Storyteller Pamela Marre has always been surrounded by her Jewish family stories and began working with them in experimental theatre in the late 70’s with various improvising groups and in a duo with Japanese artist Kazuko Hohki. In the late 80’s Pamela started linking the stories together and working as a solo storyteller. She also works with traditional storytelling material from all cultures and has published books for adults and children, written and performed for radio and enjoyed a ten year working relationship with the Imperial War Museum. Pamela is currently completing a Fellowship in Holocaust Education.
Sam Stone visited Pamela in her North London home to talk about the trouble with storytelling, the benefits of television and the difficulties in understanding why anyone does anything.
As a storyteller what do you make of the fascination that we have with the Media and reality TV shows like Big Brother?
I have utterly no interest in reality TV.
People actually live in virtual worlds, I wondered if you had an opinion on that?
I worry about my son being on the computer all the time. I find it extraordinary that he is playing a war game. But he’s playing with people in all different countries. People used to say when television was invented that it would destroy lives and take over peoples’ minds and destroy communities and I’m really not convinced that it has.
It’s the opiate of the masses now though. You go to work you come home and let the TV hypnotise you and go to bed and go to work and so on and so on.
Yes but we don’t live in communities anymore, people don’t have their families around them and they don’t know their neighbours so there’s not that need to sit at the table and have good conversation, so the TV is a good substitute.
Ah but which came first?
The splitting up of society came first. One of the things that really contributed towards that was the post-war building programme. Social architects got it wrong. Those horrendous tower blocks.
I think it is very dangerous to look at causality as down to a single thing. There’s lots of bad things about television but I think there’s lots of good things.
It’s easy to fall into the whole rant about how there’s so much more violence on the streets and the kids have got nothing to do except commit crimes.
In part, that is true and my mother says ‘ooh it wasn’t like that in my day’ and I think well no it wasn’t because she was born in 1915 during the First World War, where lots of young men got killed and she lived through the Second World War where lots MORE young men got killed. And of course young teenage men weren’t hanging about on the streets because they were either dead or fighting!
What do we need now? Do we need a war to get them off the streets…?
So I’m very cautious of looking backwards and saying, ‘it was better’.
You’ve been working with the Imperial War Museum in the Holocaust Exhibition. Do you call it ‘teaching?’
I have a problem with giving myself that title because in the strictest sense I’m not a teacher but yes it is ‘teaching’.
There’s lots of other educators there too, some are holocaust survivors, some are hidden children, almost everybody has some kind of personal connection with the holocaust.
But I do lots of storytelling at the War Museum which isn’t Holocaust based, for the Lawrence of Arabia exhibition for example, and the 1940’s house for primary schools, but always mixing history to communicate what it might have been like. In particular taking on a tiny detail.
Such as?
Like the Second World War evacuation. You get the most extraordinary culture clashes. You had kids from the slums who lived in tenements being taken into a country house with silk sheets and middle class kids going into poor farms. I mean bedwetting was a national problem – it was brought up in the Houses of Parliament! There were kids that wouldn’t consider going across the yard to a privy to use the toilet in the pouring rain with worms coming up through the earth. And other kids that thought milk was disgusting coming out of a cow!
That complete lack of comprehension that doesn’t exist now and television can take some of the credit for teaching kids and adults some understanding.
Yes, although I did hear something the other day. A high proportion of children do not know that sausages come from a farm, bless.
I find it really funny that kids are unaware where these things comes from. You know the Baba Yaga Stories of course? Baba Yaga is as a hag who flies through the air in a pestle and mortar. She lives in a log cabin that moves around on chicken legs.
But when you say ‘chicken legs’ to kids – they don’t picture the legs of a chicken, they picture chicken drumsticks!
Storytelling has often been used as a tool to educate, do you think the storytelling circle could have served more of a purpose educating the masses about the environment?
I think it’s very difficult to educate anyone on anything. I work with history. It is very difficult to get across to people what it was like to be around at a ‘different time’ in any meaningful form or ‘real’ way. I think one is perpetually doing that with storytelling when you say ‘Once Upon a Time’ but Education is much more to do with observation.
So I’m not sure how to educate about global warming.
I’m thinking back to the CND rallies and those people that tried to inform the world about carbon emissions and so forth and – were there not storytellers amongst them?
I don’t think I agree with that entirely. How many people in the storytelling world DID campaign against those things? I think it’s very dangerous to look at Storytelling as a right-on occupation and to assume that because people hold one set of values that they hold another. I think that’s part of the problem I have with the storytelling world. Storytelling communities are like folk clubs. They can be reactionary.
Do you have other problems with the storytelling world?
Only in that it has become so ‘programmed’. Everybody seems to be doing rehearsed ‘pieces’ that lack the spontaneity of true storytelling and lack the quality of good theatre. It’s become a strange hybrid. Storytellers aren’t generally good actors. As a stand-up comic yourself, you’ll know you have to connect with a room and it should be the same with storytelling otherwise they may as well be watching television.
You said that almost everyone at the Holocaust Exhibition has a link one way or another to the Holocaust, can I ask you about yours?
My father’s family came over here at the turn of the century and so did my mother’s. So I don’t have a direct connection in THAT way, but all the family that stayed behind in Poland got wiped out except for two of my mother’s cousins who we went to find in Israel when I was fourteen.
We arrived and it was August. Hot! Like walking into an oven. My mother had two cousins that had survived and they had both married other concentration camp survivors and had young children. We went to these horrible flats to see them because everything in Israel is built like a bunker.
We knocked, and the door opened. We heard excited voices and I remember there was a man stood at the door and the first thing I noticed was he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and was really soaked in sweat under the arms. At the end of the corridor stood a woman who was wearing a long sleeved dress and I was surprised because it was just so hot -how could they possibly be wearing that?
Then they raised their arms in merry greeting to welcome us – the long lost family – and their sleeves pulled up and they both had tattoos on their arms and immediately the image that came into my mind was of the butchers shop.
In those days we went to the butchers and the carcass would be hanging on a hook – and the butcher would cut a piece off. Every carcass had a blue number tattooed onto them in the abattoir yard to show the meat had been inspected – and that was the image that came into my head – these carcasses on a hook – and I was so embarrassed. I just thought how could I see this image and these are long lost cousins?
It wasn’t until I worked at the Holocaust Exhibition that I understood how accurate that image was. That’s exactly what that tattooing was about. It was about reducing people to carcasses. It’s why it was done and it was the correct association that was intended by the people that ordered them on.
All my mother’s family were wiped out apart from my grandparents and brothers and sisters who came here.
Both sets of my family left Eastern Europe to escape the Pogroms.
The killing squads who were sent through the Russian part of Eastern Europe, they got the Jews in the communities to dig pits and machine gunned them into them. They didn’t take them into camp, they just wiped them out – it was a different kind of process.
Recently I actually found a photograph of my Polish grandfather (my mother’s father) in Poland in 1904 just before he left.
In the picture he is with a set of students from a Yeshiva – and the placard reads, ‘In memory of dark times’. Those dark times were the Pogroms and a lot of them left.
But the other side of my family – my father’s side – came from Russia, and were fleeing the same kind of Pogroms and they came from this place called Bugoslav.
Now, when I came through the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Israel recently whilst working on my Fellowship project, I suddenly came across this:
“Bugoslav. On the 15th of Sept 1941 Einzatgruppen Squad Number 5 (killing Squad no: 5) killed 320 Jews and 30 communist functionaries – so that Bugoslav was now Jew Free. The SS officer in charge was SS Officer Hafflen.”
Whoever of my family was left there, and there obviously were some, because they didn’t ALL leave in 1904, they were exterminated and so it is for every Jew. Everyone is touched by it in some way.
What it should do is make you feel far more sensitive about other peoples’ genocide but unfortunately that doesn’t always work. You would think that every single Jew in the world would be fierce in their defence of immigrants and people being dispossessed and fight for human rights, but it’s not true. Of course it’s not true.
You may share experiences with people and you think you share the same value system but you don’t at all and everybody is involved in their world in the way they want it to be. Sometimes people don’t even justify their actions.
So much work goes into producing the Holocaust Exhibition. You know the SS uniforms are made by Hugo Boss. When you think about that and relate it back to the holocaust – all the construction and manufacturing that went into the uniforms, the gas chambers, the railway workers, all these people that took part in the holocaust who were, “just doing their jobs.”
My uncle was on the Kinder Transports. He never spoke to his family about it and would have the most terrible nightmares. He only spoke about it a bit before he died. I suppose some experiences are just so awful that you can’t verbalise them.
That’s why I always found it so remarkable that Primo Levi was able to write so succinctly and at times beautifully and poignantly about his experiences in books like If This is a Man and Moments of Reprieve, if you’ve read them.
Yes. But he killed himself. He couldn’t deal with it.
He may have just fallen…
I think it’s amazing what he did write.
What I have learned and can tell you is incontrovertibly true is , ‘the older you get the less you understand. The older you get the less you understand anybody or why anybody does anything.’
What is the virtue you hold most dear?
Honesty
Is the Glass Half Empty or Half Full?
I am an engineer. The optimist sees the glass half full. The pessimist sees the glass half empty. The engineer sees a glass that is bigger than necessary for the job it’s required to do.
Years ago I heard Pamela tell a story about a man lost in the woods. Afterwards I introduced myself and we talked about many things. At the time, I thought we were dealing with metaphors. On reflection, Pamela was being very direct. She asked me, ‘What is the beast you hunt?’ and I didn’t know and replied enigmatically, ‘I haven’t seen its face yet’ hoping she wouldn’t see through my bluff. It was now my turn to ask the same question.
What is the beast that you hunt Pamela?
Understanding.
