Varpalota IV – a battle for life or death

I’m back at the lake. For now it is all I have. I am drawn back to it again and again. The small island visible in the 2004 picture has become bigger and now there is a house on it. Someone’s summer house. A wooden boat sways in the breeze, banging against the jetty.  The roar of cars from the road is constant, and backing on to the far side of the lake is a retail park. Tesco and Lidl. Life goes on. It seems peaceful and tranquil. Birds are singing and occasionally a fish plops, breaking the glass-like surface of the water. Jerry says ‘its a battle for life and death under the water’. He’s talking about the fish. I am thinking about the women and children.

What happened to them when they flooded the gravel pit? I know there was no lake here then, but Philomena Franz’s testimony from Auschwitz keeps coming into my head…’and we threw these human ashes into lorries with our bare hands, and the child helped us. It all looked like gravel and it still smelled of corpses. And I felt as if I was standing in water and had to hold back the river.’

The river…I am thinking of Lethe, the river of forgetting. Lethe translates from Classical Greek as oblivion, forgetfulness or concealment, but comes from the root aletheia meaning truth. In Greek mythology the dead were required to drink from the waters of the river Lethe to erase their memories of earthly life.

Here in Varpalota its all about forgetting.

Philomena Franz…Lethe…118 Roma women and children…an image keeps coming into my head of the women and children plunging down though the water of this lake. It’s a frenetic scene, totally at odds with the tranquil idyll above the surface.

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