Auschwitz

Auschwitz: a place where millions were killed and which thousands now visit each year. A mass grave – and a tourist destination. The focus of this work of autobiographical fiction is on the sightseers – the curious that are drawn to visit. It is a book that questions our need to look: what is there to uncover, other than the difficulty of peering into such a place and into a subject that has been obsessively documented, yet can never really be understood? How to write about Auschwitz in the twenty-first century, in a time when the last generation of survivors is soon to be lost?

This is also a book that searches for a personal story. It opens on a local bus that takes Angela, her husband En (whose mother survived the holocaust where most of her family did not) and their two sons to Auschwitz sixty years after the holocaust, and ends in a pine forest outside Minsk where En’s grandparents were shot in May 1942.

The backbone of Auschwitz is a series of e-mails between the author and acclaimed American writer Raymond Federman. At the age of 14, Federman (now approaching 80) was hastily thrust into the small upstairs closet of their Paris apartment by his mother just before she, his father and two sisters were taken to Auschwitz, where they were killed. Federman also has spent a lifetime trying to find a language appropriate for the enormity of the holocaust and his part in its legacy, ultimately espousing laughterature – laughter as a means of survival.

This beautiful, powerful and innovative work experiments with new forms – correspondence, reflections, dreams, a travelogue – that mirror the fragmentary legacy of the holocaust itself and that, at the same time, capture its contradictions – and sometimes its absurdity.

Praise for Auschwitz:

'This remarkable novel ... Cutler's Auschwitz creates a category of its own ... Cutler's voice is undoubtedly a new voice of the post-Holocaust generations ... Her sophisticated and highly individual poetic style "shows the tracks of her labour" ... in an imaginative way and by doing so turns Cutler's debut into a superb novel on writing.' Scottish Review of Books

'Cutler does not preach or patronise, and her ability to deliver impressively poetic prose means that she never compromises the subject-matter. Her voice is refreshing, shocking and commanding, and represents an exciting departure for contemporary fiction.' New Welsh Review

‘Auschwitz stands like a tombstone for our civilisation. Angela Morgan Cutler has brilliantly infiltrated the borders of this landscape of desolation. Somehow she has found a voice that reflects the enormity of the horrors perpetuated there without being stifled by them. Unsentimental and richly worked … the words are more than mere messengers of thoughts and feelings – they glow with a life of their own … the whole package quite inimitable: the rarest quality in literature.’ Henry Woolf

‘Cutler writes like a British Hélène Cixous. Her invitation to visit with her the tourist attraction that modern-day Auschwitz has become is daring, shocking, profoundly moving – even, on occasion, funny. I loved its stylistic hybridity.’ Susan Sellers

‘When the story of the unspeakable has been told a thousand times, when the images of the unimaginable have been shown a thousand times, when the mind is numb - where do you go from there? You have to start anew. That is what Angela Morgan Cutler has done.’ Rex Bloomstein

About Angela Morgan Cutler

Angela lives in Cardiff with her two teenage sons and husband Ian. She worked for 10 years as a psychiatric nurse, trained as a fine artist and completed a Ph.D. in Critical & Creative Writing at Cardiff University. She has been running creative writing groups since 2000. Auschwitz is her first novel.

For more about the author see www.angelamorgancutler.com

An Interview with Angela Morgan Cutler

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

I first started writing when my two sons were born. I had finished 4 years in Art College and being pregnant it was no longer possible to hoist the heavy steel panels I was rusting and waxing into paintings. So from somewhere – maybe a necessity to keep working – I began writing, almost in secret, some afternoons while the babies slept for a couple of hours either side of me. It was years before I showed anyone - apart from En that is. And then there were long periods when I didn’t write and my paid work took over again. I don’t know if I felt inspired, it just kind of happened, came out in a great gush. It began as a more practical outlet for my work and in the end became more challenging than painting, I don’t know if that is true, but it felt like you could spend each day working with language and it would always get the better of you, it would always escape and this kept me returning - it’s a love hate relationship in many ways. Thinking back, I was always writing as a child but I didn’t consider this was writing. I wrote 20 page letters, kept journals.

I still don’t know if I think of myself as a writer – or if I ever will. As a child, and for years after, I was immersed in making images. But when I did make this shift from painting, I quickly realised that my writing defied categorisation and could not be slotted into convenient genres. When I found writers like Beckett, Cixous, Federman, Chawaf, Barthes, Deleuze, writers who were exiled to or from France, or were connected to the French language [even though I do not speak a word of French] I felt that I had found a place of association – a language that was like a kind of remembering somewhere inside me –a deep familiarity. Harold Pinter’s speech in Old Times had had the same effect many years before - made something slip. I didn’t know it at the time but hearing Kate’s final speech at the end of that play changed everything. I had never heard language like it, yet I knew it so completely. The same experience I’d had from the work of artists like Beuys, Keifer and more recently, Sam Taylor Wood, Sophie Calle, Eija- Liisa Ahtila. Well there are too many artists to mention - but I am inspired by so many things, each day, just walking down the street, finding a stray parrot in my tree. I grew up with a father who is a great story - teller. I love European films and could watch them all day long. Particularly Kieslowski and Bergman. Also, writing to Federman every day has been a completely freeing mad adventure in words.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Auschwitz? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?

I don’t know about inspiration … that is a problematic word. You could say, I got nowhere with it, or at least that’s how it felt at times; that it began with my refusal, I kept asking: what am I doing putting my nose to this subject, what am I thinking of ... You could spend a life time in or with or on Auschwitz and get nowhere. But then, yes, where is there to get … I committed myself to it, maybe that’s all I can say. One day I turned to face it and said yes to it and somehow it got inside me, and remains there now. I tried to give myself over to it as honestly as I could, attempted to find words where there are none but where there must be words … To keep the doubt visible sounds a bit clichéd, but that was important for me. Alongside this, there was of course my being in writing with Raymond each day which also, in turn, made me reflect on the personal story in our families alongside all those huge universal questions of where now in this new century … It was this how to write about Auschwitz? – that kept returning. How to write about trauma someone said, Hell someone else said, I crossed both out, wiped out the words constantly erased but still, the questions became the engine and 300 plus pages on, the same how to … remains open. The book also lead us via Auschwitz and took us to Minsk, this was not planned in any way, I was writing and living it side by side … both character and author, this interested me too. When I showed some of the early pages to my father, he exclaimed, What do you know about Auschwitz ... Nothing I said. This nothing, but trying to write despite that and into that.

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

My voice comes out of a sense of urgency to get something down. Sometimes it’s like a surge of energy that I know will only last for a while and if I don’t get it quickly down it will disperse. But it could so easily be another voice, another version. We are in voices all day and while we dream. Inside and outside. Voices sparking up in us, at us, contradicting, talking behind our backs, mimicking, laughing, imagining and lying, filling up the silence, the muteness, in this case, that I felt when we visited Auschwitz. The work normally begins with something that touches me as absurd, or something that stays, taboos, what is not allowed, nor understood. Mostly there’s resistance. An urgency and a huge resistance and fear that no voice will come, or that when it does that it will never shut up. As the late Spalding Gray said: If there is anything that terrifies me about death it’s that I’ll have to stop talking. But maybe I’ll have exhausted myself by then.

How and when do you write?

All the time in my head … in my dreams … in my notebooks. When it comes to turning up at the machine … I always write by wanting to and by not wanting to. Always after Woman’s Hour and finishing before the kids get home by 4 p.m.

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

I read about a dozen books at a time. I have book towers everywhere. I found W.G. Sebald’s wonderful novel Austerlitz as I finished Auschwitz. I am now reading his book: The Emigrants. I just finished Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Cixous’ Ex-Cities, Federman’s Carcasses and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. I am just starting Derrida’s On the Name and a beautiful huge book by Walter Benjamin that I can hardly lift up, The Arcade’s Project, which is a collection of fragments. I also just finished watching Kieslowski’s film/s Dekalog - The 10 Commandments; The Bridge, a film about all the people who threw themselves to their death from the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004; a wonderful Russian film Koktobel; and Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, which is set in Glasgow.

An extract from Auschwitz

Look, here I am at Auschwitz. Here now but after the event, this can only ever be after the event. Look, here I am already. Already collecting. My head to the ground, En’s laughing at me chasing a small grey feather for Moinous, digging in the path for some small stones some clue, yes, here I am already collecting small mementoes for Moinous as I said I would, asking myself if as a child I was short-changed on tragedy. Instead I came here mixed up with mission to please. Say please. Please find me something to say. Carrying my notebook, thinking I will write something down, find a quiet corner. En telling me this is where he left the stones last year, yes, last year, look, almost a year to the day he came here with his mother Elise. This is where I left the stones, he’s saying, the ones you gave me to bring here, to leave here. And he’s pointing and I find myself bending down just beside the gate – beneath the – Work Shall Set You Free – we look into the line of stone separating the electric fences. And I touch the fence because I know I can, the children make a gesture to copy me, but don’t complete it. I touch the wire again to show them it’s okay, but none the less tentatively. I cannot lie. I do lie. I am not confident in anything here. Despite En’s enthusiastic pointing I do not recognise the stones.

I collected small things for you, that’s all I’ll write to Moinous from here, of course I will, not here, I’ll write later, I wrote later, from a small internet café. I collected small souvenirs for you from here. I collected small flowers – I’m crushing them, crushing out the water to keep them alive. I crush water with water. The weight of a gallon water bottle dries the flowers – a feather, not crushed, stroked, nothing more unusual than a common pigeon’s … Bark from the ash tree, nothing much but as you know there is nothing here. And whoever thought of planting an ash tree outside a crematorium?

There’s a man over there, he’s sitting in Auschwitz on the grass, close by, and he’s telling someone that he’s hoping to find the perfect line. He’s saying, I am writing hoping to find the perfect line. I can hear the sound of pens scratching across paper, other people are writing out their lines and I am the only one who is not writing anything down. Not copying, drawing, photographing, videoing. Yes, among them I can hear a man say, I haven’t found my line yet, but when I find it I will know it instantly, when it comes, my line, I’ll know it for sure.

I am sitting with one of my sons and it’s so hot and I carry handsome paper, the weave of rag still visible on the page. I carry what I can, paper, pen, water, children. I spend four or five hours here trying to write, too ashamed to write here. In the time we are here all I do is learn to spell the word Auschwitz, I sit on a stone step with nothing to write but I at least learn how to spell the name, the name that was changed from its Polish Oswiecim. The name that refused to burn when it should be misspelled, Moinous will say: it should be misspelled every time, it’s an irritation to spell it, to remember how to spell it correctly.

Asking: what would you carry here apart from stones and cameras and empty books, the promise of words, what to bring here to this place if I could carry more? An offering of straw, I’ll huff and I’ll puff … A huge hunger and absence and a book to come, dear book. Each book, he said – I can’t recall who said what now, but some such writer or other had said that – each book contains a clock. Yes, the book – and maybe he should have said – the writer too. To begin it was a second heart, a second hand I held or held me trembling. The words racing to get out, pulsating, eager to get something down, vulnerable beat. Then the clock kept its own time, time I don’t yet know how to listen to here in Auschwitz, time I don’t know how to fill, time to still, time for the second hand to find the quiet steady midpoint of the other, to linger over minutes to write between sixty seconds, hours, sixty years gone by when I didn’t want the burden of time between us. But I see that writing is patience, writing is love, writing is fearlessness, to make yourself partially deaf to the doubt that whispers: STOP. The clock here stops. The voice laughs out loud. Mocks. Still. All the time stilled in Auschwitz. Still in parts, the words, parts of word, lines scattered. Do you sometimes feel you are working in reverse? She said, sometimes I feel all the books I will ever write are already written and the last will be the first. All the books will make one book, all the marks become one tick, one enormous unpunctuated breathless line all translated with that final first book.

We are grateful to the Scottish Arts Council for a grant towards the publication of Auschwitz.