On 6 October 1999 the British author Kazuo Ishiguro visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial at the invitation of the International Auschwitz Committee.
The invitation was inspired through reading his work An Artist of the Floating World (first published in 1986). In this novel Ishiguro depicts the entanglement of a Japanese artist in Japan’s aggressive patriotism and the country’s expansionist policies in World War II, and the artist’s post-war efforts to explain and come to terms with the past within his own family.
On the evening of 6 October 1999, Kazuo Ishiguro gave a reading and discussed this and other topics with Christoph Heubner, Leszek Szuster and numerous Polish guests at the International Youth Meeting Center in Oswiecim. None of the people present could have imagined that almost 18 years to the very day, Kazuo Ishiguro would be honoured with the Nobel Prize in Literature:
In an interview for the British newspaper The Guardian in March 2000, Kazuo Ishiguro told the writer Suzie Mackenzie about his reflections and experiences during the visit to Auschwitz which had moved him profoundly:
Last autumn, Ishiguro received an invitation to visit Auschwitz from the International Auschwitz Committee, set up by survivors after the war to preserve its memory and to teach future generations what had occurred there. And though he receives many invitations, and declines most of them, he decided to accept. He discovered there that the organisation had reached a crisis point: a lot of the people who had experienced the camp are very old, and a time will come when there will be no survivors to impart their memory to the young. The Auschwitz Committee had invited Ishiguro as part of its initiative to become a wider intellectual and cultural centre, to apply the experience of the past to contemporary situations such as Kosovo. They have recognised that they have got to change, Ishiguro says, or there is the danger that the memory will have no more relevance for future generations than the Napoleonic Wars do for us. "We may remember the Holocaust, but in some superficial Guy Fawkes Night sort of way. We will forget in the profound sense. The deeper questions will be lost."
As he has got older, this realisation has concerned him more. "For me, it is a part of the ageing process. I have begun to feel the burden of remembering - the last war, the cold war. It is falling now to our generation. Even though we didn't live through it, we grew up in the shadow of it and the fears that came out of it." For the first time in a century, we have leaders who did not experience a war directly. "That is a worry, because the sad fact is that we all know how easy it is to send people to war." And, as he says, some who will be eligible to vote in the next election probably won't remember a time before the Berlin Wall came down. "There is a generation after us who have never known a war. It doesn't puzzle me at all that the far right in Europe can pick up votes with the young. Or that those of us in middle age are more wary."
Of course, we have been lucky. "It seems a staggering fluke that a group of us who happen to live in a little corner of Europe have escaped disasters. If you look through history this doesn't happen often." It reminds him, he says, of a scene in a Buster Keaton film where two huge barn doors fall down either side of him, just missing him, And he walks off blissfully unaware. "There is a bunch of us just like that. And I don't know if this luck can hold out."
