by Arnold Zable
The details I gleaned from the cover notes were scant. The ‘Mauthausen Cantata’ was written by the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, the lyrics were penned by one Iakovos Kambanellis. The first of the four pieces that make up the cantata, ‘The Song of Songs’, depicts the love of a Greek inmate of the Mauthausen concentration camp for a Jewish woman, ‘beautiful in her plain dress and with a fine comb in her hair’. The poet searches for any news of her, for the merest hint of her presence:
Girls of Auschwitz.
Dachau girls
Has anybody seen my love?
His searching renders a fleeting glimpse:
We saw her in a chilly square
With a number on her white arm
and a yellow star on her heart.
The poet imagines her journey, ‘beyond the bleak and frozen square’:
Oh come tell me what became of love
it journeyed past the land of no returning
where no one could imagine or endure
and where love begged of God to sleep no more.
In the final song of the cantata, ‘When the War Is Over’, she appears again, as ‘the girl with the fearful eyes’ and the girl ‘with the frozen hands’. He yearns for the moment when love can flourish at ‘noon tide’, in the fullness of day, and he dreams of a time when ‘We could embrace with abandon, in open streets and in the town square’.
It was during Theodorakis’s Australian tour in 1995 that I first saw, in the program notes, the full text of the songs, and learned a little of the man who wrote them. By that time I was aware of the extent to which the Annihilation had torn apart my own family. I had journeyed to my ancestral villages in Poland, driven by an impulse to confront an irretrievable past. I had retraced my forebears’ final footsteps into a clearing in a forest, and through a brick archway known as the gate of death: ghosts of Treblinka and Auschwitz, have you seen my loved ones? This was the question that had fuelled my obsessive quest.
From the program notes I learned that Iakovos Kambanellis had been an inmate of Mauthausen, a concentration camp in Austria, from the summer of 1943 until the end of the war. In 1965 he published his book-length memoir of that time, Mauthausen. Kambanellis also wrote four poems on the theme which his friend Mikis Theodorakis set to music. Both the book and the cantata were launched in December 1965 at a concert in the Gloria Theatre in Athens, with the sixteen-year-old Maria Farantouri as the singer.
The program notes reawoke my curiosity. I wanted to know more about Kambanellis. I searched through anthologies of Greek poetry for his name. It was nowhere to be found. Then, in December 1997, during a stay in Athens, and through a series of chance encounters, I found myself sitting face to face with the writer in a coffee shop in central Athens, five minutes’ walk from Syntagma Square.
We had arranged to meet in Cafe Zonar, the haunt of bohemians and activists who had played various roles in Greece’s turbulent postwar past. The decor had remained frozen in time. The interior was of wrought iron and wood, burgundies and leather browns. We sat at mahogany tables, on upholstered chairs, in a cavernous room cooled by ceiling fans. Waiters in green blazers and bow ties hovered about us. Ageing revolutionaries lounged beside armchair travellers. Caffeine stirred up an ebbing past.
Iakovos Kambanellis was seventy-five years old, small in stature, receding into himself. He seemed frail, but strong in spirit. His words burst from his hands as he struggled, in English, to find the phrases that could give shape to the intensity of his thoughts.
He was not a poet, but one of the leading playwrights of postwar Greece, the author of over thirty plays and film scripts. Kambanellis never intended to be a writer. His forebears were seamen from the island of Chios, wedded to the waters that encircled them. Tragedy lurks close at hand whenever one recounts ancestral tales in contemporary Greece.
In 1822, 25,000 Chios civilians were massacred by their Ottoman overlords. Among those who fled by boat and made good their escape was the one surviving member of the Kambanellis family, a fifteen-year-old boy. He made his way to the island of Naxos where the family took root and flourished anew.
The Kambanellis clan returned to the sea. They worked caiques around the Cycladic islands. Iakovos was born on Naxos, the sixth of nine children. His father broke from the seafaring tradition and apprenticed himself to a chemist. He was granted a diploma in pharmacy, based on his first ten years of experience, but was forced to move to Athens in search of work when his employer passed on the business to his own son.
The family settled in the inner-city suburb of Thission. The move from the idyllic island of Naxos to an Athenian neighbourhood was a quantum leap for twelve-year-old Iakovos. His life now revolved around suburban squares and the nearby Keramikos cemetery, which contained tombs that dated back over two millennia. Steles rose from the graves of prominent citizens who once walked the streets of classical Greece. Archaic ghosts hovered on the fringe of Iakovos’s vision.
Prewar Athens was an expanding metropolis, an amalgam of peasants, freshly arrived from their villages in search of new lives, and an emerging bourgeoisie. Iakovos’s neighbourhood was a typical Athenian blend of traditional past and nascent modernity.
Yet little in his upbringing could prepare the young Kambanellis for the chaos and terror that ensued after the Nazi invasion in April 1941. The nineteen-year-old youth quit his job as a draftsman and set out on a perilous journey. His aim was simple—to get out of occupied Greece and make a run for the longed-for ‘free world’. Accompanied by an older friend, he stole across the border, only to be arrested on a train en route to Switzerland.
Kambanellis was sent to Mauthausen. He arrived with a group of forty-three Greek prisoners; and was thrust into another universe in which the nations of Europe were congregated in the same living hell: Poles, Russians, Jews, Italians, Czechs, Spaniards, Serbs and Bulgarians. Among them were former ministers and businessmen, tradesmen and professors, all reduced to striped prison garb and a frantic struggle to survive. Of every nine who went in, only one made it out alive.
This is where he discovered the world, Kambanellis says. This is where he came to know the complexity of human behaviour. What he lived through in those two years was to haunt him for decades.
On his return to Athens at war’s end, Kambanellis’s friends plagued him with the same question: how was he able to endure such a place? Sick of recounting his stories, he decided to put them down on paper. The manuscript burst forth ‘like a river, swimming with detail’. It was not well-crafted, says Kambanellis, but fragmented, confused. Yet it was out in the open. He set his memories aside, and tried to get on with his life.
As to how he became a writer, therein lies a remarkable tale of chance or fate—interpret it whichever way you will. Kambanellis tells the story with a sense of irony and humour, and an obvious skill in the art of weaving a tale.
It was the winter of 1945–46. He was on his first date since war’s end. They were to meet in central Athens, but the woman did not turn up. Iakovos did not want to go back to his friends and tell them he had been stood up. He feared the embarrassment. He decided to return late to the neighbourhood, boast about his conquest, and make out he had seduced the girl.
Casting around for a way to pass the time out of the cold, he saw a theatre door and walked in. It was no ordinary performance he watched that night. Kambanellis had stumbled upon a play produced by Karolis Koun’s Athens Art Theatre. Founded in 1942 during the German occupation, the Athens Art Theatre was to elevate Greek drama onto the international stage with its avant-garde productions of both ancient and contemporary plays.
After having lived through the horror of a concentration camp, Kambanellis was mesmerised by the performance. It was a contrived piece of theatre, yet it simmered with truth. For the first time he understood the power of art and its capacity to reproduce life, to capture the nuances of human behaviour.
Kambanellis emerged from that evening with an obsessive desire to become an actor. But, desp
ite his many applications, no drama school would take on someone who did not have a high school certificate. He figured that if he could not get onto the stage as an actor he would get there through writing. His first play was performed in 1950 by an avant-garde theatre company called Dionyssia. He had discovered his vocation.
It was in the early 1950s that Kambanellis first met the composer Mikis Theodorakis. The fledgling artists collaborated on radio plays, with Kambanellis producing the text and Theodorakis the music. They were both drawn towards the left in politics—driven, in the immediate postwar years, to create a more equitable society. Yet their approach was quite different. ‘I never formally joined any party,’ says Kambanellis. ‘I wanted to maintain my independent vision. I never had Theodorakis’s mania for politics.’
I ask Kambanellis about the themes that weave through his plays and scripts. We seem to be circling the issue: the moment when life stopped in an extermination camp called Mauthausen. Whenever the word arises, Kambanellis pauses, draws breath. Yes, Mauthausen has pursued him all his life. It has remained the seminal influence that has informed his work. It had been his microcosm of the world. How could it be otherwise?
Mauthausen taught him that the human being is an individual who cannot be categorised. Kambanellis’s characters are very private, yet always connected to a broader, universal fate. ‘The border between the personal and collective is thin,’ Kambanellis claims. ‘Human beings do not fit easily within themselves. Their full complexity is revealed in times of crisis. Their behaviour takes unexpected twists.’
Mauthausen also showed him that even in the darkest of circumstances there are unexpected moments of humour and irony. There were times when all one could do was use one’s wits to stay sane. But there were all too many moments when the faintest trace of light was absent. Mauthausen has remained a grim reminder of the depths of human depravity and cruelty.
And the song cycle? The poems? How did they come about? Throughout our ‘interview’, I have been biding my time. I have my own agenda. It is time to come to the point. I tell him why the ‘Mauthausen Cantata’ has been so important in my life—how it has followed me.
I tell him of my journey to the extermination camps that had claimed my extended family. Of passing through the gate of death, on a bleak autumn day in 1986, into a killing field called Auschwitz-Birkenau, where I had followed in the footsteps of those cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and extended family who were entrained there in the Polish winter of 1942.
On the fringe of my vision I note the patrons coming and going. I register their talk as a distant hum. The cafe is filling up for the midday meal. We are lulled by the ambience of gentle talk. The morning is slipping by. And the two of us have become an island unto ourselves. We have formed a bond. It is palpable, and it is time to move closer to the source.
First came the memoir, Kambanellis tells me. In 1963, by which time he was a well-known playwright whose reputation extended beyond Greece, he was invited to West Germany. During this journey, he noted that whenever he broached the subject of Mauthausen he received a wary response. He was feted, honoured, taken on a tour of avant-garde theatres, but he felt uneasy. Something was not quite right. His hosts were telling him to forget Mauthausen, to bury the past. Mauthausen embarrassed them.
Kambanellis returned to Greece determined to tell the story in full, so that it would not be forgotten. He recalls that after American tanks had finally entered the camp as liberators, on 5 May 1945, he, like so many inmates, would wake up every morning with the same agonised concern: ‘Who will I tell all this to? Who will listen? Where will all we have seen be delivered?’
Kambanellis revised the raw manuscript he had penned eighteen years earlier and employed his skills as a storyteller to weave the tale of his incarceration. He harnessed the river that had flowed so freely from him, and created a memoir as powerful as the works of Primo Levi, informed by a similar sense of detached passion, of bearing witness and remaining as true to the experience as the passing of time would allow. At least, this is what I was to discover when I read it.
And the poems? They were written in the wake of the memoir to coincide with its launch at the Gloria Theatre. The inspiration for the leading song was simple; a physical object, a photograph he had found in the dust of Mauthausen. He still has it to this day. He carried it with him through the many months of his incarceration, and it helped sustain him. It became his talisman, a secret love-object.
The photograph was of a girl, perhaps fourteen years old. She wears a plain dress, a schoolgirl’s uniform with a white collar. It was merely a snapshot, a moment in time; but it was precious. It was rare to find anything of value in Mauthausen. The inmates had everything taken from them the moment they entered. They were robbed of their identities, and reduced to skeletal frames that ached their way through each terror-filled day. To find a remembrance of humanity such as this picture was a source of wonder. Out of this nothingness there emerged something that was yours, that you could gaze at in the depths of an endless night.
We were now at the heart of the matter. Here, in a cafe in central Athens, we had reached the point where all the layers that shield us, the categories and tribal differences by which we define ourselves, are pared back to expose a deeper truth. This is the still point, the space in which intimacy is able to flourish, in silent communion, between man and woman, mentor and disciple, between writer and composer.
This is what the ‘Mauthausen Cantata’ captures, both in words and melody: our need to find intimacy in the darkest of times. It was a perfect collaboration. Theodorakis, too, was a prisoner of war during the Nazi occupation. He, too, walked, as a young man, through hell. His understanding of Kambanellis’s words was based on shared experience. As soon as he read the poems, Theodorakis discerned their essence; and a legend was born.
The legend travelled to the most unexpected places. In May 1980, Kambanellis joined 30,000 survivors of Mauthausen on the thirty-fifth anniversary of their liberation. They walked together from the village of Mauthausen towards the site of their incarceration, to a place where 240,000 inmates had been murdered. They walked in silence, trapped within their own thoughts. They were in awe of what they had lived through and somehow survived.
As they neared the courtyard the marchers heard fragments of music. They floated towards them from inside the camp upon the morning breeze. The melody seemed familiar, Kambanellis recalls. Only when they were very close by did he realise that he was listening to an amplified recording of Maria Farantouri singing the ‘Mauthausen Cantata’:
Girls from Mauthausen
Girls from Belsen
Has anybody seen my love?
Later, without revealing who he was, Kambanellis approached the camp’s secretariat and inquired about the music he had heard that morning. He was told that it had been the camp’s theme song for many years. His song cycle had come to represent the lingering memory of Mauthausen. It had become the expression of a legacy of suffering and hope.
Before we go our separate ways, Kambanellis and I embrace. The storyteller has passed on his tale. He has shared some of his hard-won wisdom. To be a writer, he tells me as we part, is to search for the contradictions that exist within us all, the subterranean rivulets that course beneath the surface calm. In fact, he does not regard himself as a professional. He just writes because he must—because injustice cannot be forgotten, because there are things that must not be left unsaid. Because he was in Mauthausen.
I leave the cafe and make my way to a bookstore that stocks his memoir in English translation. I return to Cafe Zonar, and begin to read it. The afternoon flows by, the evening settles in. I am on a frightening journey. We are being marched from the freight trains via a village, past churches, along country roads, over the idyllic Austrian countryside.
Shopkeepers, villagers, men and women are going about their business. Farmers are at work in their fields. The signs are promising. But the day grows chill. Night is falling. The fields h
ave given way to a forest. And in the distance the gates are looming. We can see Mauthausen rising like a fortress on top of a hill. Kambanellis writes:
A long row of electric bulbs show us the way. As we approach the details appear. A high stone wall. Barbed wire on the top with electric monitors. High stone towers with machine guns. A skull and crossbones on the rooftop. A smoking chimney. Flashes of flame as from an oil distillery. The air smells of burnt meat.
All semblance of normality ceases. Beyond this gate, all rules of civilised behaviour are suspended. The outside world is now a mirage. We are stripped, shorn, showered—and thrust into a world where all human values have been turned on their heads.
The prose is taut, the author’s observations precise; but he possesses a poet’s capacity to notice the ephemeral, to distil the moment, and he guides the reader into the heart of darkness. Yet there are unexpected shards of light.
‘There was so much light in that May of 1945,’ Kambanellis writes. And there was love. Between two former prisoners of the camp. Their affair begins in the immediate aftermath of liberation. Desire blossoms in the shadows of Mauthausen between a Greek inmate called Iakovos Kambanellis, and Janina, a Lithuanian woman who is partly Jewish.
It is late spring in Mauthausen when the lovers first meet. Their bond deepens as they stroll through sites where horrors had taken place, cruelties that they had witnessed. They tear at the heart, these cruelties. I do not wish to re-describe them here. They have been recorded in Kambanellis’s memoir in unflinching detail. In this instance, I’d rather speak of light.
Iakovos and Janina first make love in a guard-tower that overlooked the sites of their recent suffering. The turret becomes their meeting place; a map of Germany, their bed sheet. They spend their nights there, exchange bitter memories, share their disturbed dreams, and awaken, reassured, in each other’s arms.