From Jack the Ripper to Theresienstadt: In and Around Prague with the From Hell Crew
Though it's his last day on set, he's in an exceptionally good mood. Earlier his agent telephoned and told him he had just scored the plum role of Hagrid the Giant in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Albert greets Coltrane's news by making the Bling! Bling! sound of a cash register's ring.
Coltrane, I discover, is a very funny and very charming man. Over dinner, he tells what is probably an apocryphal Hollywood tale. "Richard Attenborough," he begins, "was in Los Angeles trying to get financing for Gandhi. He brought the project to a young MBA Hollywood exec at one of the studios. He does his pitch. And the exec says to Attenborough?the knighted Sir Richard Attenborough?'You mean to tell me, you want to make a movie about a little brown man who wears diapers, lives in the gutter and gets killed in the end? I don't think so.'"
The party also includes Johnny Depp. He sits in a chair at the table's far end and chain-smokes, his face creased with exhaustion. In contrast to the elegance of the period costume he wore that afternoon, he's dressed simply: looped painter's trousers covered with ball-point ink doodlings on the white surface and a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt with an icon of Che Guevara.
The strange thing about this image on his t-shirt is something I later notice in a photograph taken that evening of Depp, Allen and myself. It set my shaved head's nubs on end. The photograph was taken by the waiter. The composition is clumsy, the pose is awkward and we look like the Three Stooges. But the photograph is clear. What became apparent to me that was not obvious at the time is this?Depp looks exactly like the picture of Che on his chest. In person, Depp does not look like Che Guevara; but in this photograph he does. It's as if he possessed some unnamed ability akin to an undiscovered species of Kirlian photography?a wild talent blasting a blank sheet of photographic paper with forcefully vivid mental and emotional imagery, which, somehow, mysteriously imprints itself on the surface of 35-mm film stock.
Depp, I discovered when I shifted seats to speak with him at his end of the table, is in the tradition of Hollywood Reds. I find myself involved in a discussion with him about America's last great revolutionary leader, Fred Hampton. It turns out he's developing a film about the life and murder of the slain Black Panther with actor/producer Marshall Bell. He also tells me about his mission to Cuba with Hunter S. Thompson. They wanted to ferret out an interview with Fidel Castro. It didn't happen.
They did, however, encounter the photographer who took the photo of Che on his Rage Against the Machine t-shirt. The photographer told them the photo occurred purely by chance. There was Che. There he was. Snap. And, for decades, that photo has been one of the most reproduced images in the world.
Needless to say, the photographer didn't receive a dime.
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In my hotel room the next morning, the television set automatically turns itself on. In an instance of what Jung would call synchronicity, I wake up to a BBC World News report that Mohammed Al Fayed has held a press conference announcing the lawsuit he's filed against the U.S. government. He's demanding the release of all classified documents shedding light on the cause of the deaths of his son Dodi Fayed and Princess Diana three years before.
This is too weird. I'm on assignment in Prague, covering a movie about a Masonic murder conspiracy in the 19th century covered up by the British throne, based on a work of pure comic-book fiction. And my 21st-century tv set wakes me up early in the morning with a real-life plotline straight From Hell: the owner of Harrods is charging that the British Crown is behind a conspiracy in the murder of his son and Princess Di for precisely the same reason From Hell claims five prostitutes were murdered in Whitechapel in 1888?the pollution of the royal bloodline!
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On the table outside of the Hughes brothers' trailer, which has a sign in its window reading "Pimps" instead of "Directors," is a bottle of Moet champagne and a two-layer vanilla-frosted cake, elaborately decorated with candy roses, spurts of green confection and thin wedges of white chocolate. It's Joanna Page's last day on set. Her character, Annie Crook, is the reason for the story's "inciting incident," setting the rest of the tale in motion. I do not know her work. I have never seen her before. But when she comes out to cut her cake, I find myself staring into the face of one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life...even with her features grotesquely brutalized by prosthetic makeup. She looks as though she's stepped from a canvas by French painter Romain Slocombe or out of a photo by Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki?figures of scarred and bleeding women, bandaged and neck-braced, with arms or legs or both set in plaster casts. The work is invasive and voyeuristic. And it's exactly how I feel watching Page cut her cake. But despite her artificially applied bruises, the vaginal lobotomy scar splitting her forehead, the dirt and shorn patches of Raggedy Ann hair, a luminously angelic beauty shines through the rubber and greasepaint. Maybe that's the point. I tell her this.
Her eyes sparkle like fireflies.
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But in my journalistic capacity, parallels could be drawn between the horrific reality of the camps and the foam-rubber horrors devised by the movie's technicians. So I went along. We piled into two cars and left the monastery's grounds. Our destination was the Czech town Terezin, which the Nazis called Theresienstadt.
Ironically, Theresienstadt was also once used as a kind of movie set. In what could be interpreted as a National Socialist vision of Palestine, the Nazis said they were merely resettling the Jews in a town of their own. Its purpose was to show the world the Jews had nothing to fear from Nazi Germany. A propaganda film was produced giving credence to this deceitful claim. It was called The Führer Gives a City to the Jews.
With its images of "happy" and "industrious" Jews, the film was infused with the kind of paternalism reminiscent of the fictions of "contented" banjo-pluckers buckdancing with the boll weevils in the American South. The film's director was later erased.
The film came about in this way: The International Red Cross, hearing rumors of malfeasance, requested a tour of the ghetto in 1944. So the town was cleaned up and made a "model ghetto," employing all the trickery available to any big studio production. Actually, Terezin was a prison for many of Europe's leading Jewish artists and intellectuals, under watchful armed guard. Some inmates were temporarily moved out to make the town look less overcrowded. When the Red Cross arrived, Theresienstadt, with its "normal"-looking storefronts, banks, cafes and schools, seemed like a trendy art colony in Vermont. Red Cross representatives were treated to demonstrations by athletic clubs and choirs of singing, star-patched children. The ruse worked. They left satisfied with their findings: "We must say that we are astonished to find out that the Ghetto was a community leading an almost normal existence..." And then the children were herded onto trains headed for Auschwitz, murdered and turned to ash.
The Czech driver who led our two-car caravan parked in front of a graveyard spread before an old, low-walled fortress. The cemetery was laid out in a mosaic of stone and grass with a simple wooden cross standing sentry in the middle. I didn't want to get out of the car. Despite my childhood obsession with all things horror, I understood the acute difference between a Saturday matinee spook-show and the inhumanity documented in a Holocaust newsreel. And the latter gave me nightmares. As a child, I couldn't imagine anything more horrifying than being strapped to a wooden pallet and shoved inside an oven like a sheet of cookies shaped like little gingerbread men. It was my Room 101. Such was the power of Hansel and Gretel.
My mother didn't comfort me. She only reinforced my fears, instilling a healthy paranoia necessary to the psychic survival of any black person living in the USA. Though my mother had lived through World War II, she didn't suffer from the mental disorder like the one that afflicted the mother of Allen Ginsberg and moved him to write his poem "Kaddish." No, she was a startlingly sane and wide-awake black woman.
In the 1960s, when cities across America burned in a series of ghetto uprisings, my mother sat me down one night and explained the provision for mass-prison camps in the U.S. under Title II of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950. I was both dismayed and perplexed. The idea of concentration camps on U.S. soil contradicted every notion I'd been taught to believe about America.
Scowling at my naivete, my mother explained how during the war President Roosevelt ordered the relocation of more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans to detention centers in the U.S.
"What's there to prevent this from happening again?" she asked. "To black people?"
Indeed, even in 1942 American blacks were in these detention centers if they happened to be married to Japanese-Americans. It was after this I stopped standing for the Pledge of Allegiance.
I was 11 years old.
Finally, I coaxed myself from the car. Our group walked along the rim of the cemetery. The inscription on the fortress' gate of course read Arbeit Macht Frei. We paid for our tickets. In return, we were given brochures with a tiny map.
Terezin was built in the late 18th century. From the beginning, it served the dual function of fortress and prison against various freedom fighters. The Gestapo took it over in 1941. More than 140,000 Jews, as well as Romany, Communists, anti-Nazi resistance fighters, POWs and assorted non-Aryan Others were imprisoned there.
Today, Terezin is a symbolic reminder, and a warning. Though old and impoverished, the barracks are swept of dust and history. It is orderly and clean. There are even boxes of flowers in bright bloom.
There are no cadaverous slave workers. There are no sadistic guards with guns and unmuzzled dogs. It is all memory now. Only the signifiers are left. It is the responsibility of the spectator to reimagine the past and its horrors.
But I cannot think about the past. Terezin forces me to think about how the past impinges on the present. Exploring the grounds, maintaining distance between myself and groups of shutterbug tourists, I think about the Hughes brothers, the circumstances of their upbringing, the fact that their mother's people were the 20th century's earliest victims of massive genocidal slaughter. In 1915, Turkey's Armenians were removed from their homes, placed in relocation centers in the desert and left to starve and die of thirst. I think about black-on-black genocide in Rwanda, how black skin doesn't exempt one from behavior we Afro-pride types associate with sick-in-the-head white folks. I think about the morally reprehensible treatment of the Palestinians in Israel; how compassion wasn't learned through the experience of its own people.
For some odd reason, while strolling through the prison's wood and brick bunkhouse?maybe because of the brown-skinned presence of Veronika Hladikova, Heather Graham's multilingual Czech assistant?I recall the night I told my ex-roommate Thorsten to kiss my black ass and called him a "Caucasian muthafucka." In response, he cocked an eyebrow and replied:
"Caucasian? The Nazis were trying to exterminate Caucasians! We are Aryans! Caucasians are Russian peasants, you stupid American!"
Thorsten's comment was an instance of dark Berliner humor. It's one of the fundamental reasons why I live there. Laughter in the grim face of the Apocalypse.
The point is genocide didn't begin or end with National Socialism, of course. Beyond all of its lurid cartoon shocks, From Hell vividly depicts a period in history when the deliberate infliction of "conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction [of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group] in whole or in part" (UN Genocide Convention of 1948) also amounted to nothing less than genocide, long before Hitler introduced the world to Zyklon-B.
Conditions in 19th-century Ireland contributed to conditions in London's Whitechapel district. Imperial England insisted on the absolute rights of landlords who evicted some 50,000 tenant farmers and their families from their homes in Ireland during the Great Famine. Many ended up living in the squalor of London's ghettos.
From Hell drives home the point that class antagonisms in England produced not a "war on poverty," but a war on the poor, with chilling sequences of a stately, horse-drawn death coach rattling across the dung-stained cobblestones of Whitechapel. As the Ripper sits inside, plying his victims with goblets of absinthe and fresh grapes, one recognizes an eerie parallel to the Nazis' mobile extermination units that prowled the streets of the Warsaw ghetto.
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Terezin was an expression of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. This is the work of methodical and efficient administrators who reapplied Ford's principles of assembly-line production to the destruction of human beings. It was Mussolini who correctly observed that fascism was the marriage of the state and the corporation.
I look, I examine the dried bones, if you will, of history. My thoughts are cold, dispassionate, removed. Its finality, its impotence, its horror is tedious. I've seen it all before in grainy black and white, in Schindler's List. And I've seen it in my dreams: the witch, the baker, the cookiemaker.
We pass through the hospital block, the delousing room, the baths. Amy Robinson and I caress the belly of a small iron furnace outside the showers, thinking it was used for the incineration of human bodies. It's so small?was it reserved for children?
We jump back, shivering at the thought. But no, it was just a water heater. Strangely, this is a comforting thought. Later, reading Arendt's account of the Adolph Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, I learn Terezin was not an extermination camp per se. It was, indeed, a "showcase" shtetl, reserved for the Nazis' curious classification of "privileged" Jews?moneyed old people, Jewish Council functionaries and well-known artists.
We came to a spot on our map marked Area 17. Area 17 is an underground tunnel. According to our brochure, it's part of Terezin's original fortification system. It extends for at least half a mile, ending at a field where prisoners were once stood against a wall and shot. For 250 of Terezin's inmates, this was their final walk.
As we begin our tour through the tunnel, I'm reminded of a photo hanging on a wall in my family's home. My father took it during one of his early trips to Senegal. He snapped it on Goree Island. It's called "The Door of No Return." More than 20 million African men, women and children shackled in chains passed through that door, loaded into the slave ships' cargo holds, never to see their homeland again. In the photo the passage is dark and narrow, with a glimpse of sky-blue sea stretching off into infinity.
Doomed beings walked Terezin's underground corridor. Most cruel of all, they were given time to think. Death did not come quickly. It takes 20 minutes to complete the walk. That's a lot of time to reflect.
What do you think when you know you are about to be executed by men, not monsters, who say you are no better than rats? What thoughts float through your mind?
The designs of sadistic men control these thoughts, too.
The tunnel is narrow and white-walled, with low, rounded ceilings. It's dim, nearly dark. Acoustics are hollow and stark. There is little room to move. You cannot stretch your arms. You cannot lift your head. In the gloom, you stink with despair.
As you approach a juncture, believing the tunnel's end is just around the corner, the passage widens. It is filled with light. With that light comes a twinge of hope. For a few moments, you're able to breathe. Almost. Then the passage darkens and narrows once more.
This macabre pattern is repeated over and over again. It's not unlike the architecture of a funhouse. Or the structure of a horror movie. The tunnel's construction depends on the constant interplay of constriction and expansion; suffocation and breath; dark and light; hope and despair. The farther I proceed, the more I am overwhelmed by feelings of suffocation. No matter how removed I try to be, it's glaringly apparent the walls of Terezin sweat with the residues of terror. I can't see it, but I can feel it. I can hear it. I know it's there. The walls reverberate with screams, echoing in my head.
Finally, when we exit the tunnel, another odd thought occurs to me.
As the Doksany monastery is not so far away, it's not unlikely many were murdered on its grounds. If this is true, and Jack the Ripper, as the movie claims, gave birth to the 20th century, the ghosts left by his children must haunt its frames.