Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, Medical, Society, Syria

Book Review – War Doctor: Surgery On The Front Line

MEMOIR

Syria, 2012 – Location: Atmeh. A woman was rushed to the operating theatre with severe bomb damage to her leg.

Dr David Nott, a trauma surgeon, clamped the artery to prevent her from bleeding to death and gently pressed a finger into the gaping hole above her knee joint. He felt an object. It was probably some kind of shrapnel, but it was strangely smooth and cylindrical.

Dr Nott grabbed it with his fingers – “very carefully”, he recalls – and pulled it out. Once extracted he held it up to examine it. His Syrian helper took one look and went visibly pale; he obviously knew what was being presented and blurted out, “Mufajir!” before turning tail and leaving the room.

Nott and the anaesthetist locked eyes in panic. Was this some kind of bomb? The room fell silent, bar the hiss of the patient’s ventilator. The anaesthetist backed away and Nott felt his hand begin to shake so vigorously, he was in danger of dropping the thing.

Then the Syrian helper rushed back in with a bucket of water and motioned for Nott to place the metal object carefully into the bottom of it. He later learned that “mufajir” means “detonator” and it could have blown off his hand.

The woman was injured when a bomb her husband had been making in their kitchen had prematurely detonated, killing him instantly.

You can sense Dr Nott’s frustration and anger at the speed with which the Syrian civil war escalated. It had begun in March 2011, when a peaceful protest against the oppressive regime of Bashar al-Assad was met with shocking brutality.

By chance, Nott had met al-Assad in the early 1990s, when the dictator-in-waiting was working as an ophthalmic senior house officer at the Western Eye Hospital, London.

“He seemed very pleasant and respectful,” recalls the surgeon who would later treat Assad’s victims, including a heavily pregnant woman whose unborn child had been shot through the head by a sniper.

In his devastating memoir of more than two decades volunteering his services in some of the world’s most dangerous places, Nott doesn’t speculate on what changed al-Assad’s attitude to his fellow human beings.

He does, however, pinpoint the precise moment that a shy boy from rural Wales realised he wanted to become a “war doctor”, his epiphany occurring in 1985 when he first qualified as a surgeon. His parents took him to the cinema to see The Killing Fields (Roland Joffe’s 1984 drama about the civil war in Cambodia).

Nott’s father, also a doctor, was born in Burma and Nott had endured racist bullying as a child.

“The film lit a torch in me,” he says. “I could relate to its themes of innocent people being bullied, pushed around or dismissed. It gave a vivid depiction of the horrors of war. But, more than that, the film depicted the incredible power of human love in the face of unimaginable adversity.”

Some eight years later, Nott was standing over an operating table in Sarajevo. He had taken a month’s unpaid leave from the NHS to volunteer for the French aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontieres. The Bosnian civil war opened his eyes to a new medicine, in which decisions had to be made quickly, without the diagnostic tests and specialist equipment on which he had come to depend.

“I had never seen injuries like the ones that were coming in every hour.”

 

THE damage inflicted by bombs and high-velocity bullets was of an entirely different order from those received in even the most catastrophic trauma car accidents.

Multiple limbs were often missing. Many patients were dead on arrival, accompanied by relatives begging for help that Nott could not provide.

When he could attempt surgery, the hospital generators would often fail, and the team would have to wait until a porter brought in a wheelbarrow full of car batteries to get the theatre functioning again.

When bombs fell on the hospital itself, Nott’s team fled, leaving him alone in the dark, his hands around the failing heart of a teenage boy.

Stumbling from the room, soaked in his patient’s blood, Nott felt angry and betrayed. But he soon learned that, as an aid worker, his first duty was to keep himself alive so that he could help more people.

It was the first of many difficult moral choices he would have to make in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Chad, the Ivory Coast, Libya, Gaza, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq and Pakistan.

In his scrubs, would you defy the Taliban policeman forbidding you to treat a woman bleeding to death in childbirth? Would you save the life of an ISIS fundamentalist likely to kidnap you on recovery? Would you give money to the children of dead patients?

Dr Nott had to make all these calls under extraordinary pressure.

He describes numerous near-death experiences and there was some terrible emotional fallout.

After returning from one mission, Nott found himself unable to bear the complaints of a British patient fretting about her “unsightly” thread veins and began a screaming, feigned sciatic attack until she left his consulting room.

He also had a panic attack when invited to a private lunch with the Queen. Overwhelmed by the contrast between the luxury of Buckingham Palace and the desolation he had seen in Syria, Nott found himself unable to answer Her Majesty’s questions.

As visions of limbless children filled his head, she placed her hand gently on his and encouraged him to pet her dogs. “There,” she said. “That’s so much better than talking, isn’t it.”

These days, the 63-year-old medic still travels the world to help victims of disaster. But his priorities changed after meeting his wife, Elly, at a charity event for Syria Relief in 2013.

The relationship came as a “bolt from the blue” to the man with a “monastic existence”. But, before they could arrange a first date, Nott made a trip to Gaza, where he elected to stay in the operating theatre to save the life of a little girl called Aysha, even though he had been ordered to evacuate the hospital because an airstrike was expected in minutes.

It was a story that Dr Nott told on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2017, reducing listeners to tears as he described how he still treasures the photograph he has of her, smiling as she recovered.

David married Elly in 2015 and welcomed daughter Molly the same year. Elly – an Oxford graduate with an MA in international relations – was the chief executive of the David Nott Foundation (a charity training surgeons to work in conflict zones) until the beginning of 2019.

Although as a husband and father, Nott tries harder to avoid danger, he finds it hard to be optimistic about the situation in Syria.

But he remains committed in continuing to train doctors working there.

On the final page of his book, Nott quotes the Koran: “Whoever saves a life, it shall be as though he had saved the lives of all mankind.”

– (Memoir) War Doctor: Surgery On The Front Line by David Nott is published by Picador for £18.99, 304pp

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Arts, Books, Theatre

Book Review: The Birth Of Modern Theatre

REVIEW

Intro: 200 years ago, theatre audiences were so rowdy and menacing that bouncers were needed to keep the peace. Actors lived in fear of being pelted with fruit, and much more. That would have been real stage fright

. Read/Listen in PDF Format Book Review: The Birth Of Modern Theatre

A NIGHT out at the theatre in the 18th century was extraordinarily immersive – that’s to say, audience participation was taken to terrifying lengths.

It was a common scene for riots to break out in the stalls, with the destruction of lighting fixtures, benches and canvas scenery. Gents were forever swarming on stage, with swords drawn, to join in the action. If patrons didn’t like a performance, they were known to stand up and bellow: “This will not do!”

Once, when a magician’s act was particularly poor, the audience were so enraged they dragged the theatre’s furnishings into the street, hoisted the velvet curtains on a pole “as a kind of flag” and started a bonfire.

Such behaviour was normal. In 1755, after war had broken out between France and England, the audience decided that the dancers at Drury Lane theatre were “disguised French soldiers”. Not only that, “all foreigners are Frenchmen”, including the Swiss and Italians.

It was then remembered that David Garrick’s ancestors were Huguenots, which made the famous actor-manager French, though he was born in Hereford and raised in Lichfield.

The audience raced to his house in Southampton Street and smashed his windows. In retaliation, Garrick cancelled all concessionary tickets. They returned and smashed his windows again.

 

EVEN if they remained seated, patrons pelted each other with oranges and apple cores. When a barrel fell of the edge of the balcony and hit a lady in the stalls, “her huge fashionable headdress saved her from injury”.

Dr Johnson, accompanied to the theatre by friend and biographer James Boswell, was so cross when he was hit by flying fruit that he picked up his assailant and threw him into the orchestra pit.

Given such mayhem, it’s a wonder anybody attended to the plays, but theatres employed “hush men” to calm people down and encourage them to enjoy the acting – which generally they did. During Garrick’s career, Romeo and Juliet was performed 141 times and The Beggar’s Opera 128 times.

As Norman S. Poser says in the fascinating The Birth Of Modern Theatre, out of a metropolitan population of around 700,000, more than 12,000 people a week regularly attended Drury Lane and Covent Garden, where seat prices started at a shilling.

The theatre was also a significant employer, as in addition to actors and dancers there were ticket collectors, stage managers, prop men, bill stickers, scene painters and janitors.

It was only at the theatre that the social classes mixed at all, from the Royal Family, who attended 11 times in 1760, down to servants and labourers. Daily newspapers, which began flourishing in this Georgian period, carried reviews and gossip. Actors became celebrities whose careers were discussed in London coffee houses.

Garrick, very much the hero in Poser’s narrative, was the Laurence Olivier or Kenneth Branagh of his era. Acting and living had become the same thing to him.

Described as being “open without frankness, polite without refinement, and sociable without friends”, Garrick was a great enigma, and dominated his profession for three decades.

In 1737, he’d walked from the Midlands to London with Dr Johnson, who later had to stop himself from paying visits backstage. “I’ll come no more behind your scenes,” he told Garrick. “The silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.”

Though in make-up and on-stage, Garrick was “alert and alive in every muscle” – and watching him as Richard III was generally said to be “like lightning passing through one’s frame” – off-stage, out of costume, the star was a bit plump and nondescript, short and squat.

Peg Woffington, Garrick’s Cordelia and Ophelia, rebuffed him adroitly after a brief affair by saying, “I desire you always to be my lover upon the stage, and my friend off of it.”

In 1749, undaunted, Garrick married the illegitimate but beloved daughter of the Earl of Burlington, who provided a useful dowry of £6,000 (or £1.3 million in modern currency). Thus, Garrick could purchase the Drury Lane lease and form his company. He was also the first actor in history to freely mix with the aristocracy, and he advised the Duke of Devonshire on the purchase of Old Masters.

He performed privately for George III at Windsor, as the King was fond of theatricals. Indeed, his father George II had hired an actor, James Quin, to teach his children how to speak English correctly. Elocution lessons are a thing of the past, aren’t they?

Garrick attempted many innovations. He tried to ban audience members from sitting on the stage. He studied and rehearsed roles diligently; and, expected his company to learn their lines. He wanted actresses to be more than adornments or models whose sole purpose was their “ability to dazzle the audience” with an array of elaborate costumes.

 

WHAT Garrick didn’t do was play Shakespeare as written: he preferred the edited versions, where King Lear had a happy ending and Hamlet lost the grave digger scene and the business about Yorick.

As Poser says, Garrick aspired to a style of acting noted for “ease, simplicity and genuine humour”, rather than anything bombastic and artificial. He got rid of the old-fashioned declamatory manner, where there was a lot of gesticulation, arm-waving and face-pulling to signify grief, anger, joy and despair.

Though there’s nothing realistic about the mechanical wig he wore as Hamlet, where the hair stood on end when he saw the Ghost.

After giving his Richard III he’d be in his dressing room, “panting, perspiring and lying prostrate” – acting the part of a man looking exhausted and spent. (There’s a dreadful editorial mistake here. Poser says Garrick was lying “prostate” – though what killed him in 1779 were kidney stones.)

One thing that was definitely invented in the 18th century was The Pinter Pause. Charles Macklin, who was 98 when he died in 1797, played Shylock hundreds of times, and inserted many dramatic pauses, the most impressive being known as the Grand Pause.

One night the silence grew and grew. Finally, the prompter whispered the next line. Macklin rushed into the wings, knocked the prompter down, and returned to inform the audience, “The fellow interrupted me in my Grand Pause.”

– The Birth Of Modern Theatre by Norman S. Poser is published by Routledge for £24.99, 200pp

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Arts, Books, History

Book Review: The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz

REVIEW

Intro: When 19-year-old Fritz Kleinmann learned his father was being sent to the notorious concentration camp, he begged to go with him even though it meant almost certain death

THIS shattering book about the Holocaust is a must read, lest we forget the depravities to which humans can sink, and what the human body and spirit can endure.

We know about the use of the gas chambers, but this account informs us more about the living death outside such hell holes. Those selected to be slave labourers are worked until they drop and die of complete exhaustion.

. See also Book Review – ‘Hitler’s Scapegoat: The Boy Assassin And The Holocaust’

It is also the astonishing narrative of the unbreakable paternal bond between a father and a son, Gustav and Fritz Kleinmann, from a happy Viennese Jewish family – a bond that is so strong that the son volunteered to be transported to Auschwitz in order not to be parted from his father.

Jeremy Dronfield delivers a brilliantly researched and written book that offers searing clarity. Things are ghastly from the very beginning – Viennese Jews being made to scrub the pavements by their previously friendly neighbours who have become rabid anti-Semites overnight – and then get progressively worse. It is inconceivable or unimaginable they can get any worse, but they do.

Reading Dronfield’s deliberations could be deemed as a kind of torture. It’s almost unbelievable that the chief protagonists, Gustav and Fritz, lived every day of this hell for six years.

In one of the first round-ups of able-bodied Viennese Jews, on September 10, 1939, those two (aged 48 and 16) were carted off to Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimar.

On the very first day of their incarceration, when everyone, thirsty and terrified, was made to get out of the cattle wagons and run 8km uphill to the camp without stopping is just a mere taster of the daily torture and cruelty that was in store.

 

AS ALWAYS with the Holocaust, there are new details you learn that, once heard about, you can’t ever forget. Inside the hell of barbed-wire fences, searchlights, routine beatings and starvation that was Buchenwald, there stood a beautiful old oak tree, known as the “Goethe Oak”. So named, because under it, this is where Goethe used to sit while writing his poems.

From the branches of that oak, the enslaved prisoners were hung by their arms for hours on end, as a punishment for not working hard enough in the backbreaking quarries, where they were enforced to do 12-hour shifts pushing wagonloads of boulders uphill. Sadistic guards lashed them and called them “Jew-pigs”.

There can be no starker image to bring home the fact that those depraved atrocities happened in the “civilised” country of Goethe, Beethoven and Bach.

And there’s worse: the administration of lethal injections by smiling doctors of death, routine lashings and despicable starvation punishments.

A favourite sport for the guards was to throw a prisoner’s cap beyond the sentry line and encourage him to go and fetch it.

If he stepped beyond the line he was shot for trying to escape. A guard was awarded three days’ holiday for every “escapee” he killed.

Gustav managed to keep a tiny diary, which he hid, for the entire six years. He didn’t write much, as there wasn’t much space within the confines, but every now and then he wrote sentences of such humanity, using the vocabulary of a man of morals in a place of such depravity, that to read them is balm.

“One can scarcely drag oneself along,” he wrote, “but I have made a pact with myself that I will survive to the end. I take Gandhi as my model. He is so thin, yet survives. Every day I say a prayer to myself: ‘Gustl, do not despair. Grit your teeth: the SS murderers must not beat you.’”

Young Fritz was taken under the wing of some older fellow inmates, who had helped him to survive by teaching him the art of bricklaying.

A pivotal moment came when, on October 15, 1942, Fritz heard that his father had been put on the list of 400 prisoners to be transported to Auschwitz the next day.

He insisted on getting onto that list as well, but his chief mentor, a kind man called Robert Siewert, was aghast: “What you’re asking is suicide,” he said. “You have to forget your father. These men will all be gassed.”

Fritz was adamant. He could not bear to be parted from his father, and formally requested that he should be sent to Auschwitz, too.

So it was that father and son travelled to their next place of horror, where they were both selected for work rather than instant death.

To Gustav’s astonishment, he realised that he was in the same barrack building where he’d been hospitalised during World War I (he had been a decorated military hero).

Again and again, over the next few years, father and son came within a whisker of death, whether from random selection, punishment, illness (which nearly always led to the gas chambers) or American bombing raids.

Somehow, through a network of good luck and kindness, they survived – seasoned old “Buchenwalders”, toughened up through enduring years of the nightmare.

Many newcomers couldn’t cope with the shock: within days they were reduced to broken-spirited wrecks, especially when they found out that their wives and children had been sent straight off to Birkenau to be gassed.

Gustav and Fritz were spared till much later the knowledge that Tini and Herta (wife/mother, daughter/sister) had been transported to the east in 1942 and shot on arrival, their bodies thrown into a pit.

 

THANKFULLY, Fritz’s brother Kurt had succeeded in getting a visa for the U.S., and his sister Edith fortunately managed to get to England, where she fell in love with and married another refugee.

It is the generous acts of strangers that will likely pull at your heartstrings the most.

The slave labourers at Auschwitz worked alongside German civilians in the local factory, and one of these, Fredl Wocher, turned out to be a kind and trustworthy person who went to Vienna on leave, and brought back loving messages and food parcels from Gustav and Fritz’s old and loyal neighbours.

As the whole Nazi murder machine fell apart in 1945, the skeletal surviving prisoners were sent on death-marches or death-train journeys to Belsen.

By the time they were liberated by the Americans, both men were just skin and bone. Fritz weighed just five-and-a-half stone.

Amazingly, Gustav lived on until 1976, and happily remarried, or that Fritz (who married twice and had a son) lived until 2009.

Like so many held during those dark years, Gustav never wanted to talk about their ordeal. Fritz, however, seething with anger, was determined that the story should be told. He had the courage to do so.

His own memoir was entitled, And Still The Dog Just Will Not Die. The Nazis had tried to obliterate him and his father, but in the end they had failed.

Their living, breathing children and grandchildren are the Kleinmann’s final triumph.

– The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz by Jeremy Dronfield is published by Michael Joseph for £12.99, 432pp

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