Seven notes, historical and terminological
I.
I have been sorting papers, a never-ending task. Up has surfaced a snap-shot photo that I took in September 2003.
The photo, taken with a disposable plastic camera and its feeble flash bulb, is not a good one. It was taken in late afternoon in an ill-lit room. It shows the bare, bleak, shabby interior of a wooden barrack building. In the corner stands a single item of furniture, a crude wooden bed, covered only by a thin, grey, comfortless blanket. The photograph, taken on a cheap, plastic disposable camera with a feeble flash, is not a good one.
It was September 2003. I had been to Zamość in south-east Poland, to a colloquium organised by the organisation Krok za Krokiem (‘Step by Step’). On the way back I visited the Department of Psychological Rehabilitation at the Catholic University of Lublin where I was I was asked what I wanted to see in during my very limited time in that ancient and beautiful university city. I replied ‘Only Majdanek’.
Late afternoon on a grey September’s day beyond the outskirts of the city, the tourist season at an end, no guides on duty, hardly a soul there, ourselves alone in the gathering darkness of that carefully maintained and terrible place.
Some 300,000 men, women and children were imprisoned there Some 235,000 of these perished, their bodies burned, more than eighteen thousand on one single day (3 November 1943). Around half were Jews, then there were Soviets, Poles, other nationalities…
The Mausoleum at the head of the camp is a hideously ugly piece of architectural brutalism, appropriately so. The great heap of grey ash that lies beneath its squat dome is more that a memorial to those who suffered and died, it is them, some of them at least, bearing witness still.
Only a few of the wooden barrack huts in which the prisoners lived survive. Within the electrified barbed-wire perimeter fence most of the site is now bare, wind-swept grass. In one of the wooden barrack huts that have been preserved is a huge, melancholy collection of shoes. So many shoes. A red pair of girl’s shoes remain imprinted on my mind from the thousands and thousands of others there that I could not take in. Recycling shoes was a major industry at Majanek, 80,000 pairs were still being processed there when the camp was liberated. Another major industry involved human hair, and industrial-scale looting of the prisoners’ possessions, and their bodies. For some reason it is those little red shoes that I remember.
Then of course there were the gas chambers, and the Kremat.
Vivid, searing impressions but the mind blanks out details. Was it one of the remaining huts or two (or more) that is preserved as living quarters? The wooden slatted beds are stacked three-high, in racks. In a far corner I found the single bed that was the subject of my snap-shot.
The German word for such slatted beds is Pritsch [i]. This transfers across readily into Hungarian as priccs [ii]. I guess that there are equivalent words in different transliterations across Central and Eastern Europe.
We do not have this word in English. We were fortunate not to have the need.
II.
Mid-eighties Germany. The first Conductive Education pioneer was Gabi Haug. Later Fr. Prof. Karin Weber originated the term konduktive Förderung to denote a new ‘multi-disciplinary’ practice but Gabi had been a special pedagogue and used the obvious expression, konduktive Pädagogik.
Her Dad told her: ‘Gabi, you are wasting your time, this will never catch on in Germany. No parents will want to think of their children on Pritschen’
III.
In 1998-9 I was redacting Júdit Forrai’s living-history collection of the reminiscences of then already elderly people who had known András Pető in Budapest, from 1945 to his death in 1967. Júlia Dévai’s recollections went back so far as even to predate Mária Hári’s arrival on the scene. In 1947 Pető at last acquired some sort of dedicated accommodation for his work, in premises belonging to the special education training college. The facilities were exceedingly rudimentary, just four empty rooms and a below-stairs cubicle. There was of course no money to equip it.
In the treatment room we had three berths, put together by a concentration-camp survivor carpenter. Because of the general post-war poverty, the carpenter had only fragments of timber, broken logs and boards, thus he could not make a bench with a nice smooth surface. He created something called ‘priccs’. It was the prototype of the obligatory Pető bed today. He said he got the idea from the concentration camp, and, he added with a good-hearted self-irony, if these berths were good enough for the prisoners, they would certainly be OK for some young crips…
Now, in 2009, I note that, in retyping this passage for publication in Conductive World, my redaction carefully had avoided ahistorical use of the English word ‘plinth’.
IV.
In 1964 a British physiotherapist Ester Cotton had visited András Pető at the State Institute in Budapest. When she came back she set out to make his work known, and she had to find the ideas and words to do so.
Ester has been originally Danish, from an educated family. She spoke German and spent a period being educated in that country (it is said that she once by chance met Adolf Hitler there, in a lift).
In Budapest, she and András Pető surely communicated in their common language of German. Back home in London, what word could she use in English to convey the meaning of Pritsch? A rudimentary wooden bunk-bed, a pallet, a berth, a bed? Certainly, she would have known of the meanings and associations of the original German word. It would surely be a mercy if any new word used could leave these behind where they belonged, half-way across Europe and buried in the past. But what to call this thing as it was reborn into the English language?
She plumped for ‘plinth’.
As an ordinary educated layman I could never understand why this word was chosen, till I twigged: the word ‘plinth’ in the sense of something you lie on to have things done to you, or to make ‘exercises’, is a longstanding English usage in the arcane world of physiotherapy. Search the Internet for “plinth” AND “therapy” to find the amazing range of commercial products new available. Or, if you really care, get yourself a copy of the hundred-year history of the word in this sense:
Creasey, M. (1987) One hundred years of physiotherapy plinths, Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, vol. 2, no 1, pp. 35-38
http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/09593988709044166
I am sure that Ester Cotton meant well and I do not envy her the translation tasks that she faced (though I regret her chosen solutions such as ‘principles‘ and, of course, ‘Conductive Education’ itself). Be that as it may, naming these things ‘plinths’ helped place Conductive Education comfortably within the preconceptions and expectations of a particular profession. And it has been under this abiding name that plinths live on as a central part of her influential invention, the ‘principles of Conductive Education’.
The rest, as they say is history… Or is it?
V.
Saturday, 7 November 2009, the day after tomorrow. A conference in Nürnberg: Konduktive Forderung - ein weg zur Teilhabe und Integration [iii].
From the afternoon’s programme: Die Bedeutung der Pritsch - Einsatz und Vorteile [iv]
No doubt this presentation will throw some most interesting sidelights upon this near ubiquitous (in CE) bit of kit. Would that I could be there to experience this, and the 45 minutes’ Pause (Kaffee + Kuchen) that follows straight after.
VI.
So much for history. What about a bit of speculative counterfactual, some ‘what-if history’?
There seems grounds for suspecting that plinths (or rather the need to stoop across them and hump them about) comprise the largest single occupational health risk amongst those who work in Conductive Education (I do not of course count madness here!).
What if the Health and Safety authorities had spotted this and required plinths’ immediate withdrawal from use?
What would conductors have done then, poor things? Rejoice possibly and turn their ingenuity to elaborating other ways of working. Where would the ‘principles’ be then, with a ragged hole torn from their centre? What new címer [v] could be sewn there in its place by those who wish to rally round the banner of the principles?
It could never happen, could it, so I guess that nobody is making contingency plans.
VII.
I have just realised today’s date. It is Guy Fawkes Day
- Remember, remember , the fifth of November
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Tonight across this Kingdom, it is Bonfire Night.
Nuff said?
[i] ‘pallet bed’
[ii] ‘plank-bed, bunk, berth, bed of boards…’, Magyar-Angol Nagyszótár, p. 1186
[iii] A way to participation and integration
[iv] ‘The meaning of the Pritsch - utilisation and advantages’
[v] Hungarian for ‘coat of arms‘. The image is from 1956.
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