Flowers grow on the dung heap, blades of grass squeak between concrete blocks, and life sometimes sprouts from rubble. Horror can produce beauty, and that’s what writer and journalist Frank Westerman tells us in three episodes Art behind barbed wire shows. He travels by train to the former concentration camps in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Poland in search of the good, the beautiful and the beautiful that was created there, whether or not under duress. Music, drawings, songs, advertising brochures, carved busts, wooden chairs, replicas of sailing ships for the home on the mantelpiece. What the SS asked, the prisoners made.
The first episode, Monday evening, passed through the greenhouses and fields of Dachau, where SS leader Heinrich Himmler experimented with medicinal plants and herbs. Forced laborers cultivated the land next to the barracks, prisoners meticulously traced the crops that grew there. The goal was to brew a herbal infusion, packed with vitamin C, for the soldiers on the battlefield. All ingredients, of course, completely biodynamically grown.
Tuesday evening we were in Buchenwald. The camp commander there loved German folk songs – Liegt ein dörflein mitten im Walde, that work. He offered a reward for the prisoner who would make a new Buchenwald song. Ten marks to the winner, and if no one came up with anything good, no food. A librettist and a composer set a text to a cheerful Viennese melody. Seven thousand prisoners had to rehearse for four hours after work had been done – in the middle of winter – at the roll call area. First line of the chorus: “O Buchenwald, I cannot forget you, because you are my destiny.”
Torture and movie nights
The twin brother of the draftsman Anton Pieck, deported to Dachau as a communist, drew their portraits on the orders of the guards, while clandestinely he sketched the daily scenes in the camp. The lice checks, the stacked dead, the overcrowded barracks. Tortures coexisted with movie nights, executions with concerts, forced labor with colorful evenings of acrobatics and dance.
On to Theresiënstadt, where prisoner Jo Spier, cartoonist from Zutphen, was ordered to make a souvenir for visitors to the ghetto. In 1944 a delegation of the Red Cross came by, and the run-down ghetto was given a complete makeover. To disguise the lie even more, there was Jo Spier’s picture album. He drew Jews in the coffee house, a puppet show in a children’s home, families relaxing in the open air. In episode three, on Wednesday, Westerman travels to Mauthausen. Auschwitz is the final station.
‘Keeping art and culture alive’ was what dancer Ahmad Joudeh did in the Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus where he lived until he was 31. Özcan Akyol (Eus) receives him in his barber chair in a special series of The cut guest which airs this week. In The refugee guest he speaks to five people who fled from threats, violence and oppression. Ahmad was there on Tuesday evening. A refugee who could not even flee legally, because he and his father were born in a refugee camp and therefore have no nationality. A stateless citizen of no man’s land has nowhere to go.
In the camp, Ahmad gave dance lessons to children. A dancing young man, Eus says euphemistically, is not really liked by Islamists. The camp was at one point under IS control. To which Ahmad replies that dancing is his life and that he would not let what lives in him be destroyed, when everything around him has already been destroyed. Reason why he has a tattoo on the back of his neck – where the sword cleaves the head of the neck – with, in Arabic: ‘Dance or death’.