A Few Seconds, Part One: Bach

The first of two essays about how a few seconds in the lives of two men Ive never met influenced my entire adult life
by Michael W. Harkins

watching the TV. I dont know what my father was doing before the movie, other than he may have been reading the newspaper, where he might have seen the TV schedule, or he might have just had the TV on. It was Chicagos PBS station, WTTW, channel 11. On I now know the characters name is Bach and the film, those weekend days when my father had a few hours alone Kaddish After a Living Memory, was a 1968 German in the afternoon (over the years my mother had some jobs production shot in Tel Aviv. I finally that required work on Saturdays), that found the information three years ago, PBS channel was more often than not Characters that live with after decades of trying to track it down what he switched on. us, teach us, guide us, with no success because I had nothing of The afternoon was bright, one of whether we meet them real substance to describe it or enter into those elements of a memory that seems a database. What I recalled in part was a inconsequential, save for its contrast to in books, on stage, or general description of the movie, that it the black and white films story, which on screen, they live and might be called Kaddish, that it was most was dark and sad. breathe for us not just likely a German film, but I didnt know It has taken time for me to understand anything else, including the exact year I in what manner and why the particular because of what they do saw it. few seconds of the film still resonate and say, but because their The most definitive part of the movie in my soul like the infinite tone from a that I had thought about, been influenced struck Buddhist prayer bowl. There are creators help us underby, and have been able to see in my head other aspects of the memory, though, stand the full spectrum with an eerie, unusually focused clarity of which I will never know specifics, of their characters lives, for a forty-four year-old memory is not because they have to do with my something I believed would have helped father. Im certain he would be willing on the page and off, on me locate the film. While it is as clear as to discuss these, but Im also certain screen and off. day to me, neither the emotional impact he will not remember that day or the nor the actual sequence is easy to convey. movie, and, frankly, I do not really wish I was wrong. What I recalled was enough when I finally to know if he does or not, because I find some satisfaction found the right person to ask. and much respect for my father in my own conjecturing as I have only seen the film once, when it was broadcast one to why he allowed me to watch. Even with my haphazard, afternoon in 1969 and I watched it on the TV in our south incomplete recollection, and despite its historical side Chicago apartment, me on the living room floor, my importance, I think the movie might best be described as father in a chair behind me. Like so many other decades-old not suitable for younger viewers. memories, only portions exist now and nothing remains of And yet, as a fourteen year-old, its effect on me was life what happened before or after the movie. The few bits that altering without the gruesomeness that cant be avoided in linger are soft, fuzzy or disjointed. But within this tiny cloud documentary footage of the same period and subject manner. are a few seconds from the film with detail that will not fade, Much of the movie is told in flashback, by a father to his where the focus is sharp, painful, and important. son. The son is slightly younger than I am at the time, and I have no recall of what Im doing before I am on the floor I think this connects with my father. It intrigues me that my

For forty years I didnt know the movies title, the characters name, or the actor whose piercingly effective portrayal has stayed with me to this moment.

father may have realized then or he could have planned it all along -- that the films father character in explaining the story of Bach to his son could also open my own eyes to something so important, and in a much more effective way than anything my own father could say. It would not be that my father didnt think he could teach me about the Holocaust, the foundation from which the film rises. My mother and father had no qualms about explaining things or telling me stories that I needed to hear. Every parent certainly does that for their children, but I realized long ago just how much point of view informs conversations between child and parent. Point of view evolves from knowledge, experience, and personal beliefs. It is point of view that tweaks common tales and shared wisdom, why one mother will tell her child that to succeed in life you need to work hard and always be honest, while another will tell her child the same but add and always say your prayers. Point of view is informed and adjusted with every moment of our existence, by incidents large and small, events local and global, stability and upheaval, peace and war. As a child in 1969 I knew of war from many sources: from my parents; about the war in Vietnam from newspapers and television news reports; and about World War II (a far more distant event for my still youthful mind) from history books, movies, TV shows, comic books, and men who had actually been in the Army. I have no recollection about the Korean war, and yet I know that it would have been much fresher, a more recent historical stain on the world than WWII, but the big war was different. As kids we played war, with toy machine guns and toy helmets. We could read about it in comic books, fight the good fight side-by-side with Marvel Comics cigar chompin Sgt. Nick Fury. We watched it on TV every week, faithfully, never missing an episode of Combat! starring Vic Morrow, leading his platoon across the European countryside. In spite of its proximity in so many forms, a fourteen year-old in 1969 was incapable of understanding how fresh the worlds second great war was to his parents. It had only ended twenty-five years before. Every parent of a teenager had memories of those terrifying five years. It was not ancient history to my parents generation, it was of their lifetime. The point of view for my parents had evolved differently from almost all my friends parents, however, because while all my friends parents had lived with war in their lives, my parents had lived in Scotland during the war and had been part of mass evacuations of children out of cities threatened by Nazi bombing runs, and away from uncontrollable buzz2

bomb rocket flights. Like all the other children there, my parents as kids carried gas masks along with school books. My parents had not suffered as the children of Europe had suffered, but they knew the distant rumble of explosions, had felt the emotional stress from wondering why some evil man wishes to destroy everything they know. War had been a part of their adolescence. The mechanics, politics, injustice and justice of war mattered to them, as did the post-war packaging and presentation of it in movies, on TV, and in books. At some point, almost certainly in school, I had learned about the Holocaust, although I did not know it by that name. I knew that during the war the Nazis had put Jewish people into concentration camps and killed almost all of them. That again was a historical fact with little empathy or attachment for a fourteen year old, except, I did wonder why someone could be so mean, so unfair, so very cruel. I couldnt understand outright cruelty of any kind, no matter where I first saw it or how I became aware of it, because it wasnt part of my daily existence. While my father shared some of the biases and prejudices of the day, neither he or my mother would countenance any cruelty or tolerate unfairness. They would not shy away from situations where morality was at stake, and I saw that from them in small but impactful ways. When I was ten or eleven, my mother and I walked to the Marquette Theatre to see a movie one afternoon. Two boys only barely older than me rode by us on their bikes, talking to each other, and stopped at the corner about twenty yards ahead to wait for the light to change. We caught up to them only seconds later and when we did, my mother hauled off and open-hand whacked one of the boys so hard on the back that if he hadnt been straddling his bike he would have hit the sidewalk. I was stunned silent while the boy let out a wailing, Oww! My mother yelled, Dont you ever let me hear you use that word again! We crossed the street and continued to the theatre. I had no idea what word the boy had said and I sure as heck was not going to ask. Obviously, he had used a word that my mother felt shouldnt be said at all, let alone be uttered by a boy, and it didnt matter that she didnt know him or his family. Much, much later in my life I found out that my mother had grown up tough as hell, that she had developed her fighting spirit in part by chasing after her father whenever he hit her mom chasing him out of the apartment and down the street and that she had grown up in a section
A Few Seconds, Part One - Bach copyright 2012, M.W. Harkins

of the city known as the Gorbals, historically one of the toughest, most dangerous neighborhoods in Glasgow, Scotland. My father was also not one to stand by if a situation warranted citizenry (he was born and raised in County Donegal, Ireland, but as a teen he had moved to the Gorbals, where he met my mother). He wasnt a particularly big man but he was an Irishman whod had a tough life and had been a Royal Marine Commando. He once saw a pickpocket working a crowd and grabbed the guy for police. He once kicked a mans ass, literally, when I pointed out to him that the guy was taking a piss in the middle of a vacant lot on one of our neighborhoods busiest corners. My life was a front row seat from which to observe my parents, as a couple and as individuals, act when necessary. And interestingly, without having ever explained why or ever discussed, they allowed me to learn from TV, including allowing me to watch what are now considered the pioneers of late night TV, Paar, Allen, and Carson, and groundbreaking programs including The Twentieth Century with Walter Cronkite and the reports of Edward R. Murrow. Television programming was so radically different back then it is difficult to convey its simplicity, but for everything that it broadcast in comparison to todays vast array of programming it had something that is now harder and harder to find on any given channel: an unambiguous moral compass. Back then the bad guys always lost, lessons were learned, deceit and dishonesty never trumped integrity and truth, and in those rare, adult-oriented storylines and documentaries where just the opposite happened, it generated discussion and conversation, not advertising revenue and sybaritic personalities. Television at that time was not something to be feared by the masses, not something that warranted the massive, sentry-level oversight by parents today. Its a few seconds. Rudolf Wessely, an Austrian-born actor now 87 years old, was Bach. I now take this opportunity to address him directly: Thank you and Im sorry. Thank you, for a performance that channeled an unimaginable world grief and informed me, intellectually and spiritually, at a young, impressionable age. Im sorry, for not having told you sooner. I am a believer in the importance of accepting that while most of us cannot right the wrongs of the entire world, we can all share something of ourselves to help overcome a challenge that may be unfairly holding that person back, and know that when carried forward our effort can reach untold numbers


of others of which a few may, indeed, be world changers. Your portrayal of Bach did that for me. Bach affected me. Your portrayal became an important cornerstone in what became a lifelong quest to feel and hear the heartbeat of humanitys truth our collective soul -- in anything I created, whether I was acting, writing a story or song, or attempting to understand the motivations behind someones actions. Bach also provided witness of mans potential for unfathomable cruelty and evil. Whenever I have asked myself, whenever I have attempted to understand what it is about those brief moments of film that have enabled them to remain such a distinct visual memory, the voice that is my thoughts stops and I see the scene. As striking as the scene is in my head, I could not say with confidence how long the brief moments actually are. For the first time, I let it play and I count. Ten seconds. I am not stating this is an accurate count, I am stating it is the count of the scene as I see it now. I sense it might be longer in reality. I was fourteen. When the movie finished that afternoon, I couldnt have told anyone what about me had been changed because I was incapable of intellectually mapping it out for myself, let alone for anyone else. It didnt make me want to be an actor; it didnt make me want to be a writer or filmmaker. It did something much, much more powerful. It was a revelation about humanity, acting, and storytelling. It was the first time I realized how powerful acting could be, that acting meant something more than saying lines and pretending. What I saw, and still see, in those ten seconds could not have been achieved by a man pretending to be in that situation. It was too painful, too disturbing, too sad. It is a black and white scene. It is a black and white film. The phrase doesnt do justice to the style; it only describes the two ends of the mediums grayscale spectrum, and does nothing to convey the mood generated by a black-and-white film. Indeed, it may have been shot in color, but buying our first color TV is still at least a few months away. My brain will not add color to it, never has. The image has the wide-angle distortion of what Im assuming was the same wide-angle distortion of the shot itself. I am old enough to know that memories, memories we swear as accurate, are not always so. I assume my memory has somewhat exaggerated the distortion. I now know that it was sixty minutes and premiered on TV in either Israel or Germany (or both) in 1969, the year I saw it. The father is a concentration camp survivor who runs into a friend who survived the same camp. The man tells the
A Few Seconds, Part One - Bach copyright 2012, M.W. Harkins

father that another mutual friend, Bach, also survived, and is somewhere in Tel Aviv, where the film takes place. The father and son find Bach standing on a street corner, mute, disengaged, zombie-like. Periodically, women pushing baby carriages walk through the scene, pause, and Bach, holding a small oil-can in his hand, applies oil to the carriages wheels, stands, and the women move on. The women do not speak to him, and from their demeanor it seems evident that they have experienced this encounter many times before. The son asks the father why Bach is this way, and the film goes into flashback, back to the concentration camp. That description is a combination of my recollection and a summary of the film from Cinematografie des Holocaust, a database of Holocaust-related films. Old memories are old memories, whether of a childhood birthday party or film scene, and I have no idea as to the films overall quality, whether it was well watched or ignored, whether it is an important addition to German cinema or simply an addition. I am skeptical that it could be regarded as anything other than well-received and important, given its unique point of view on its subject. I had made a handful of inquiries over the last few years. I did web searches for films with Kaddish as part of the title; I added a date range of the 1960s; I called WTTWs offices in Chicago, spoke to several nice people, gave them a general description of the movie and tossed around ideas about old FCC logs, or of locating anyone who might have had something to do with programming way back then. Forty-plus years is a long time; the courteous people I spoke to were apologetic about not being able to help. I sought out friends who spoke German, or who might know someone who could assist me in searches of European databases or documents. It was a controlled obsession. It had grown as I had aged, fed by my own reading and interest on the subject. I do have a continuing obsession in that I want to know things, certainly not unusual and an inherent pre-requisite for any serious writer. There is, though, a subset of this quest to know: things I wish to understand. Human nature and its extremes are in this subset. The quest to understand is the Why? obsession that fuels everyone from writers, actors, and artists to scientists, mathematicians, and sociologists. The Holocaust and the Japanese-Americans Internment, the latter of which I learned of first from my parents, became subjects I sought to understand. During my time in the Army I had read two early, well-known books on the Holocaust, The Theory and Practice of Hell and The Nuremburg Trials, and I had also seen both the

documentary film on the trials and the movie adaptation starting Spencer Tracy. I had also seen George Stevens famous, stark film of the concentration camp liberations. I would have sought to understand regardless of whether I had seen Kaddish After a Living Memory but the film and those few seconds humanized history for me. The first hint of a way forward came as I read a New Yorker magazine article a few years ago about the discovery of a trove of photographs depicting the off-duty lives of Auschwitz concentration camp guards. The article noted that the photos were being cataloged and studied by Bruce Levy, project coordinator for the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive. I sent him an email with the scant details I remembered and the parameters of when and how I saw it, and that certain elements of the film had made a lifelong impression on me. He responded within a few days: ...Most requests like yours do not have happy endings. You did remember enough detail that I found the information you seek. Below please find the information for Kaddish After a Living Memory... Again, allow me a moment: thank you, Bruce. Your courtesy and responsiveness enabled me to find Bach. The film had subtitles which I cannot remember, and I apologize that all I can do is describe what I believe leads up to the ten seconds, and then describe what I see. Bachs head has been shaved, he wears the camp garb of loose pants and tunic-like shirt. There are three or four other people in the frame. Bach is being spoken to by two or three camp guards. His face is round, there is nothing of note about his appearance or build. I feel more than know that I have seen him in earlier scenes interacting, speaking and engaged with other characters. From this shot to the next is missing for me, but there is a transition, some sort of action by the guards on Bach and he is made to bend over, over a table or some kind of platform. He is somehow secured or held down. He cant move. The shot is now an extreme close-up of Bachs face, framed left, meaning that even as it looms in front of us, his face is just to our left of the center, and that allows us to see the actions of the guards behind him. The guards pull down Bachs pants. It is a shot that is manipulative, director Karl Fruchtmanns choice to capture us and restrain us, to hold us down with Bach and twist our insides, because although we see what Bach cant, we cant see that without also seeing Bachs face as it fills the screen, and we see his increasing terror, his eyes wide and darting,

A Few Seconds, Part One - Bach copyright 2012, M.W. Harkins

and neither he nor us knows what is about to happen. But this is a concentration camp, where terror and horror are the reality of every moment, and Bachs terror is our terror. He is helpless. We are helpless. One guard picks up a board; he swings it. I cant hear the sound of the board as it slaps Bachs exposed flesh, even though I know that sound is in the scene. All I can hear is Bachs scream. I see his eyes bulge, his mouth open wide, wide, releasing the most primal screams from any human Ive ever heard. Again and again, the board is swung, and we never leave the shot, the wide-angle close up of a mans face as his ass, his bare ass, is being flailed, over, and over, and over. Bachs screams are piercing, and his shrieks become cries, then wails, and his face becomes covered in tears and snot, a stream of snot that flies around and off his face as his restrained body shakes with his every scream and every inhuman slap. Behind him, the guards laugh. There are no cutaways. It is a remarkable, remarkable scene. I dont know how the scene ends, I dont know the transition to the next scene. There is a memory within this memory of my thoughts as I watch: I know this isnt real, but how can a man do this? How can a man make himself cry like this, scream like this? How can those guys do this and laugh? How can this guy cry like this? I know this isnt real. It looks real. How can those guys do this to this guy? I dont know where the scene is relative to the end of the movie, but I recall the end of the movie as a shot of Bach, standing still, oil can in hand, staring, unblinking, a woman pushing a baby carriage stops, he stoops to oil the carriage wheels, the woman moves on, nothing said. They had ruined Bach. They had beaten the very soul out of him, emptied him of everything. I knew, instinctively, that there would have been more, more abuse, more beatings, more beasts tearing into the prey. I knew that between his time in the camp and the storys return to its present, as the boy and his father watched Bach, there had been more horrors. No one had ever explained backstory to me, I had no exposure to even the most basic how to write a story tools, and was unaware through any formal kind of teaching that creating a character means creating the stories and events that become the bones, blood, flesh, and soul of a character. During the last moments of the film I had my first real understanding that what I had watched had story layers I should continue to think about, wonder about, of people and incidents and places not shown.


Characters that live with us, that teach us, guide us, whether we meet them in books, on stage, or on screen, they live and breathe for us not just because of what they do and say, but because their creators help us understand the full spectrum of their characters lives, on page and off, on screen and off. Kaddish After a Living Memory had put my head into an intellectual space that I had never experienced. It was a movie, it wasnt real, but how could someone put themselves in the mental state that would allow them to feel what that poor bastard in that movie had felt? Even though words and stories are now my life and work, it is difficult to describe my thoughts immediately after the movie ended. I was stunned. I know I watched the credits roll, and I know I got up from the floor and turned to my dad, and neither of us said anything for a second or two, then my dad said, That guy had snot flying all over the place, didnt he? which sounds almost trite when written this way. Yeah, I said and left the room. What was my father to say? Ask if I liked the film? If Id like to talk about it? I say he let me have my head. He gave me the opportunity to walk away and let what I had just seen work its way through my system. I think it interesting that I remember what he said so clearly, and I believe its because it reinforces that no matter what spin and alteration my own memory may have done to the scene, it is as powerful as I remember it, because it also, for that moment at least, impressed my father. All of us have a few seconds we carry with us for our entire lives. I am not the only one who has had a few seconds of film affect me, just as I am not the only one who carries memories associated with a few seconds of music, a few seconds of conversation, a few seconds of something seen on the street. Ive retained mine for the same reason we all retain such memories, because they are striking in some distinct way funny, loving, unbelievable, heart breaking, or terrible. In 2005, I realized just how powerful and pervasive the a few seconds of observation and realization had become in my life. That few seconds of Bachs life touched my heart, obviously, but in looking back over time, I now realize just how influential a few seconds can be, because without knowing it, it has often been the basis for how I discover and develop stories that are important to me. I had worked in a Louisiana hurricane Katrina shelter, arriving there less than a week after the storm, and when I came back home I wrote and a year
A Few Seconds, Part One - Bach copyright 2012, M.W. Harkins

later performed a solo show about the experience. While I obviously couldnt have written it without having been there, it was a few special seconds of observation that had sparked the idea for the show. Walking through a vast event center that had become an American Red Cross shelter, looking across a small sea of people living on the floor in their ten-square-foot areas, everything they owned in plastic bags stored under their cots, I caught a glimpse of a single red rose, its vase an empty, plastic water bottle sitting on top of a box. A few seconds of observation conveyed pages and pages of story to me, and allowed me to create a way for people who had not been there to understand what had happened, to humanize what might otherwise be a historical event on a page in a history book or website.

Was it on par with Rudolf Wesselys portrayal or director Karl Fruchtmanns film? No. Was it important in its own way, in conveying a particular message, to possibly put someones head in an intellectual space never experienced before? I hope so. It is true that my most influential, lifetime-lasting memory moments, whether a few seconds or a summer long, have at their roots my father, mother, sister, family, loved ones and close friends. And there are other moments that have some unique importance. Only a few, however, burn eternally as guiding lights, and I still marvel at their influence. Of those special few, there are two that have at their core men whose names I had never known. To the one I now know, I can finally say, forty-four years later, that a few seconds of your life, Mr. Wessely, lives in me to this moment.

***

Michael W. Harkins is a writer, editor, and communications consultant. He is currently working on a book about the woman who founded the countrys oldest wild horse sanctuary, and he continues to follow the story of Brandon Maxfield, the subject of his previous essay, Seven Years Later. His book The Way to Communicate, a practical and philosophical guide to building enlightened person-to-person communication skills in a time of expanding personal disconnection, was published in 2010, and his short fiction has been featured in Thrice Fiction magazine (www.thricefiction.com). He can be contacted through his blog, www.thewaytocommunicate.wordpress.com

A Few Seconds, Part One - Bach copyright 2012, M.W. Harkins