Holocaust Memorial Day: Race for Remembrance

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, a time to pause and remember those murdered by the Nazis and their allies and indeed those killed in subsequent genocides. On the 27 January 1945 the Red Army liberated the 7,000 prisoners remaining at Auschwitz, a place where over a million people had died.

Like people from all walks of life, the Holocaust took its toll of athletes. Jewish athletes in particular of course, like the members of the Dutch women's gymnastic team, Ajax footballer Eddy Hamel or Lilli  Henoch, a leading light in the Berlin Sports Club in events including the discus, shot-put, and the 100-meter relay. But also other victims  like the German Gypsy boxer Johann Trollmann, the communist resistance fighter and wrestler Werner Seelenbinder (who finished  fourth in the 1936 Olympics) and Janusz Kusocin'ski (1907-1940) the Polish runner who had set a world record in the 10,000 meters at the 1932 Los Angeles Games. 

Lilli Henoch (1899-1942), second from left

Last Sunday, 22 January, about 1,500 people took part in the 'Run for Mem' in Rome, a non-competitive road race past sites related to the history of the Holocaust, such as the Regina Coeli prison where Jews and political prisoners were detained. It was organised by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, with support of Maccabi Italia and the Rome Marathon, with the guest of honour being Holocaust survivor Shaul Ladany, who also survived the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics which he was attending as a race walker.

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The President of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities Noemi Di Segni, who opened the race, said:

“This year we chose a new, maybe even brave way to mark Holocaust Memorial Day — a sporting event... People happen to run every day, but today we have to take with us the milestones of our history and remember that the path ahead of us starts from the one influenced by past events. Sometimes people fall and are hurt. They have made us fall, they have hurt us, but we have gotten back to our feet and we have started again, as individuals, as a people, as a community, as Italians, as Europeans". Participants wore t-shirts bearing the slogan  '"Corsa per la memoria, verso il futuro" - “Race for Remembrance, Into the Future" see full report in Times of Israel, 27 January 2017).

Morrissey - List of the Lost: 'the future is a time when you will only watch'

I still think that The Smiths were one of the greatest bands of all times (I saw them four times), and last year their lead singer/lyricist wrote a novel about running. What's not to like? Except that 'List of the Lost' by Morrissey (Penguin, 2015) received pretty much universally terrible reviews, and knowing that even his musical solo output has been decidely patchy I have put off reading it until now. 

And no it isn't very good. It's the tale of four young Boston athletes, 'America's most sovereignly feared college relay team' but that is a device for the over-intrusive narrator to sing of the joys of a band of brothers at their physical peak before what he sees as the inevitable disappointments of adult relationships and ageing.
  

So as they prepare to run their half-mile relay (or in metric terms 4 x 200m), Morrissey reflects that 'Their success depends upon the communal goal, the spring in eight legs, the combined methodology of four minds, and the maintained perfection of four physical frames; four wheels of the one machine... there is a job to be done - a job almost as old as reading, one which fades faster than it blooms, batting away the decline that rots in life, a decline that must always win'. 

 There is a coach who is simply one of the 'belligerent ghouls, run Manchester schools' (The Smiths, Headmaster Ritual), transplanted to New England. He berates the young athletes 'we search in life for that one race that sums everything. Well keep searching. As they lower your cold-meat body into the ground, keep searching still... Historians of track and field need watch you no longer'.  

Devices that work fine in song lines - alliteration, internal rhymes etc. - sound strained and tortuous in long archaic sentences. And the plot - well without wishing to spoil it, the young athletes are spared the compromises of getting old thanks to a series of deaths with a supernatural twist. But surely Morrissey, who was a schoolboy athlete himself (see my previous post on this) must have some perceptive observation to offer on the world of running? 

Well, this was the best I could find: 'Somewhere alone within the hole of the soul it is known that the page is already turning, and the future is a time when you will only watch. Fully present in today, you will make the most of yourself as you dig deep to bring out whatever will save you'.

The cover star is American athlete Early Young, running a relay for Abilene Christian College, Texas. Young won a 4 x 400m gold medal for USA in the 1960 Rome Olympics.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

The Runner - W.H. Auden (1960)

The Runner

All visible visibly

Moving things
Spin or swing,
One of the two,
Move, as the limbs
Of a runner do,
To and fro,
Forward and back,
Or, as they swiftly
Carry him
In orbit go
Round an endless track:
So, everywhere, every
Creature disporting
Itself according
To the law of its making
In the rivals’ dance
Of a balanced pair
Or the ring-dance
Round a common centre,
Delights the eye
By its symmetry
As it changes place
Blessing the unchangeable
Absolute rest
Of the space all share

The camera’s eye
Does not lie
But it cannot show
The life within,
The life of a runner,
Of yours or mine,
That race which is neither
Fast nor slow,
For nothing can ever
Happen twice,
That story which moves
Like music when
Begotten notes
New notes beget
Making the flowing
Of time a growing
Till what it could be
At last it is,
Where Fate is Freedom,
Grace, and Surprise.

Wilma Rudolph (USA) wins the 100 m at the 1960 Olympics

In 1960 W.H. Auden was commissioned to write a poem for a BBC programme about athletics - presumably tied in with the Olympic Games which were held that year in Rome.  My favourite section of 'The Runner' is the opening of the second stanza: 'The camera’s eye, Does not lie, But it cannot show, The life within,  The life of a runner' . A reminder that we can never see the interior life of the athlete - or anybody else.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'