaust Memorial at the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Walking in the mist and fog in Tamworth and Comberford

Visiting Comberford Road and Comberford sites in Tamworth earlier this week (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

I was back in Tamworth and Comberford earlier this week to revisit a number of places associated with the Comberford family, including the Comberford Chapel in Saint Editha’s Church; the Moat House, the Comberford family’s Tudor townhouse on Lichfield Street; Comberford Road; Comberford village; and Comberford Hall.

Despite the cold mist and fog that enveloped most of the Midlands earlier this week, Tuesday was market day, and the town was colourful and lively. Staffordshire’s first poet laureate Mal Dewhirst writes in his poem ‘We are Tamworth’:

Market on Tuesdays and Saturdays,
for the purveyors of:
fleeces and fruit, cakes and clothes, trainers and towels,
books and batteries, rugs and rollers,
cheese and chutney, shoes and socks, games and gifts.

The mutilated effigy of William Comberford in the Comberford Chapel in Saint Editha’s Church, Tamworth (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

These days, the Comberford Chapel in the north transept of Saint Editha’s Collegiate Church is filled with the stock of the church shop as extensive work is carried out at the west end of the church to provide a new coffee shop, book shop and toilets.

As usual, there was a warm welcome in the church, but the temporary layout and arrangements made it difficult to take the photographs I wanted in the Comberford Chapel to update pages on my Comerford Family History site.

A newly-published history of Saint Editha’s, compiled and edited by Stan T Parry, devotes three pages to the Comberford Chapel, and including a photograph and a full transcription and translation of the Comberford monument, erected by Irish members of the Comerford family almost 300 years ago in 1725 – including the misspelling of Anglure as Anglunia.

The booklet also draws attention to the monument on the floor of the chapel which is ‘the mutilated figure of a knight in chain armour, with surcoat and hauberk, and sword belt carrying a cross-handled sword. The head rests upon a visor and the figure wears a collar. The legs and arms, with hands formerly in prayer, have gone. It has been suggested that it represents William de Comberford, one of the predecessors of the family who owned Comberford Hall and the Moat House in Tamworth.’

These details are very difficult to make out today, even for the keenest of eyes, and there is no explanation in the booklet that the monument may have been mutilated by Parliamentarians during the Civil War in the mid-17th century, in revenge for the Royalist activities of the Comberford family of the Moat House.

The old Peel School on Lichfield Street, Tamworth, looks sad and neglected (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

As I walked along Lichfield Street to the Moat House, it was sad to see that the old Peel School on Lichfield Street is still in a shabby and dilapidated state of neglect.

But this building still looks like a Victorian chapel. It was built as a school in 1837 for Sir Robert Peel, and some local historians suggest it may have been built reusing the materials of the private chapel of the Moat House, further west on the same side of Lichfield Street.

The Moat House on Lichfield Street, Tamworth … once the townhouse of the Comberford family (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

The Moat House is closed during the week, opening only at weekends. So, although the fog and mist made for low visibility I decided to head out to Comberford village, about 3 or 4 km north of Tamworth.

Here too, poor visibility made it difficult to take any good photographs, and the winter weather made it difficult to go for an afternoon walk through the fields. Instead, I took a stroll up the drive to Comberford Hall.

I have always found it difficult to get a taxi in Tamworth. When I called, I was told by two taxi firms that I would have to wait for 45 minutes. It took me less time than that to walk along Comberford Road and back into the centre of Tamworth.

The Tuesday market stallholders were packing up beneath Sir Robert Peel’s statue and in the arcades of the town hall. In that poem, Mal Dewhirst Tamworth repeats a popular one-liner about Tamworth ‘where the town hall is like an orange, it has Peel on the outside.’

As darkness closed in on Tamworth, still covered in mist and fog, there was time to catch a coffee before getting the train back to Milton Keynes.

Freezing fog and mist created poor visibility in the fields in Comberford earlier this week (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)