In the story a former SS officer, Eduard Schwermann known in England as Nightingale, seeks sanctuary at the Gilbertine priory of Lakewood in England in 1995. He is alleged to have been a leader in the deportation of Jews from Paris in 1942.
Brodrick could not have known when The 6th Lamentation was published in 2003 how the concept of sanctuary would become such a fraught issue 22 years later, especially in the America of Donald Trump.
As set out in my review Schwermann was granted sanctuary. While there has been no legal right of sanctuary in England since 1675, the authorities of 2003 did not enter the monastery to arrest Schwermann.
Who should have the right to claim sanctuary?
While Schwermann is at Lakewood a French man, Salomon Lachaise, comes to the Lakewood Priory and confronts Schewermann:
With one great savage movement, Salomon Lachaise, tore open his shirt from top to bottom, both hands ripping the fabric apart, exclaiming in a loud voice, “I am the son of the Sixth Lamentation.”
Lachaise is a medievalist, a professor of history at the University of Zurich.
In 1942 Lachaise and his mother were taken from Paris to Switzerland by a smuggling ring of young people in their 20’s called The Round Table evoking Arthurian images. They were saved from the Holocaust. The other members of their family are taken to the death camps and killed.
In the Bible, Jeremiah has five lamentations “each mourning the destruction of Jerusalem, each placing absolute trust in its sworn Protector”.
The Fifth Lamentation ends:
20. Why have you utterly forgotten us,
Forsaken us for so long?
21. Bring us back to you, LORD, that we may return:
Renew our days as of old.
22. For now you have indeed rejected us
and utterly turned your wrath against us.
The agony of those powerful words must have felt personal for many Jewish people caught up in the Holocaust. Calling the Holocaust the Sixth Lamentation is visceral and vivid.
Lachaise thinks of the lamentations of the Jewish people at the hands of the church over the centuries. He sees the irony in the mythical Knights of the Round Table being re-surrected to save Jewish children as a small effort of atonement for the persecution of Jews by the Church over the centuries but now “the person who broke it apart” is protected by the Church. The betrayal of the Round Table caused lifetime guilt in the betrayer.
Lachaise reflects to Anselm on how God in the Bible, “made covenant with Abram and he became Abraham …. The change of name obliterates the past, bestowing a blessed future.” Brodrick took my breath away when Lachaise, speaking of Schwermann added:
“So, who was it that dared to take the place of God and give that man across the lake a new name, a new life?”
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