Owshvits

I write this into my notebook, outside the cinema hall during my nth viewing of The History Boys. Despite trying my best to read and write, I keep finding myself drawn to watch certain scenes again.

One particular draw is the Holocaust debate that the class get into. It’s truly rare and excellent cinema.

We sit in our comfy seats, in the huge darkened room as the Oxbridge hopefuls discuss the ‘problems’ of the Holocaust with their two differently inspiring teachers. We have the old artful eccentric Mr Hector (played by Richard Griffiths) and the young Mr Irwin, the post-modern devil’s advocate – provoking thought, not truth. They neatly represent the two polarising approaches to history that Bennett is trying to convey.

Hector teaches passionately from his instinct; his feeling, and he is unable to find words to deal with the Holocaust. A fairly common problem. He is unwilling to expand on such a close-for-comfort subject in history. He makes a groaning sigh when Irwin brings it up. He cannot bear to articulate on theories of such a memorably real and recent horror. Going through the motions of debate for this subject seems artlessly distasteful.

Irwin’s job is to help the boys get beyond intelligence, facts and competence. Their task now is to be ‘not boring’. His job description in the film is literally to get the boys through their Oxbridge interviews, and he is painfully aware of the need to say something new or at least controversial - debatable. History, for the sake of scholarship, becomes not truth, just an interesting take on something that happened.

Hector asks the question that filled my mind as I strolled around Auschwitz a few years ago – “what is appropriate?” Nothing is appropriate.

“Do people hold hands? Are they smiling?”

Yes, of course they are. They are humans. That’s what humans do, regardless of setting, of appropriateness. Is it inappropriate to express love in a touristically inhabited ex-murder camp? Surely love is always appropriate? This was not our suffering, afterall, why should we suffer?

One can walk the enormous grounds, stare at manmade gaschambers, breathe in the atmosphere clamouring with sheer death, but I suppose there will always be a sense of detachment. Sandwiches must be eaten. Jokes must be told.

How else to face such an enormous stadium of death?

I, for one, was silenced. I was shocked. And I was, as it happens, disgusted by my colleagues in tourism; the other disparate bum bags and camcorders who had for some variety of reasons, found themselves in this most chilling of places. They were taking photos of each other. They were dicking around. Smiling, laughing, some of them.

Everything seemed inappropriate. I guess that’s the Englishman in me.

I just wanted everyone to shut up.

I could only manage silence. I had gone there with a friend, and there was nothing to do but separate and wander the grounds in solitary contemplation.

So then - 'We must not forget!'

It's scrawled in graffiti all over the place. It's written on big memorial artworks. It's the same phrase, rattling in my head, that makes me heave with anguish every time the news decides to let us know about some far flung place where they are tearing each other apart.

Not everyone, it seems, agrees to remember. (Yes, everyone's looking at you, Israel.)

In the film, the boys become particularly impassioned and articulate during the debate. Despite the appropriateness of silence, the Holocaust is the one subject guaranteed to rile the quietest of minds. Posner eventually points out that he is Jewish; he lost relatives in the Holocaust and that it’s hard to be so dispassionate, or even, God forbid, Nazi-sympathising. Why should he do this? (He later jokes, walking out of his exam, that he's never been so kind about Hitler, the misunderstood man.)

And yet that is exactly what Irwin needs to cultivate in them. His style of history wins the debate in the film. Hector eventually yields to silence.

It is precisely this debating that my education did its best to hone in me. To debate for its own sake. Opinions? Well, these become increasingly unclear; hazed in a blur of conflicts, vested interests, and an increasing sense of pointlessness and futility.

I get that a lot these days.