The Human Cost of War: A Personal Story

I live in a peaceful country, New Zealand, where we have freedoms unimaginable to the people of Ukraine right now. Perhaps unimaginable to people in many countries. Recently there have been many times when I have heard the long rolling thunder of a subtropical storm and I thought about the people in Ukraine, for whom explosions and their echoes are a common theme.

I thought of the refugees. Around 8 million people have left Ukraine with whatever they could carry. Another 8 million have been displaced within the country. That’s around 3 times the entire population of New Zealand, less Wellington.

My late grandmother Elisabeth Augustin wrote a poem about refugees. It was about Jewish, Gypsy, Coloured, Gay and handicapped people leaving Germany. She wrote it on the 10th of December 1938 in Amsterdam. It could just as easily have been written today. These are the last lines of her poem. If you read them, you might get the tiniest impression of what those people are feeling.

‘In the distance we hear organ music
coming from a church
or the singing of young girls
coming from a village.
Then we pause
to quietly listen, and we travel on
for we are strangers wherever we go.
We only stop briefly
where they ask us to stay,
stay and rest, sit down and eat
or even lie down and sleep.
Then we taste the sweetness
a home may give.
Then too, while we can, we dream
we have found our destiny,
and may rest forever.
That may last a day,
sometimes also a night, or two.
But always comes a morning
to subdue the dream with light
with the cold, hard light
the days bring along
banishing all illusions.
We have to pick up our walking sticks
and our bundles of meagre possessions.
Strangers we must be again,
passing by everywhere and,
just once or twice,

we look into a window that is lit up,
as if it opens into Heaven.’

My grandmother was a well-known writer of books, novels, radio plays, poetry, and other material. She was very much focused on dispossessed people, having fled her home in Leipzig, Germany with her husband in the early 1930s when it became clear that even though my grandfather was Swiss-German, and considered to be a perfect Aryan, by Hitler’s standards, standing around 6 foot 2, she was Jewish and likely to be in danger. She had wanted to become an actress and had a few bit roles. She also used to tell me she was part Gypsy, but that was just a dream.

She loved German stage shows and Brecht was one of her favorites. I lived in Holland between the ages of 11 and 13 and used to stay with my Omi and Opa every second weekend.

So in my Top 500 songs, I have to include one of the versions of Mack the Knife, by one of her favorite writers of her youth, Bertolt Brecht, who wrote Threepenny Opera, but not the version you know. She would play me lots of versions from the 1930s. I still have a cassette she gave me with at least 10 different versions, which I kept in her honor, but haven’t listened to in decades.

When visiting her in her apartment, below the house of the famous Dutch painter, Willem Witsen, which she would open for visitors by appointment, I would sit quietly through these renditions, being polite, because one was pretty much enough, but it was part of my heritage. My patience was rewarded though when one day in 1970, she took me to the movies to watch the extended version of the Woodstock movie.

She gave me a musical education like no other. At the time I used to listen to Radio Veronica, in my bedroom through a transistor radio, that I had placed strategically in the wooden drawer of my desk, which was like a speaker cabinet. I spent hours listening to the hot rock of the late 60s, like Joe Cocker’s With a Little Help from my friends.

My apologies to The Beatles, but I have always preferred his version to the original.

Woodstock was also of course a peace festival and many of the people there were protestors and draft dodgers. Country Joe & the Fish were also influential in my music with I’m Fixing to Die. This song makes me think of the Russian soldiers who have been conscripted into the army to invade Ukraine, who do not believe in the war and do not want to be killing their neighbors.

So this post is dedicated to the refugees, but also to the Russians who have been drafted into the military to go and commit war crimes on behalf of their leader, and the 13,000 or more brave protesters in Russia who have been arrested for protesting against the Ukraine invasion.

This is not a political blog, but as someone who has had relatives murdered in Sobibor, Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, and other camps, even in the street in Amsterdam in WWII, I can’t ignore it.

I’ll leave the last word to Richie Havens at Woodstock, while I quietly thank my late grandmother who was already elderly at the time she took me to the movie, for sitting through the very loud extended version for almost 5 hours. She told me she enjoyed it and would take me again if I wanted. I spared her that, but I still have the album set and the 40-page program that she bought for me at the theatre in Amsterdam.

I hope we can all do more for these people in Ukraine. If they don’t I fear Ukraine could just be the first country. Finns, for example, are feeling a range of emotions in response to the invasion, including shock, disbelief, vulnerability, insecurity, solidarity, and commitment to NATO. These emotions are understandable given Finland’s close proximity to Russia and its long history of neutrality. The invasion of Ukraine has forced Finland to reconsider its security arrangements, and it is now more likely to join NATO in the near future.

In My Life

My Ongoing Autobiography tracks my adventures in life together with a Spotify Top 500 list of songs that accompany my journey.

Turn up your volume and click on the link to hear the songs I am sharing!

I’ve always wanted to have a book where you could actually listen to relevant music at the same time as you read. That’s why I’m starting this blog series, where I’ll be sharing songs that have been and are part of the fabric of my life and the stories behind them.

Take “Norwegian Wood” by The Beatles. This song is a masterpiece from the album Rubber Soul, and it’s one that has had a profound impact on my life.

When I was a kid, I didn’t really understand the lyrics to “Norwegian Wood.” But as I got older, I started to appreciate the song’s complex emotions and its beautiful melody.

“Norwegian Wood” is a song about loss and longing. It’s about the pain of being in love with someone who doesn’t love you back. But it’s also a song about hope. It’s about the belief that even though love can hurt, it’s still worth it.

I hope you’ll listen to “Norwegian Wood” and share your own thoughts and memories in the comments below. And if you like this post, be sure to subscribe to my blog so you don’t miss any future installments!

According to an interview in 1980, Lennon described it as his “first real major piece of work”. He said that it came about when English journalist Kenneth Allsop commented that he should write songs about his childhood. How serendipitous it was that it was the song that came to mind in coming up with the first song on my list.

He rewrote the song into the one we know and love today because he felt the original lyrics, about the places he went past when he caught the bus into Liverpool, were ridiculous. He called it “the most boring sort of What I did on My Holidays’ Bus trip song”. Sage words of advice for me to ponder as I embark on this journey.

Mojo Magazine named this song as the best song of all time in the year 2000 and it has featured on many lists of top Beatles songs, and songs in general, including Rolling Stones 500 greatest songs of all time in 2004.

I’m sure you know the lyrics well yourself. We remember the places and people we have been to and known, but we can’t go back. Well we can, but they have changed, while the memories haven’t. Miranda Lambert captured this really well in another song on my list, The House That Built Me.

If music is the fabric of our lives, then the memories of what we were doing when we first heard them, map the timelines. Most of us can listen to a song that we love and evoke memories of what we were doing at the time, where we were living, and who the important people were in our lives; friends, lovers, and even people we didn’t like.

In My Life turned into a love song, as Lennon rewrote it to make it more commercial and less self-indulgent, as one of my lecturers at Berklee Music used to call the songwriters’ weakness.

In My Life, the perfect soundtrack for an autobiography

So I think back to 1965. Our family at the time was composed of myself, my parents and my little brother, aged 2. We were living in our first home of many, in Titirangi, a village in the west of Auckland City.

It was a great house, edging onto the bush, neighbouring Titirangi Primary School, which was an awesome school, with strong links to the Ministry of Education. Titirangi School was involved in experimenting with many aspects of education, supported by an office at Lopdell House in the Titirangi township, which is now home to an art gallery, the Titirangi Theatre, a restaurant, and up to 11 small local businesses.

I often visited there when it was part of the Education Department, going up and down the lift to the third or fourth floor, as in some ways I was part of the experiment. I might come back to that later in this book.

Our house at 1A View Rd had a gravel driveway and a large section. It was surrounded by fruit trees. We had oranges, apples, lemons, grapefruit, mandarins, and even a large fig tree.

To the back and side of the house, we had beautiful native bush which was part of my playground. In summer I would have many adventures in the bush, and once I discovered a track that led me to the school playing field, I would take that route to school in summer. In winter the track became muddy, and I walked along the road. The Waitakere Ranges which Titirangi edges is part of a rain forest that provides drinking water for the west of Auckland.

On the radio, in 1965 a new talent emerged in New Zealand. Ray Columbus and the Invaders won the inaugural Loxene Golden Disk Award with the song ‘Til We Kissed. He would become a star, particularly due to his head-shaking dance to a subsequent hit, called She’s a Mod.

In my later years, I would often see and talk to the diminutive man with a big legacy and heart, when I had a stall at the Takapuna Sunday Markets. I would get up at 4 am and set up a stall selling holographic novelties. I would often sit there playing the guitar while waiting for my next prospect.

The Lawson Quins were born in 1965. They were New Zealand’s first quintuplets to be born and survive. Later as a young adult, I would live on the same road as them in Massey and would see them from time to time.

Kiri Te Kanawa also became a household name that year, winning the Mobil Song Contest.

Back to me. I was in Standard 2, and if memory serves me well, my teacher was Mrs Tuoro. As the only Maori teacher in the school, she taught us action songs, stick dances, and Haka, which we boys particularly enjoyed.

We had a school pool and I proudly arrived home with certificates for doing things like swimming the mammoth distance of 25 feet. I remember the smell of the chlorine that got mixed by pulling a bucket with ropes extending to each side of the pool. Those ropes would be dragged up and down the length of the pool until the supervising teacher felt the chemicals had been appropriately mixed.

I enjoyed swimming and other sports, although my coordination wasn’t great where a bat was involved or in athletics. I was pretty handy in squares and played on a school soccer team. Safety rules were a lot more relaxed then, and Mr McLaren a great teacher and coach was able to fit an entire team in the back of his Morris van for away games.

The only negative, and maybe one of the reasons I used the bush track, was because there was a kid a few houses towards the school who was older and bigger than me, who bullied me from time to time.

For example, I took the initiative with all our lemon trees to make lemonade. I had a jug, cups, and ice and sold the refreshing drink to kind people walking along the road. I don’t recall how much for, probably a halfpenny. Yes, this was before the days of decimal currency. That makes me feel really old!

Anyway, I remember one day, this bully came along, slapped me around, and threw everything off my table at the top of my drive, smashing my glass jug full of refreshing juice. Such is youth. This person would later apologise, on orders of his parents, but took advantage of opportunities to let me know that he didn’t like me.

He was a rarity, though. I had plenty of friends and attending a school reunion decades later, caught up with people whose children were then going to the same school. Even though we were just little kids at the time, we remembered our friendships and the years seemed to melt away.

Life was simple then. Later in life, I was to hit some stormy weather, as I wrote in my song Life Is Simple When You’re Five.

Did this resonate with you? Please leave a comment and tell someone about this blog if you think it will be of interest to them.