HELEN LEWIS The Dead Still Cry Out: The story of a combat cameraman. Reviewed by Kim Kelly
Winner of the 2018 Nib Literary Award and longlisted for the 2019 Colin Roderick Award. Helen Lewis traces her father’s experiences in World War II and how he witnessed the devastating results of the Holocaust.
Part memoir, part war history, The Dead Still Cry Out is a moving and compelling quest for the truths that lie behind photographic images. At its most familiar, the narrative follows the author, Helen Lewis, as she searches for her father, Mike, piecing together his combat experiences during World War II as paratrooper and then cameraman; and at its most profound, this is an exploration of the power of witness, an unblinking, up-close-and-personal account of the devastation of war and the depravity of the Holocaust.
Lewis writes with clear and often beautiful economy of language. There is a searing critical distance at work here but one that at the same time manages to convey a depth of intimacy not usually apparent in military history – or literary memoir. Lewis’s voice is engaging, honest, questioning, and thorough, and she tackles Mike’s story in vivid present tense, as if it is all unfolding before her eyes; as if we are moving with him through the world.
Daughter of a Jewish-Londoner father and Danish mother, Lewis grows up in England with a sense of vaguely displaced otherness many Australian readers will recognise, but it’s her increasing need to know her father after his death that resonates universally: who was the man beneath the enigma of his large and interesting life?
Lewis begins with an intriguing secret: a small collection of shocking images from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp she discovers in a suitcase under the stairs of her family home when she’s a child, which she then rediscovers when she inherits the suitcase after her father’s death, across the other side of world in Australia, almost a lifetime later:
As I lift out the next few items I feel something slip from a folder. Several outsized black and white photographs have fallen face-up on the floor. I fan them out. There are five of them, and I recognise them immediately. For a moment I cannot seem to breathe, and a burning sensation chases over my skin. Desolation leaches from the images …
Then comes a decision that will irrevocably shape the course of her intellectual and personal life:
I want to write my father’s story down. I have this sense that if I do, I might ease his burden of remembering – of witnessing.
What follows is as much a multifaceted journey through the process of research as it is a revelation of history; but initially, the task seems overwhelming:
Sitting among the files, papers and objects, I wonder what I am doing with it all anyway … The piles spread across the floor are like a map of my father and his war, if only I could read it.
Steadily, through her father’s small but fascinating personal archive, and through his photographs and films, as well as those of his comrades, and recorded interviews, locational explorations and museum-fossicking of all kinds, the truths Lewis seeks begin to coalesce:
Pictures and scenes are developing in my mind like photographs in a darkroom as I reconstruct what happened and begin to write it down.
Young Mike emerges from his Orthodox family, the Cable Street riots and general anti-Semitism in England just prior to World War II, transforming himself from mild-mannered, artistically talented Mike Weisenberg into Mike Lewis, a man who dares himself to jump out of planes and into combat behind enemy lines with the 2nd Parachute Battalion.
While Lewis has had to imagine events, she lets facts speak for the themselves: from the death-defying descents of the paratroopers, to instances of military incompetence and class bias. The war she finds isn’t a neat series of objectives and executions: it’s full of error and confusion, ignorance and accident; the grimness of losses with each operation, those who get caught in the tail of the plane, those whose parachutes fail; nerves that fail, too. Facts are laid out plainly even in the intertwining of the author’s present-day quest: in the frustrating symptoms of menopause; her relationship breakdown; her grappling with the mountainous task of truth-telling.
Those readers interested in the fine detail of military experience will not be disappointed: from the strategic intricacies of the African campaign, to the terrible loss of a good friend, Lewis takes us there. Her observations are often succinctly acute; for example, while the army has no time for bigotry – ‘The exacting physical and psychological demands of their training have helped to break down barriers’ – at the same time it assigns nicknames that ‘smack of boarding school and secret boys’ clubs. Maybe the subliminal suggestion that the soldiers are really eternal boys …’ Similarly, and poignantly, the description of a dead comrade is stripped to bare and basic gruesomeness: ‘split open from neck to legs. Blood and bits of tissue spray over him.’ The war that Lewis sees through her father’s eyes is ‘one immense horror made up of many small ones’, and ‘one big anxiety about the future’.
Lewis dwells in all this military action self-consciously, avoiding the ultimate truth behind those Bergen-Belsen images that have haunted her since childhood. But as the narrative marches forward, the inevitable confrontation looms closer. After he’s injured, Mike’s war shifts to one behind the camera with the No.4 Army Film and Photographic Unit, where Lewis gives us a detailed view of the battle of Arnhem in September 1944, and rich insights into the role of the AFPU, their equipment and the challenges they faced. She brings Mike closer, too, as she walks quite literally in his footsteps: ‘As I walk up the pockmarked steps, I see a fleeting flash of him, bounding past me, under fire, almost falling through the door.’
Writing of the Allies’ rolling invasion of Germany, Lewis provides a last warning before she takes us into Bergen-Belsen in May 1945, discussing Jewish perspectives on the Bilderverbot, the prohibition against looking at images of the victims of the Nazi concentration camps, and the view some scholars hold that these images ‘demean and dehumanise those depicted’, and that ‘the cameramen who captured them [were] transgressive and callous’. Lewis grapples with the moral weight of all this, with her father’s pain at remembering, and with her own lingering shock at the photographs.
For those readers with a deep emotional connection or intergenerational trauma related to this hate-fuelled tragedy, the warning is warranted. The images and descriptions of the camp and its victims Lewis presents are so disturbing this reader was overcome with a visceral disgust and grief several times throughout the latter chapters. But Lewis’s intention is to restate these facts in the face of Holocaust denialism and anti-Semitism, which are on the rise once more.
Lewis’s depiction of one survivor’s relief says as much as any description of horror might:
Another young woman takes hold of Mike’s arm and hangs on tight, looking into his eyes without speaking … When he gently tries to pry her hands away, he finds her grip surprisingly strong. She squeezes his arm harder, painfully now, and the others have to help peel her fingers away. She has left bruises on his arm, and the incident has bruised him in other ways too.
Of the perpetrators, Lewis says little except that: ‘They were ordinary people who, once they got started, were extraordinarily vindictive and pitiless.’ But Belsen itself ‘slips between understanding and incomprehension, between knowledge and disbelief’, and her empathy is anchored not only with the victims of this crime against humanity but with those sent to record it, especially Mike, who must confront the confirmation of everything his parents have told him about the persecution of Jews in Europe:
We try to piece together knowledge of the historical events at Belsen from the records left behind – we try to imagine, to know, in a sense to become witnesses – but our seeing is more than this. Our seeing is also an act of remembrance. Because the Belsen dead, without families left to mourn them and mark their passing, and stripped of their names and identities in anonymous graves, have only these photographs, shocking as they are, to mark that they existed at all.
In Mike’s own words: ‘People who think “Well I’m not Jewish, it won’t happen to me” are deceiving themselves.’ Lewis leaves her father’s plainest facts until the very end:
I wanted to forget. After forty years, I know now I will never forget. That the hell I saw in Belsen will never leave me. Down the years the dead still cry out to us. Remember us.
Helen Lewis The Dead Still Cry Out: The story of a combat cameraman Text 2018 PB 272pp $32.99
Kim Kelly is the author of eight novels, including the acclaimed Wild Chicory and The Blue Mile. Her latest novel, Sunshine, was published in March 2019, and her next, Walking, will be released in February 2020. Find out more about Kim at: kimkellyauthor.com
You can buy The Dead Still Cry Out from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
