A Few Seconds, Part One: Bach

8/2/2019 A Few Seconds, Part One: Bach

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I now know the characters name is Bach and the lm,

Kaddish After a Living Memory, was a 1968 Germanproduction shot in Tel Aviv. I nally

found the information three years ago,

after decades of trying to track it down

with no success because I had nothing of

real substance to describe it or enter into

a database. What I recalled in part was a

general description of the movie, that it

might be called Kaddish, that it was most

likely a German lm, but I didnt know

anything else, including the exact year I

saw it.The most denitive part of the movie

that I had thought about, been inuenced

by, and have been able to see in my head

with an eerie, unusually focused clarity

for a forty-four year-old memory is not

something I believed would have helped

me locate the lm. While it is as clear as

day to me, neither the emotional impact

nor the actual sequence is easy to convey.

I was wrong. What I recalled was enough when I nally

found the right person to ask.

I have only seen the lm once, when it was broadcast one

afternoon in 1969 and I watched it on the TV in our south

side Chicago apartment, me on the living room oor, my

father in a chair behind me. Like so many other decades-old

memories, only portions exist now and nothing remains of

what happened before or after the movie. The few bits that

linger are soft, fuzzy or disjointed. But within this tiny cloud

are a few seconds from the lm with detail that will not fade,

where the focus is sharp, painful, and important.

I have no recall of what Im doing before I am on the oor

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

those weekend days when my father had a few hours alone

in the afternoon (over the years my mother had some jobsthat required work on Saturdays), that

PBS channel was more often than not

what he switched on.

The afternoon was bright, one of

those elements of a memory that seems

inconsequential, save for its contrast to

the black and white lms story, which

was dark and sad.

It has taken time for me to understan

in what manner and why the particular

few seconds of the lm still resonatein my soul like the innite tone from a

struck Buddhist prayer bowl. There are

other aspects of the memory, though,

of which I will never know specics,

because they have to do with my

father. Im certain he would be willing

to discuss these, but Im also certain

he will not remember that day or the

movie, and, frankly, I do not really wis

to know if he does or not, because I nd some satisfaction

and much respect for my father in my own conjecturing as

to why he allowed me to watch. Even with my haphazard,

incomplete recollection, and despite its historical

importance, I think the movie might best be described as

not suitable for younger viewers.

And yet, as a fourteen year-old, its effect on me was life

altering without the gruesomeness that cant be avoided in

documentary footage of the same period and subject manne

Much of the movie is told in ashback, by a father to his

son. The son is slightly younger than I am at the time, and

I think this connects with my father. It intrigues me that my

The first of two essays about how a few seconds in the lives of two

men Ive never met influenced my entire adult lifeby Michael W. Harkins

A Few Seconds, Part One: Bach

Characters that live with

us, 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 under-

stand the full spectrum

of their characters lives,

on the page and off, on

screen and off.

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.


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father may have realized then or he could have planned it

all along -- that the lms 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 lm 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 thebig war was different. As kids we played war, with toy

machine guns and toy helmets. We could read about it in

comic books, ght the good ght 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-ve years before. Every parent of a teenagerhad memories of those terrifying ve 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 buzz-

bomb rocket ights. 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 tothem, 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, nomatter where I rst 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 yardsahead 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 wasnot 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

ghting 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 - Bachcopyright 2012, M.W. Harkins2


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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 apickpocket 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 Centurywith Walter Cronkite and the reports of Edward R. Murrow.

Television programming was so radically different back

then it is difcult 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 nd 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 discussionand 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 forunfathomable cruelty and evil.

Whenever I have asked myself, whenever I have

attempted to understand what it is about those brief

moments of lm 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 condence how long the brief moments actually are.

For the rst 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 senseit might be longer in reality.

I was fourteen. When the movie nished 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

lmmaker. It did something much, much more powerful.

It was a revelation about humanity, acting, and

storytelling. It was the rst time I realized how powerful

acting could be, that acting meant something more than

saying lines and pretending. What I saw, and still see, inthose 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 lm.

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

lm. Indeed, it may have been shot in color, but buying our

rst 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 Imassuming 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 - Bachcopyright 2012, M.W. Harkins


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father that another mutual friend, Bach, also survived, and

is somewhere in Tel Aviv, where the lm takes place.

The father and son nd 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 encountermany times before.

The son asks the father why Bach is this way, and the lm

goes into ashback, back to the concentration camp.

That description is a combination of my recollection and

a summary of the lm from Cinematograe des Holocaust,

a database of Holocaust-related lms. Old memories are old

memories, whether of a childhood birthday party or lm

scene, and I have no idea as to the lms 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 otherthan 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 lms with Kaddish as part of the

title; I added a date range of the 1960s; I called WTTWs

ofces 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 rst 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 lm on the trials and the movie adaptation

starting Spencer Tracy. I had also seen George Stevens

famous, stark lm of the concentration camp liberations.

I would have sought to understand regardless of

whether I had seen Kaddish After a Living Memory but

the lm and those few seconds humanized history for me.

The rst 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-dutylives 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 lm 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 nd the information for Kaddish After aLiving Memory...

Again, allow me a moment: thank you, Bruce. Your

courtesy and responsiveness enabled me to nd Bach.

The lm 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 lls the screen, and

we see his increasing terror, his eyes wide and darting,



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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 esh, 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 primalscreams 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 ailed, 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 ies 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, remarkablescene.

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, esh, and soul of a character.

During the last moments of the lm I had my rst 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 putthemselves 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 difcult 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 oor and turned to my dad, and neither of

us said anything for a second or two, then my dad said,

That guy had snot ying 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 lm? 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 lm 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 hadbecome in my life. That few seconds of Bachs life

touched my heart, obviously, but in looking back over

time, I now realize just how inuential 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



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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 oor 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 ontop 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 lm? 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 inuential, 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 someunique importance. Only a few, however, burn eternally as

guiding lights, and I still marvel at their inuence. 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 nally 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 bookThe Way to Communicate, a practical and philosophical guide

to building enlightened person-to-person communication skills in a time ofexpanding 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

Documents

A Few Seconds, Part One: Bach