Theme from Schindler’s List

The city of Krakow itself may have been spared (unlike other Polish towns and cities), but its people weren’t so lucky. At first, the biggest threat to the ‘new order’ were the Polish intelligentsia including the political, cultural and social elite who were arrested and sent to concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen – but that was just the beginning.

The Jews may not have been such a threat, but they had to be dealt with, and Krakow had over 60,000 of them, a quarter of the city’s population – and most of them lived in the district of Kazimierz.

Although the current population is naturally much smaller, Kazimierz as a Jewish neighbourhood still exists, and so I went to see what it looked like today (or at least what it looked like in 2003).

It obviously looks very different from the pre-war years, but it was good to see that the community, albeit a lot smaller, still survives. Based around Szeroka Square, there are still a few synagogues and Jewish businesses that keep the Jewish way of life going, and it was my intention to go back one evening to listen to some Klezmer music that is more often than not on offer at one of the cafes in the square, but unfortunately I never made it.

In ‘Mein Kampf’ Hitler described his vision of ‘Lebensbraum’ (Living Space), where Germany could expand into Central and Eastern Europe: His Generalplan Ost was essentially a plan that would use, expel, or exterminate those that were in the way, and for the Jews of Kazimierz it meant all three.

The Generalgouverneur, Hans Frank, wanted to cleanse the city of all its Jews, and so in March 1941, he established a ghetto across the River Vistula from Kazimierz in the suburb of Podgorze.

To get there I walked across the Most Powstańców Śląskich (Silesian Insurgents Bridge) to Plac Bohaterow which, under the name of Plac Zgody, was the focal point of the ghetto.

To begin with, the square was somewhere that people could escape to from their cramped conditions, but it wasn’t long before it became somewhere to dread.

Beatings, executions, and people being rounded up to be sent to the death camps would have all been witnessed by Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the proprietor of the Apteka Pod Orlem (Eagle Pharmacy) at the far end of the square.

The pharmacy was the only Polish establishment allowed to operate inside the ghetto, but the owner didn’t only dispense medicines and pills he also provided false documents as well as being involved with other clandestine operations that undoubtedly helped to save many lives. It was a small museum about ghetto life when I was here, and I’m glad to see that it’s still going strong.

Whether the pharmacist was still here when the ghetto was liquidated in March 1943 or not, I don’t know, but it would have been a sickening site if he was. Those still able to work were marched off to the nearby Plaszow forced labour camp, but the old, young children, and sick were either killed where they were standing or sent off to Auschwitz. The square and the surrounding streets were just left strewn with what remained of their belongings.

Before leaving Podgorze there was still one place that I wanted to seek out – the building where Oskar Schindler ran his enamelware factory.

For anyone who is not familiar with the name, he was the subject of a film by Stephen Spielberg called Schindler’s List – and in my view, one of the best films ever made.

Oskar Schindler was a member of the Nazi party who ran a factory not far from the Krakow ghetto, and the film (based on a novel by Thomas Keneally) is a true story of how he saved the lives of around 1200 Jews who worked for him.

I managed to locate the building, but if I hadn’t known what the outside of it looked like, there would have been nothing there to tell me. Today, it’s a museum that recognises Schindler’s contribution to humanity and what life was like for the Jews in Krakow under the Nazis.

Stephen Spielberg’s family had a Jewish background, as did another well-known film producer, Roman Polanski, who was a young boy when he managed to escape from the Krakow ghetto. His parents weren’t so lucky: His father was transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and his mother was sent to Auschwitz.

The journey to Oswiecim, where Auschwitz-Birkenau is located, takes about 1½ hours by road from Krakow, but the camp is split into two between Auschwitz I (the original camp) and Birkenau (Auschwitz II), and convenience over cost was the main reason I chose to use a mini bus service to get here.

Nothing quite prepared me for the experience though. The words Arbeit macht frei welcome you through the gates into Auschwitz I, but they wouldn’t have been a welcome sign to those who were transported here. In English the words translate into ‘Work sets you free’ meaning that if a prisoner was able to work and therefore useful, then it was just possible that they could survive a bit longer than those that weren’t.

Inside the gates, blocks were used to house the prisoners that were subjected to the most unimaginable cruelty.

Block 11 was known as the ‘Torture’ block, which literally sent shivers down my spine when I went inside. There were cells with no light, cells where there was only enough room to stand, starvation cells where prisoners were left without food and water until they died, and even a cell (No 27) which was where the first tests using Zyclon-B were conducted. 600 Russian prisoners of war and 200 sick prisoners were the first people to be gassed to death at Auschwitz, but there were many more to come.

Between Blocks 11 and 10 is the ‘Black Wall’ where executions took place. Official Nazi records show that 1,646 prisoners were shot here, but according to the Auschwitz Museum the number was nearer to 20,000.

Block 10 was where medical experiments took place, and outside are two wooden poles where prisoners were hung by their arms tied behind their back.

Blocks 4,5,6 and 7 have been converted into a museum with glass cases that contain objects that belonged to prisoners – suitcases, shoes, spectacles, false limbs and even hair. This isn’t just a few items; this is personal stuff on a massive scale. Nobody could possibly come in here and not be affected by what they see. A glass case full of children’s stuff still haunts me now; baby things like little mittens and dummies – it’s all here.

It’s even possible to walk into one of the gas chambers for an even more sobering experience, if that’s possible – and if you still got the stomach for it, you can go into the crematorium where the trolleys are still here ready to load bodies into the ovens.

The only saving grace is that nearby is the site where the first commandant of the camp, Rudolph Hoss, was hanged on 16^th April 1947.

Birkenau, in many ways isn’t as intensive from an intimate point of view as Auschwitz I, but it’s just as poignant, purely because of the scale of it.

The camp was built by the Nazis as an extension to the first camp – and it’s massive. This was where the transports arrived bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the death camp. When they arrived, they were segregated into those who could work, and those who couldn’t, and by and large that meant that men who could work were sent one way, and everyone else was sent the other – the elderly, the sick, women and children.

On their retreat from Auschwitz towards the end of the war, the Nazis tried to destroy as much evidence as possible, but there are a few barracks showing what conditions would have been like for those who had to endure cramped conditions and communal sanitation until they were exterminated (I hate that word) – inhuman isn’t a strong enough word to describe it all is it?

The figures speak for themselves; the best estimates for the number of people who were deported and died at Auschwitz-Birkenau are; –

• Jews (1,095,000 deported to Auschwitz, 960,000 died)
• Non-Jewish Poles (140,000- 150,000 deported, 74,000 died)
• Roma (Gypsies) (23,000 deported, 21,000 died)
• Soviet Prisoners of War (15,000 deported and died)
• Other nationalities (25,000 deported, 10,000- 15,000 died)

I endeavour to make my blogs fairly short, but I make no apologies for the length of this one – in fact it’s nowhere near long enough as far as I’m concerned.

As to the question as to why I decided to write this blog, I still haven’t come up with an answer, in fact, if anything, it has thrown up even more questions.

Reliving the trip hasn’t been easy at times, but I’m glad in a way, that I’ve brought myself to do it. If nothing else, it’s my small contribution to help keep these inhuman activities fresh in our minds to stop them ever happening again. Perhaps I’ve just answered my own question, but I’ve an uneasy feeling that it won’t make a scrap of difference.

Being both head of the Gestapo and the SS, Himmler’s enthusiasm for his job is well known. If he wasn’t torturing people here, he was planning where he could do it elsewhere, but on 23^rd Nov 1944 all his plans started to fall apart when the RAF bombed his headquarters. With the end of the war in sight Himmler was eventually captured and taken to Luneburg where he committed suicide.

The Russians captured Berlin but under the London Protocol of 1944 the site ended up in the American Sector – but only just, because the boundary ran along Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The longest stretch of the outer wall still left standing in Berlin still runs along here and has become part of the museum’s outdoor museum space.

By the early 1960s what had been left of the buildings was cleared and left as a wasteland until 1987 when Berlin celebrated its 750^th anniversary and re-discovered the site. During excavation work the cellars of the Gestapo headquarters were unearthed and an outdoor museum was created with a roof covering what remained, and illustrated with pictures of events and people of the times.

After lots of deliberation with what to do with this waste land the idea of a permanent museum was suggested, but it took until May 7^th 2010 before the suggestion became a reality.

There are three sections to the museum – the outdoor section as mentioned above which runs under the Berlin Wall, the grounds of the entire site with 15 information stations explaining the various points of interest, and an indoor exhibition.

The modern steel and glass construction of the indoor exhibition is in complete contrast to the classical buildings that once stood here. It’s known as the Documentation Centre which explains its function, and the layout inside is light and airy, which I suppose lightens the tone a bit for such a dark subject. Most of the space is used up by boards showing copies of photographs and documents covering the major themes connected with the site and beyond. This is where I took the old black and white pictures of how the site used to be. The pictures taken in 2003 were from my first visit.

Entry to the whole museum is free, very central and should be a ‘must see’ on everyone’s visit to Berlin.

If the people of Berlin think that this place should be remembered, then I think we all should too.

The road is closed to traffic as it passes by the British Embassy, which I’m pleased to say is a fine architectural addition to the Berlin landscape (or at least it is to me).

Opposite is a rare survivor from the past. It used to be the Prussian Ministry of Education and now an office building for the German Parliament.

Instead of continuing on down Wilhelmstrasse Turn right at Behrenstrasse and take a look at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, part of which lies over the villa that used to belong to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi’s Reich Minister for Propaganda. The only thing that’s left is his bunker that lies beneath the memorial, which seems fitting somehow.

If we continue to walk along Cora Berliner Strasse and then cross over Hannah Arendt Strasse into Gertrud Kolmar Strasse we come to the site of Hitler’s Bunker in the Ministergarten.

When I first came here quite a number of years ago there was nothing to suggest that this was the location where Hitler committed suicide, but I had done enough research to think that it probably was.

Under the Soviet occupation the bunker was largely destroyed but not completely, and several corridors are said to still exist. Apartments have been built over the top of it with a small playground in the middle, and I remember sitting here alone thinking about what stories this place could tell, when a young mother and her two small children came to the playground. Whether they knew what was underneath their feet I’m not sure, but from what I’ve read Hitler loved children.

During the last days of his life in the bunker he married Eva Braun. It was too late for them to have children of their own and across the other side of the street is the spot where their bodies were reported to have been burned.

After you’ve come to terms with the situation, take a left turn back onto Wilhelmstrasse where the Palais Schulenburg or Bismarck’s Chancellery (whichever you prefer) once stood. Today there’s a steel sculpture here of Georg Elser who attempted to assassinate Hitler in Munich in 1939. How different things might have been if he had succeeded!

Crossing over Leipziger Strasse brings us to what was the largest office building in Europe when it was completed in 1936. It was built for Hermann Goering’s Ministry of Aviation and it still amazes me how a building of this size wasn’t destroyed by the allied air forces when it must have been known what it was used for. I suppose it was just too big to obliterate. Today it’s used by the Federal Ministry of Finance (see main picture).

During the Cold War the street met the Berlin Wall at the junction with today’s Niederkirchnerstrasse and Zimmerstrasse, and although this is as far as I’m going for now, I can’t leave this part of Berlin without mentioning the fact that across the road are what remains of the SS and Gestapo headquarters – and left to wonder what the world might have been like if Whitehall had got to look like Wilhelmstrasse.

The memorial has plenty of Russian visitors and each VE Day (Victory in Europe – 8^th May) wreaths are laid to commemorate the occasion. It has to be said though that it’s not universally popular with the German population and has even been referred to as the “Tomb of the Unknown Rapist”.

There are 4 sections to the 67m high column, the lower 3 of which represent the three wars and adorned, if that’s the right word, with cannon barrels captured from these conflicts.

More captured cannons were used in the making of the bronze bas-reliefs at the base of the monument, but perhaps even more striking is the mosaic frieze on the rotunda at the base of the column which symbolizes the founding of the second German Empire.

Even though the area around the Siegessaule was devastated during WW2, the column somehow miraculously survived relatively unscathed, although plenty of bullet holes can still be seen as a reminder. The same evidence can be seen on some of Albert Speer’s four neo-classical temples that serve as the entrances to the pedestrian underpass that gives access to the monument.

The Siegessaule is open throughout the year and can be reached by taking the well-used bus #100.

Apart from the Kaisersaal Restaurant and Café Josty, there are a number of other places to eat and drink, which are best enjoyed on an evening, when the Center takes on a completely different ambience thanks to a lighting experience put together by Yann Kersale, a Parisian lighting artist. His idea is to use the roof’s design in a way that evokes the changing colours of sunset through varying degrees of cyan and magenta. I love it!

The Sony Center attracts some 8 million visitors a year, many of them tourists. Fortunately, it’s big enough not to get too overcrowded, but to get the best seat in the house, so to speak, I recommend that you get here early enough to pull up a chair outside one of the cafes, watch the roof change from daylight through to Yann Kersale’s illuminations, and enjoy one of Berlin’s most historically interesting locations inside an icon of modern Berlin.

After the war was over, the square fared little better. The Soviet, American, and British zones collided at Potsdamer Platz and when the Berlin Wall was built it ran straight through the middle, leaving the area a total wasteland between the eastern and western sectors.

With re-unification came a blank canvas for Europe’s largest building site and the area is now a thriving intersection once again. The modern architecture may not appeal to everybody, but whatever your thoughts about it are, there’s no denying that Potsdamer Platz has now become one of Berlin’s places to come to once again.

Many buildings have come and gone since the area started out as a livestock market in the Middle Ages, but it was the visit of the Russian Tsar Alexander I that gave the square its name in 1805.

Alex has seen many ups and downs over the years, being seedy one minute, and upmarket the next. WWII dealt it a heavy blow when much of the area was destroyed, but two buildings of note survived – Alexanderhaus and Berolinahaus.

They were designed by the modernist architect Peter Behrens and built between 1929 and 1932 in a new style that became known as ‘New Objectivity’. His plans were to enclose the square with several buildings, but with the depression and rise of fascism in the 1930s these two buildings were the only ones completed.

Having survived the war and post war re-construction, they were given protected status in 1975 and renovated between 2004 and 2006.

Another large building that would be impossible to miss is the Galeria Kaufhof. Today, it looks just like any other store, but when it was opened as Centrum in 1970 it was not only the largest store in the GDR, but somewhere that sold goods that most people could only dream of, including items imported from the ‘West’. Ironically, outside the store these days are people now selling ‘GDR and Russian military caps and hats’ to people from the West!

Nearby is a fountain built in the 1960s called Friendship among Nations and a great meeting point, but probably the most famous meeting point and also the most photographed object in the plaza has to be the World Clock.

Being such a large open space, Alexanderplatz has attracted a fair number of demonstrations over the years, but none bigger than the anti-government rally just before the wall came down in Nov 1989. It’s been estimated that up to a million people joined the demonstration.

A lot of water has gone under the Schlossbrucke since then but Alex has been largely untouched by new development, which I’m sure will please those who still miss the old East Berlin days.

Ostalgie is still alive and well in some East Berliners minds, and even though I’m not sure I would have wanted to have been living here I do understand some of that thinking. From purely a tourist’s point of view though I’m also pleased that Alexanderplatz hasn’t changed too much, but whether that situation lasts, only time will tell.

At the time, Dauphiné was a state and not a part of France, and the Counts (who were known as Dauphins), ruled from the area around Place St. André. The church of the same name was the family’s private place of worship and final resting place, but as churches go it’s nothing exceptional, but it’s worth paying it a visit, if only to see where the Seigneur de Bayard is laid to rest.

Pierre de Terrail Seigneur de Bayard, to give him his proper title, was a late 15^th/early 16^th century French knight more commonly known as the Chevalier de Bayard, and if you were wondering who the character on the plinth in the middle of the square was, well now you know.

Place St. André is probably the best place to soak up the atmosphere of the Old Town, but as this was late December (between Christmas and New Year) there wasn’t a lot of point in hanging around, and so we popped into the Café de la Ronde for a coffee to warm up.

As you would expect, it had all the ambience that only a French café can have, but more than that it claims to be the second oldest in France after the Café Procope in Paris.

As much as I could have stayed in here all day, it was time to move on and check out the rest of the Old Town. Even though it was the ‘Twixmas’ period it was good to see that the markets were still operating – one in the Place aux Herbes and another in the St. Claire Halles. Other than that, it was the wrong time of the year for sightseeing really. We stopped off at the Notre Dame Cathedral, which didn’t actually set my pulse racing, and moved on to the Isère Resistance and Deportation Museum.

Some of you will know that I have an avid interest in events of the 20^th century, the Second World War being one of them, but before you dash off, I’d like to reassure you that I’m not going into any significant detail here about a forgotten army of brave people who fought and died for France during the Nazi occupation. It wasn’t just those who fought against Petain’s Vichy government who are remembered here, but also the Jews that were sent east to those places that they never ever returned from. Enough said.

One of the things that travel does is open your mind to things that you never realised before, and visiting this museum was one of those things. Now that I’ve been to this region, I can start to understand what those resistance fighters were up against, because we were now off up to the Bastille – and the highlight of any trip to Grenoble.

There are two ways to get up to the Bastille – you can walk, or you can take the Bubbles, a cable car that some people might not care for too much, but for me it would be the Bubbles every time. Before I go any further, I would have to say that the Bastille isn’t very exciting from a monument point of view, but the view from the Bastille is incredible.

From here you can see how Grenoble is surrounded by mountains – the Chartreuse, the Belledone, and the Vercors: You can even see Mont Blanc, 70 miles away, and I could now start to understand the terrain that those resistance fighters were having to contend with. My mind wanders off in all sorts of directions when I think of these things, but that’ll do for now – let’s just get back to those views.

It’s only when you come up here that you can see the reason why Grenoble was awarded the Winter Olympics in 1968 and why it sees itself as the Capital of the Alps. I’ll stop talking now, and just let you enjoy the views.

The first carousel shows some views of the Vercors first thing in the morning, the second shows some views of Grenoble and the Belledone from the restaurant during the day, the third shows the Chartreuse, the Belledone and Mont Blanc as the sun went down, and finally, Grenoble as the lights came on.

I can’t really remember much else because it all became a bit of a blur. I think I just wanted one of those pits to swallow me up. From what I can remember, some of the miners helped get the coach moving again and the rest of the coach party turned up when nearly everybody else had gone home.

The Treorchy Male Voice Choir never got to sing that song either, which was a great shame, because they did a rehearsal of it, in both English and Welsh when I was in the club one time, and it was really very moving. It would have been a fitting end to the evening. As it is, the best I can come up with is them singing a rendition of ‘Cwm Rhondda with the Morriston Orpheus Choir instead. This is my attempt at an apology to that wonderful group of singers.

Our journey back home to Somerset was a lot quieter than I was hoping for, and instead of making a whole new load of friends for life, I think I had less than when we started out.

Back at the coal face, 1986 saw more pit closures, and when Maerdy amalgamated with Tower, it effectively brought coal mining in the Rhondda Valley to an end (see picture at the start of this post).

Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of the miners encouraged her to take on the rest of the union movement, and with the legislation behind her, it wasn’t long before she accomplished that aim as well, but unfortunately for her, she wasn’t able to control members of her own party, and in 1990 she resigned. Her reign as the unofficial queen of England lasted 11 years, in which time 115 pits were closed, considerably more than the 70 Arthur Scargill was ridiculed for suggesting would happen.

She was succeeded by another conservative prime minister, John Major, who privatised British Coal in 1994 after announcing the closure of another 55 pits, one of which was Tower. The mine was closed on 22^nd April 1994 but was back open again on 2^nd January 1995 after being bought by the miners who worked at the pit. It carried on producing coal right up until 2008, even though John Major said pits like Tower were uneconomical.

The NUM’s lack of influence enabled the coal dependent industries to import cheaper coal from around the world, even though there were still vast reserves in the UK, and by 2001 coal production was exceeded by imports for the first time. Since the early days of Thatcherism, the country was fast becoming a post-industrial nation, with steelworks, shipbuilding and manufacturing joining the collieries into the dustbin of industrial history.

Service industries stepped into the breach and ‘Privatisation’ and ‘Market Forces’ were the new buzz words. The financial sector was benefitting the most, and there was no better example than Canary Wharf in London, which had become a desolate wasteland after the docks were closed down and the East End dockers’ families cleared out of the way for the powerful multi-national financial institutions that were to take their place. In contrast, in 2006, I came back to the Rhondda to see how things had changed since that last inauspicious evening back in 1985.

We decided to have an overnight stay at the Heritage Park Hotel, which was located right next door to the Rhondda Heritage Centre in Trehafod. Since then, it’s been re-named the Welsh Mining Experience for some reason, but whatever they want to call it, this was the site of the former Lewis Merthyr Colliery which closed in 1983.

The attraction was officially opened on 11^th September 1989 by Peter Walker, Secretary of State for Energy, which seems an odd choice after what the conservative government had done to the industry, but at least there was some recognition of what coal mining meant to the area.

I’m not going into the history of the pit or the tour around the attraction here, but I can’t pass by the opportunity to speak about what I thought was a chance encounter with somebody from Blaenrhondda. It was in fact, a put-up job, which on reflection, I thought was a wonderful gesture. Thanks to the staff, and in particular, Peter Arundell, the tour guide, my wife and I were to meet Teifi and his wife from Blaenrhondda. To be honest, I can’t really be sure if that was his name or not, but that’s what it sounded like (and before you ask, I’m sure it wasn’t Taffy).

This grand old boy of 81, and his wife of 80, were able to remember our visits with the food parcels. They not only knew Dai and Rae Lewis, but were also related to them. I may have been hearing things, but it sounded like Dai was one of 24 children, one of his sisters had 26, and someone else (I’d lost track by now) had another 22. I can see now why men were called names like Dai the Butcher, Bryn the Baker, and Gareth the Candle-Sick Maker. For somebody like me who gets the next-door neighbour’s name wrong for nearly a year, it all gets a bit confusing. Anyway, I digress. These two were a mine of information (excuse the pun), and we spent a long time mulling over the events of the strike. I’m sorry I can’t remember Teifi’s wife’s name, but she made me smile when she said she would have liked to have invited Maggie Thatcher round for a cup of tea – “just the one mind you”.

They also invited us back to their home, not just for a cup of tea, but to spend the night. I felt really guilty that we had to tell them we were booked into the hotel next door. Our journey from the M4 up to Trehafod had already shown us that the area was changing – but one thing that didn’t appear to be, was the generosity of the people themselves.

Yesterday’s journey up to Trehafod from junction 32 of the M4 showed changes which some people would say were not a bad thing. The road to Pontypridd had been vastly improved, and the Nantgarw coking plant was no longer here. I don’t think anyone could put hand on heart and honestly say that working underground is a good way of earning a living, but I suspect that many miners would want those days back again if they could, no matter what I think.

After our overnight stop at Trehafod, we headed back up the Rhondda Fawr to see how things were up here, and to be honest it all looked a bit forlorn to say the least. The miners, as I’ve said before, were not just fighting for their jobs, but their communities too – and here was the living proof. Driving through Ystrad, Ton Pentre, Treorchy, Ynyswen, and Treherbert, there seemed to be a general air of gloom and despondency about the place, and this was a picture that was taking place throughout Britain. There was a saying that “Maggie knew the cost of everything, but the value of nothing”, and that’s how it seemed to many people. While the money men were adding zeros to their accounts in Canary Wharf, communities in post-industrial Britain were left to wait in dole queues where, what jobs there were, paid the least amount they could get away with now that trade unions had been left impotent. It was this sort of mentality that brought people to form unions in the first place.

As we approached Blaenrhondda I couldn’t help but think that the valley has had the lifeblood sucked out of it, and yet at the same time, I couldn’t help but think that it needn’t have been quite like this. I know it’s easy to say with hindsight, but I’ve always gone by the philosophy that “It’s better not to fight, than to fight and lose”.

Arthur Scargill’s prediction about wholesale pit closures were proved to be correct, but he was up against a formidable opponent, as well as the added problem of power stations changing from fossil fuels to a cleaner alternative. I’ve already mentioned that I think he should have called a national ballot when the majority would have supported it, but he had a get out of jail card in November 1984 when the arbitration service, ACAS, got involved. If Scargill had put forward a recommendation to his NUM members to accept the compromise on offer, and they had accepted it, not only would the miners have not been defeated, but they would have been seen to come off best in the deal as well. Any good card player will you that you that you need to ‘know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em’. If only Arthur Scargill would have realised that.

All that is history now of course, and to be fair, not all of the news on my visit in 2006 was bad. I could see some positive changes too. The hillsides were starting to turn green and the Rhondda River, if not sparkling, was looking cleaner than ever: Even if life was still hard for many, nature can be very resilient too, and it was beginning to show us humans how we can make our lives better in other ways. When the threat from this Co-vid 19 virus allows us to safely move around again, I intend to come back up to South Wales and finish The Changing Face of the South Wales Valleys with the final part of the story. I’m just hoping I haven’t got to wait too long.