The Scrapyard Awaits us all
My mother, who died on Sunday 21st July 2024 aged 100 - just like the rest of the family – was in the metals business. But in her case, it was as forced labour at the Polte munitions factory at Salzwedel in Northern Germany where her job was filling brass shells with lead for the German artillery.
When allied bombers flew overhead, the Germans asked her and other prisoners to sit on the ammunition dumps as it would make a prettier explosion.
It was from here that she was liberated by the Americans on 14th April 1945 riddled with typhus.
She and my grandmother were taken in by a German woman and her daughter whose home was outside the gates of the camp. They nursed her back to life and with the aid of a map torn from her daughter’s school atlas mum and grandma made their way south on foot and sometimes on trains able to take truncated journeys on broken sections of railway.
My grandmother and the lady living by the camp gates exchanged letters for the rest of their lives.
So, metals run through our family like a piece of rebar. It’s served us well, you could say, and has certainly given us something to talk about. But it’s also been able to instruct me to see the world in a certain way – to see the battle for resources as the proxy war for all human existence. I am not sure a thesis has been written on this and I’m too old now to do it. Our battles as nation states or corporations, have so often come down to no more than an element or a mined resource. Witness only the froth about lithium or the doom-mongering forecasts attributed to shortages of…(fill in at home).
I also love the ironies that commodities as a whole show up about our frail sense of right and wrong – for example the British in WW1 were short of lenses for binoculars while the Germans were short of rubber. A trade in the thick of war was worked out so that Zeiss lenses could be used by the British with which to see their enemy in the opposing trench while the British supplied Malayan rubber for German army vehicles. If you think that is all old hat – merely give a thought to the uranium America is still buying from Russia today...
Metal, or specifically the metal trade, teaches us (I hope) not to be too prejudiced, or bigoted, or rigid, or over-idealistic about our fellow humans’ righteousness, however hard we ourselves may like to try to be moral, or think of ourselves as such.
This week I have been travelling round UK with a Zambian miner and driller from the town of Mufulira. In Zambian terms he became wealthy when an Australian miner in the Congo had created a complete mess of their open cast mine by not removing the overburden. Like a hole in your backyard, the more their people mined downward to rapaciously remove God’s bounty, the top-soils started to slip. Someone had to be found brave enough to drill downwards and sideways into the middle of the open cast mine to continue operations.
My colleague, Ebrony, did this job and the prize for survival was untold wealth (in Zambian terms). But instead of becoming a great big egocentric bigshot driving a high end vehicle mocking the poverty of his fellow countrymen, he became a vegetarian and Theosophist and is now our main partner at the MMTA assisting us to rebuild the labour ward at the hospital in his poverty-stricken town.
Before we all end up in the scrapyard for recycling – these are the things we can do. My mum survived the worst that humanity was able to bring out of the bag and live long enough to see four great grandchildren (one born just this summer).
As she used to say in her 90s –‘This is a ridiculous age’, adding, ‘I never thought I would live beyond 20 and I now have great grandchildren’.
And so it goes…
by Anthony Lipmann
Published by Lord Copper www.lord-copper.com
26th July 2024
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