Some of my journalism
This is a piece I wrote for Epigram, the Bristol student newspaper. I am relatively pleased with it, but encourage comments and criticism.
“I can’t stand idly by”
84-year old Hedy Epstein escaped the Nazi concentration camps that killed her family before embarking on a lifetime of political activism. When she came to Bristol to talk about her work in Palestine, Rob Trotter went to meet her.
Meeting Hedy Epstein is like coming face to face with history. The violence and suffering of the twentieth century lies in her memory and in her eyes. A remarkable woman, she merits the clichés passionate, intelligent and energetic more than anyone else I have met.
Born in Freiburg, Germany on August 15th 1924, the only daughter of a Jewish businessman and his wife, she was eight years old when Hitler was elected chancellor. Six years later she escaped to Britain, one of the ten thousand Jewish children who left with international support. Her parents, unable to leave Germany, were deported to a concentration camp in Vichy France during 1940. Two years later they were sent to Auschwitz where both, along with nearly all her extended family, died.
Around this time, she received a postcard from her mother. It read: “Travelling to the east…sending you a final goodbye”.
In England she worked in a munitions factory before returning to Germany in 1946 to work for the American government. She was a prosecution researcher at the Nuremberg Medical Trial, where the doctors who conducted experiments on concentration camp inmates were tried. Then, in 1948 she moved permanently to the United States where she became involved in the political activism that has occupied the rest of her life.
The conflict between Israel and Palestine is a central concern of hers. As an escapee of the holocaust - an event that helped trigger the creation of Israel in 1948 – her criticisms of Israeli policy attract a lot of attention. As such, some Jewish commentators have called her a “self-hating Jew” and “anti-Israeli”.
She strongly denies this. Her concern with the conflict has, she says, always been in response to events and the suffering of the people there. She describes her “wake up call” as being the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, when the Israeli army allegedly allowed Lebanese Phalangist militiamen to enter two refugee camps and massacre hundreds of Palestinian interns.
Her stories seem endless. In 2004 she was returning home from her second visit to Palestine. Whilst passing through Ben Gurion airport in Jerusalem she was asked to step aside by two security guards. They stripped and cavity searched her, an act that made her feel “utterly humiliated and angry”. She was 80 years old. Despite this, she has still visited Palestine every year since, enabling her to say of it: “The first time I went I was just appalled by the situation…and each time I’ve come back its worse”.
On a more personal level, she emphasises memory as a motivation for activism. She says at one point: “remembering is very important…but it also has to have a present and future perspective…if you know what it is like to be oppressed then when you know another people is oppressed then try to not stand idly by…that’s how I feel, I can’t stand idly by”.
Her speech to the packed church hall begins with a short, unassuming account of her extraordinary life. When she begins to talk about Palestine her eye becomes more focused, the action she describes more detailed. Her analysis of the conflict is told through a series of short episodes. A story about being unable to leave a village because of too many invitations to coffee, for instance, sits easily next to a description of being tear gassed, or of taking a companion to hospital with shrapnel buried in their leg.
Slowly the impact of each story accumulates, each spinning outward and into the others until a detailed picture of everyday life begins to emerge - violent and tense, yet utterly ordinary.
The way she speaks, I think, reflects the way she views the world. The intense logic at the heart of her political engagement – that the memory of her own suffering drives her to oppose the oppression of others – demands a concern with the experiences of ordinary people. It is these stories that illuminate history. Remembering them, as her life shows, is a vital political act.
“I can’t stand idly by”
84-year old Hedy Epstein escaped the Nazi concentration camps that killed her family before embarking on a lifetime of political activism. When she came to Bristol to talk about her work in Palestine, Rob Trotter went to meet her.
Meeting Hedy Epstein is like coming face to face with history. The violence and suffering of the twentieth century lies in her memory and in her eyes. A remarkable woman, she merits the clichés passionate, intelligent and energetic more than anyone else I have met.
Born in Freiburg, Germany on August 15th 1924, the only daughter of a Jewish businessman and his wife, she was eight years old when Hitler was elected chancellor. Six years later she escaped to Britain, one of the ten thousand Jewish children who left with international support. Her parents, unable to leave Germany, were deported to a concentration camp in Vichy France during 1940. Two years later they were sent to Auschwitz where both, along with nearly all her extended family, died.
Around this time, she received a postcard from her mother. It read: “Travelling to the east…sending you a final goodbye”.
In England she worked in a munitions factory before returning to Germany in 1946 to work for the American government. She was a prosecution researcher at the Nuremberg Medical Trial, where the doctors who conducted experiments on concentration camp inmates were tried. Then, in 1948 she moved permanently to the United States where she became involved in the political activism that has occupied the rest of her life.
The conflict between Israel and Palestine is a central concern of hers. As an escapee of the holocaust - an event that helped trigger the creation of Israel in 1948 – her criticisms of Israeli policy attract a lot of attention. As such, some Jewish commentators have called her a “self-hating Jew” and “anti-Israeli”.
She strongly denies this. Her concern with the conflict has, she says, always been in response to events and the suffering of the people there. She describes her “wake up call” as being the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, when the Israeli army allegedly allowed Lebanese Phalangist militiamen to enter two refugee camps and massacre hundreds of Palestinian interns.
Her stories seem endless. In 2004 she was returning home from her second visit to Palestine. Whilst passing through Ben Gurion airport in Jerusalem she was asked to step aside by two security guards. They stripped and cavity searched her, an act that made her feel “utterly humiliated and angry”. She was 80 years old. Despite this, she has still visited Palestine every year since, enabling her to say of it: “The first time I went I was just appalled by the situation…and each time I’ve come back its worse”.
On a more personal level, she emphasises memory as a motivation for activism. She says at one point: “remembering is very important…but it also has to have a present and future perspective…if you know what it is like to be oppressed then when you know another people is oppressed then try to not stand idly by…that’s how I feel, I can’t stand idly by”.
Her speech to the packed church hall begins with a short, unassuming account of her extraordinary life. When she begins to talk about Palestine her eye becomes more focused, the action she describes more detailed. Her analysis of the conflict is told through a series of short episodes. A story about being unable to leave a village because of too many invitations to coffee, for instance, sits easily next to a description of being tear gassed, or of taking a companion to hospital with shrapnel buried in their leg.
Slowly the impact of each story accumulates, each spinning outward and into the others until a detailed picture of everyday life begins to emerge - violent and tense, yet utterly ordinary.
The way she speaks, I think, reflects the way she views the world. The intense logic at the heart of her political engagement – that the memory of her own suffering drives her to oppose the oppression of others – demands a concern with the experiences of ordinary people. It is these stories that illuminate history. Remembering them, as her life shows, is a vital political act.
posted by My Back Pages at 7:10 pm
