Buttons 2.
The button tin of my childhood, with its huge variety of shapes, sizes and colours, encapsulated the presence and differing experiences of those who wore the garments. Babies, children, women and men, all with unique personalities and life events.
Buttons are the things that literally fasten us together. Those of us who are parents remember squatting down to the level of our little ones to fasten the buttons on their shirts, coats and cardigans. We talk of reserved or unyielding people, often unfairly, as ‘buttoned-up’. If we want someone to keep a confidence, they are asked to, ‘button it’. There is a self-containment that comes with the act of buttoning. If a button is missing, then the whole outfit looks wrong and loses its integrity.
We would rarely ask a stranger to undo buttons for us. There is an intimacy in the action. An uncovering. The mother gently eases her child out of his wet clothes. The lover leans in to remove the barriers and reveal nakedness not shared with others.
Last month, I went to view Antonia Stowe’s art installation at Ripon Cathedral. ‘6 million +, Every Person Counts’ involved over 6 million buttons spread across the floor of the Cathedral and in a series of perspex funnels, symbolic of the Second World War death camp chimneys. Each button represented someone who died in the holocaust . The Nazis murdered a total of 11 million people which included not only Jews but anyone who did not fit into the Aryan concept of normality as perceived through religion, skin colour, disability, sexuality, ethnicity and political affiliation. 200,000 gypsies, 250,000 mentally or physically disabled people and 3,000,000 Soviet prisoners of war also lost their lives. The ‘+’ referred to those who were not counted and the millions who have died in genocides and conflicts since the Second World War.
Set around the area were recorded interviews with survivors of the death camps and more recent genocides.
Buttons were donated to the project from all over the region and often with emotional stories attached. One elderly lady gave 21 buttons – one for each member of her family that the Holocaust had claimed. Individual buttons, all with their own history and memory, donated by people from all walks of life who will probably never knowingly meet, brought together in one place as part of a unified collection.
Survivors of the Holocaust were present to answer the questions of curious visitors, but on the day I was there, the only question hanging in the air, but left unuttered, was, “Why?” People stood looking across a vast ocean of buttons, finding it hard to comprehend that each button represented a unique and precious individual who was robbed of their right to live. Visitors stood or sat, silently, thinking their own thoughts, often with tears glazing their eyes. It was a profoundly moving and contemplative experience. It has taken time for me to be able to assimilate it enough to write about it – and even now, there is a sense that anything I write is inadequate.
I had intended the first blog about buttons to flow seamlessly into a comment on Stowe’s installation, but I was halted by the emotional immensity of it. For me, this brought home to me, more than the piles of shoes at Autschwitz; more than the photographs of victims, the violation and degradation and utter, utter evil of it all.
Buttons are the things that hold us together. They should only be unfastened by ourselves or those close to us. Gently. With care and intimacy. That isn’t what happened in the holocaust of the Second World War – or the genocides of Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur. The victims were taken and forcibly had their garments torn from them, by strangers who wanted to destroy them. And in that horrific process, there was an undoing in our world; an unfastening of things that are right and good. Like buttons bursting from a violently pulled coat, lives and families were torn beyond repair.
It would be too easy to shut the memories away and bang the lid tightly on the tin. The buttons of so many bygone garments, stashed away and unlikely to be used again.
But atrocities still continue. The discarded clothing piles up and individual rights and lives are still being lost.
We must never forget.
I found it too intrusive to take photographs in the installation, so all images used here are the property of Ripon and Leeds Diocese.
Links: Ripon Cathedral – http://www.riponcathedral.org.uk/
Antonia Stowe – http://www.antoniastowe.com/
Some of the best images that I’ve seen of this installation can be found on the site of a fellow blogger – http://www.beckynaylor.co.uk/six-million-buttons-%E2%80%93-ripon-cathedral.html
© E.J.Stanforth-Sharpe. All rights reserved. March 2010.
Visiting Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin three or four years ago was a humbling and intensely moving experience. As I walked around, I heard a plaintive violin in my head – playing sweet funereal music for all the lost ones…and their ill-fitting striped pyjama suits were buttoned at the front.
Such an incredibly poignant story – I can’t imagine what it must feel like to stand in the cathedrtal amidst those 6 million buttons! Thank you for this, Elizabeth – much to meditate on.
I found you through my sister Kaybee. She’s in Canada, I’m in Southern California. Your post on buttons is staggering. I’ve been thinking about the holocaust myself lately. I have recently watched two movies on the topic — one was “The Pianist” and like you the only response I can come up with is, WHY? Evil in this world is so tangible, yet people seem to believe that we are all good at heart. There is much good in the world, praise the Lord — but so much evil.
I will come back and visit again if that is OK with you.
Thank you for this, YP.
One of the books that has been a life-force for me has been Victor Frankl’s, ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’. Frankl was a physician who survived the death camps and through his experiences developed a branch of psychotherapy called ‘logotherapy’. He said,
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
xx
Hello Chrisj,
it’s great to have you visit. As we often say to visitors to our home, “Ye’ll ‘ave ti tek us ‘ow yer find us, but yer very welcome – t’ doors allus op en” Being a Yorkshire girl at heart, I’m sure you understand that!
Nietsche once said, “He who has a ‘why’ to live by can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
xx
Thanks for calling by, Kaybee.
To quote my friend, Frankl, again; ‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’
xx
That is extremely moving Elizabeth. I wish that I had seen it.