They came to celebrate death in their hundred of thousands, and death joined in the celebration. 161 young dead teenage Hallowe'en revellers lying in a long row of swaddled bodies in the middle of the road, and more than 50 seriously ill still in Korean hospitals. Apparently others continued drinking in neighbouring streets and alleys of Seoul, oblivious to the fate of their colleagues., The world over young people, and even children, are encouraged to exult in death, mutilation, horror and fear as some kind of entertainment. In the age of Auschwitz, Rwanda, Cambodia, Srebrenica and Ukraine, who wants to dress up as monsters, witches or skeletons and should want to celebrate these horrors? True horrors already invade our lives, either directly or through the televison screen. This Hallowe'en tradition, still unkown to me when I was a kid in the 1950s, seems to have emanated from a XIXth century American middle class tradition. I remember the Judy Garland musical, "Meet me in St Louis", which built up a scary storyline for a little girl lost in the fog, as she tried to join her family's trick or treat escapade in a well to do American suburb around 1910, in what is otherwise just a sugar sweet family film. I must admit I have played my part in this game, tempted by trying to give a little scare to female colleagues in the office by sudden;ly appearing unexpectedly in a death mask or making them press a boxed doorbell which springs back at them and causes them to jump. Their little scream or intake of breath is your reward for keeping up the murky tradition. But is it really desirable in this day and age?
I prefer the Polish tradition of All Souls night, where cemeteries remain open and families brighten the night sky with the light of thousands and thousands of votive candles. Whole families gather around their relatives' graves to pray, or to contemplate and remember their parents, as well as other relatives and friends. This tradition, called Zaduszki, has dignity, serenity of the mind and spirit, and no grounds for excess or fear. It's just an effort to look at the current world and at the future through the eyes of the past. At most you might recall happy anecdotes, you might look again at their pictures, bring out the family album, but you have your family together and have a chance to talk about death and life with young children, without causing them panic as they first become aware of their own mortality.
Two days ago I popped into South Ealing Cemetery to clear off the leaves and dirt from my parents' gravestone, give it a wash, and to trim back the lavendar bush at the rear. Today I will go there and light a candle which hopefully will burn through to November 2nd. There may be masses of Polish families there and perhaps even a few friends.
It is good to remember my parents. My father, Henryk Moszczynski, born way back in 1899, a young political independence activist who helped disarm German soldiers in Poland at the age of 16 as the empires that had divided Poland collapsed. He was the first Moszczynski to go from his humble rural gentry background to a university. He studied law. joined the Polish Socialist Party, became a section head at the main bureau of statistics in Warsaw, was a contributor on economics to the Robotnik newspaper, joined industrial ministry intelligence just before the Second War, was interned in Lithuania, imprisoned in a Soviet POW camp, worked as a relief officer at the Polish Embassy in Russia, where he met my mother, joined the wartime Polish Governemnt in exile in London and then continued his social and political activities as a political exile and journalist in London, having refused to return to Communist Poland. He retained his social status as an important figure in the Polish community here, even though he earned a meagre salary as a clerk in a company sending family parcels to Poland. I remember when I was 7 and heard the news that Stalin had died. "Do you go back to Poland now?" I asked. "Not yet, my son." he said. In fact he never returned to Poland and died in 1976.
And my mother, Anna Barbara Madejewska, 13 year younger than my father, born still a subject of the Emperor Francis Joseph in Lvov, a spirited atractive young law student, deported in the middle of winter, in a cattle truck, with her mother and brother, to deepest Siberia, then worked in the Polish Embassy in Russia, where she met my father, worked and lived with the Polish Red Cross in Polish settlements in India and Kenya, and then becoming an important figure in the Polish community, where she was eventually employed to run the Information Office of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, until she was 90. Surely it is good to remember them both, to honour what the stood for, and to contemplate their suffering and sacrifice, and that of the Polish people. At least she got back to visit Poland after 1990, and we visited her native Lvov (now Lviv in Ukraine) together a few years before she died in 2004.
I aim to spend some time at the grave, thinking of their life and the fate of my country, Poland, and that miserable nationalist government that so embarasses intelligent Poles. I can contemplate the current economic and political crisis in England, the women demonstating in Iran, Bolsonaro and the burning Amazon forests, the Chinese government's growing oppressiveness and centralized control over its people, mass repression in Myanmar, the increasing violence and division in America (aka Paul Pelosi), the North Korean tinpot tyrant firing his missiles, the crumbling cities in defiant Ukraine as the Iranian drones rain down on residences and energy centres, while Ukrainian troops recapture Kherson, just like the German V2 rockets that tried to destroy London even as the British troops advanced into Germany, So much misery now, so much more misery promised in the future, in Tigray, in Taiwan, in Tibet. There is little one can influence now, so just batten down the hatches, secure your own life, and look forward to the Jules Verne adventure next year.
And as for the frivolities of Hallowe'en? How can they seem relevant or appropriate in these circumstances and with these disasters. Or may be I'll go into work on Monday (in a car at last), don a mask and give some girl in the office another scare!
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