Hurbinek’s stone reaches Auschwitz-Birkenau

Extract from ‘Is this a Man?’

*I found this extract online – it’s been badly typed up so it’s not exact. The word for the sounds Hurbinek makes is missing but I remember it clearly from the original:- ‘mas-klo’

Hurbinek was a nobody, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz. He looked about three years old, no-one knew anything of him, he could not speak and he had no name; that curious name Hurbinek, had been given to him by us, perhaps by one of the women who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate sounds that the baby let out now and again.

He was paralyzed from the waist down, with atrophied legs, as thin as sticks; but his eyes, lost in his triangular and wasted face, flashed terribly alive, full of demand, assertion, of the will to break loose, to shatter the tomb of his dumbness. The speech he lacked, which no one had bothered to teach him, the need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency: it was a stare both savage and human, even mature, a judgement, which none of us could support, so heavy was it with force and anguish.
None of us, that is, except Henek; he was in the bunk next to me, a robust and hearty Hungarian boy of fifteen. Henek spent half the day beside Hurbinek’s pallet. He was maternal rather than paternal; had our precarious co-existence lasted more than a month, it is extremely probable that Hurbinek would have learnt to speak from Henek; certainly better than from the Polish girls who, too tender and too vain, inebriated him with kisses and caresses, but shunned intimacy with him.

Henek on the other hand, calm and stubborn, sat beside the little sphinx, immune to the distressing power he emanated; he brought him food to eat, adjusted his blankets, cleaned him with skilful hands, without repugnance, and he spoke to him in Hungarian naturally, in a slow and patient voice.

After a week, Hurbinek could say a word, what word?[missing hungarian word] It was difficult to know. During the night we listened carefully. A difficult word, not Hungarian? [missing words] It was true? [missing words] from Hurbinek’s corner came a word- it was not admittedly always the same word, but it was certainly an articulated word: or better, several slightly different articulated words experimental variations on a theme, on a root, perhaps a name.

Hurbinek continued his stubborn experiments for as long as he lived. In the following days everybody listened to him in silence, anxious to understand, and among us there were speakers of all the languages of Europe; but Hurbinek’s word remained a secret. Perhaps it was his name? Perhaps it meant “to eat” or “bread”?

Hurbinek who was perhaps three years old, born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek who fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain entry into the world of men from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm – even his, bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed.

Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.

Primo Levi . “If This is a Man – Truce.”

My partner Clare’s grandfather was shot by the Nazis

Clare’s dad was David Winsor (born Kurt Wang) an Austrian Jew who witnessed his father being shot to death by the Nazis, probably in Vienna, in 1939.  David Winsor escaped to England with nothing but his life and went on to become an eminent lawyer.  He died in December 2005 and we buried him in the Jewish cemetary in North London.

I’ll let Clare tell you more about her family’s history.  What I do know is that her paternal grandmother had 10 brothers and sisters, of whom 4 died in the concentration camps and another who, along with his wife,  survived medical experimentation by the Nazis only to be separated from her.  Miraculously, they found each other again by accident many years later in London.

But I’ll let Clare tell you more about these stories.

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.