THREE BOYS
words
with eric arnal
video 2024–6
[TRANSCRIPT] Anyway there’s this footage or audio, it gets confused in my mind which is the audio and which is the footage. And they make him sleep on the floor and he doesn’t have food. There’s video of him waking up and he makes his bed or tries to make his bed but he’s so weak he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But he has language, he has this extraordinary clarity of language. I guess he was six or seven or eight. You hear him saying—again, I couldn’t watch this more than once so maybe I remember it differently, but he says “nobody loves me” and then he says “nobody feeds me”.
In my mind I put these two videos together in terms of the clarity of the boy’s language. He can say—because he has no guilt—he can say what is happening. And it’s not the language of feelings. It’s not the language of pain. It’s the language of description.
It reminds me of a story from Auschwitz. When the Russians were coming to liberate Auschwitz, the Nazis force-marched the remaining prisoners. It was a death march, but they left behind the sick, and there was a boy there, a little boy, and no one knows his name. Primo Levi writes about him and gives him this name, which is something like Hurbinek. I don’t know how you pronounce it. There were children born in Auschwitz. And he is trying to speak. And there are these women there and Primo Levi says they were “too tender and too vain” to help him speak. But there’s a teenage boy there too who just keeps him company and, in the telling of it, he learns a word or two—or the shape of a word or two—which perhaps no-one really understands, and then he dies if I remember correctly but there’s this effort at language. This beautiful effort even in those circumstances to find some words.
[singing]