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Poetic tribute to victims of Nazis
Jan 2 2008 by David Whetstone, The Journal
As Holocaust Memorial Day approaches on January 21, Anna Woodford tells David Whetstone about her poetic tribute to her great-grandparents.
Take Woodford, for instance. When she gets married this year, Newcastle poet Anna Woodford will have the right to call herself Anna Vigar – but Woodford is the surname she inherited from her father and she is fond of it.
It appealed also to her grandmother, whom she remembers as Gran. In fact, Gran chose it for her husband, Anna’s paternal grandfather, from a map of the London Underground.
“She liked the sound of it,” says Anna.
A poem called
“She unwrapped the rest of his life like a boiled sweet from her handbag,
took his name – the German name that meant he couldn’t open doors for her –
called him Richard, name for a man she might have married.”
Anna says: “My Gran died in 1999 and I started writing the first poem then. It became a sequence and I’ve written maybe a couple a year ever since.”
The photographs which gaze out side by side from the little book’s first pages are portraits of Josef and Marja, the in-laws Gran never met: he in military uniform emblazoned with medals; she in housewifely attire.
The tiny portraits were a presence on the mantelpiece throughout Anna’s childhood but only when she was 11 or 12 did she learn that they were of her great-grandparents who had died in the Holocaust.
They had lived in L’viv, a city whose geographical location – part of Poland when the Second World War broke out, now in the Ukraine – hints at its horrible 20th Century history. They were Jews, which more than hints at their tragic fate.
“He was high up in the Army, she was a housewife,” says Anna with the benefit of what scant details her research has turned up. “Their son was the apple of her eye.”
The son was Ludwick, born in Vienna as was fashionable at the time. From his elevated vantage point in the military, Anna surmises, Josef would have seen the war coming and had an inkling of the horrors it would wreak on him and his kind. In about 1938, Ludwick was sent abroad to study for a degree at Nottingham University.
He would never see his parents again and their fate is unknown. Anna believes he received one letter telling him they were trying to escape but “they got overtaken by history”. In the poem
“They were shot – maybe they were captured
in close-up first, their shorn heads raised
for the camera’s scrutiny.”
Of son Ludwick, marooned in Britain as war broke out, she says: “He struggled to get a job because of his background which was so different. But he spoke five languages and was a scientist and philosopher with an interest in literature.”
Despite his academic achievements, he was pretty much all at sea until he met a Nottingham lass called Elizabeth Baker, Anna’s Gran.
Anna says: “They had this whirlwind romance. Although he was only about 5ft 4in, she was wild about him and talked about him as if he was about 6ft. He got a job at the Raleigh factory in Nottingham and lived there for the rest of his life.”
It was Elizabeth who masterminded his absorption into English society, as described in
“On the eighth November nineteen-forty-sevenhe became a changed man.
Albert J Peace of Bank Chambers, Batley witnessed Mr Richard Woodford (formerly Ludwick Magenheim) guided by Gran, absolutely renounce his own name.”
At one time – an even earlier time – Ludwick’s family had renounced Moshinsky in favour of the more Germanic and acceptable Magenheim.
“They never referred to the Holocaust after they heard his parents had died,” says Anna.
“He had a breakdown and never spoke about it again. He focused on their current life and she encouraged him in that. So he became Richard Woodford.”
Their son, Christopher, was about six when his surname changed but, as Anna says, it wasn’t something that interested him greatly at that age. Nor does he talk much nowadays about his grandparents who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. His life represents the transition from past to present, from one culture to another.
“He’s not Jewish, I’m not Jewish. We became very much an English family, although at the end of his life my grandfather started to hallucinate about the Nazis coming for him.”
Richard (Ludwick as was) died in about 1972. Extraordinarily, Anna’s Gran then met and married another man called Ludwick – Ludwick Silber – whom she also met in Nottingham and who had a similar background to her first husband.
“She called them Ludwick I and Ludwick II,” says Anna with a laugh.
Ludwick Silber, another refugee from eastern Europe, was more fortunate than Ludwick Magenheim in that his mother survived the war, hiding in someone’s shed. He was less fortunate in that he outlived Gran, dying in 2003 after four years of gnawing grief. Only then was one of his most poignant secrets revealed.
“In his will he told us to go and look under the floorboards in Gran’s pantry,” says Anna.
A cake tin was found, as she recalls in the poem
“Inside was the hem of a coarse skirt
he could never let go,
it was puffed up like pastry
with diamonds.”
They were the remains of the fortune that had “brought his mother back from the camp a lifetime before ...” Anna doesn’t know why he left them under the floorboards when they could have improved his life and Gran’s. Posthumously, the proceeds went to a Jewish charity.
Her father, Anna says, is “quite a private person”, as is she. It was her mother, born in County Durham, who shared her interest in the precise identity of the people portrayed in miniature on the mantelpiece. Having discovered their names, Anna wasn’t overly interested in learning their exact fate.
“I just wanted to reclaim them from being Holocaust victims,” says Anna. “I wanted to put names to the faces. I know they would have died horribly but this little pamphlet is like the gravestone they never had.”
It is a moving tribute – much warmer than a slab of marble – which speaks volumes about the coping nature of many who survived the horrors of the Second World War. Anna, who lives in Heaton, Newcastle, teaches creative writing at the Open University and the universities of Newcastle and Sunderland, and is currently completing a PhD on the poetry of the American Sharon Olds.
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