The Stone

This is the stone I hastily engraved for Elliot to take with him on his visit to Auschwitz. By the time I’d taken the Dremel to it, I wasn’t even sure it was all stone – some kind of mix of grey cement over very hard stone. It’s half of a pair of stones that I’ve had one on top of the other for a couple of years. This one’s shaped like a knee-cap and it sat on top of the other like a lid.

Hurbinek was a child who was born, lived and died aged about 3 in Auschwitz. That in itself is a terrible idea. Terrible, bleak and so futile. And he would have passed into oblivion too, like millions of others, had not Primo Levi not written about him. Levi’s words are a testament to the forgotten and the faceless. His words kept Hurbinek’s memory alive and he passed the child’s name to me, some day a few years back. I’m not ashamed to say that I read the passage two, three, four or more times in a row and wept.

I copied the whole piece from ‘Is this a man?’ and it’s somewhere on a backup disc. I’m going to find it so that I can write it out here again. It feels important enough to do that.

I’d be interested to hear how it made you feel.

As for me, I can’t tell you how I feel to know that my son will leave this stone behind at Auschwitz in memory of Hurbinek.