Holocaust Memorial Day 2013

There’s a garden in Jerusalem, at the Yad Vashem institute, in which an avenue of trees commemorates those who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. I find that idea powerful, that in a bustling city at the epicentre of religion and politics and geopolitical tensions there’s a place for contemplation and peace and history.

It exists within a wider context, of course, a context of tragedy and horror and violence. It’s right to remember those who survived, the heroes who saved others, but the bigger story is that of the millions killed, industrialised slaughter and the vicious, brutal explosion of racism and xenophobia. I visited Yad Vashem years ago; it’s a place that changes you. I remember a room full of candles and pictures of murdered children. It wasn’t a room to simply walk away from.

More people died than were saved; it’s that simple. We memorialise what happened, not just because of it’s horrific history but because it happens again and again and again, in Rwanda and Cambodia and Bosnia and Darfur, and maybe if we keep remembering, sooner or later we’ll take the damn hint and it won’t happen again.

And yet remembering the rarer stories of the rescued and the rescuers remains important. Holocaust Memorial Day coincides with National Storytelling Week, and maybe telling stories of survivors and rescuers will, if not prevent another genocide somewhere in the world, strengthen reactions to it, light beacons of hope.

So I’ve blogged about Irena Sendler and Astrides de Sousa Mendes before, and then there’s Leopold Socha. A Polish sewage worker, Socha, his wife and a colleague hid a group of Jewish refugees in the sewers under Lwow – a year after the end of the war, Socha was killed saving his daughter from being hit by a truck. I think it’s safe to say that he’s my new hero.

But while I’ve heard of these, and while Oskar Schindler is a household name, I know less of the stories of the death, survival and saviours of gay people and Roma and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Trade Unionists and… The Holocaust is overwhelming in its scale, terrifying in how communities seemed to collapse so suddenly, neighbours colluding in putting the people who lived next door on trains to death camps. The reasons for this – fear, propaganda, malice – all seem painfully inadequate, but they serve as a reminder – these things can ultimately only happen when communities turn against each other. A military can bomb a town, sure, but to operate an infrastructure of identification, registration and murder? That requires communities to turn toxic.

And maybe that’s a reason to remember the Righteous Among the Nations; this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day theme is ‘Communities Together: Build a Bridge’, and stories of survival demonstrate how various individuals fought to maintain those communities, not simply labelling those around them as Jewish or Gay or Gypsy or Tutsi, but as people, friends, neighbours; a community.

It’s so easy for communities to fracture: a few cynical political and media comments and suddenly attacks on the disabled are on the rise; suggest opening a mosque in certain places and see what reaction you get. It’s terrifying, but the capacity to run that infrastructure I talked about earlier is never as far away as we’d like. “It couldn’t happen here” is only true until it actually happens here.

The stories we tell define our communities; let the stories of the Holocaust, of all the other genocides we watched on the news, act as warnings and testimony, yes, but also as inoculation. Let’s tell stories, not lies; let’s build bridges, not camps.

Irena Sendler: What to do when the world ends

And so the world didn’t end yesterday. The internet has treated it all as something of a joke, and probably rightly so, but what happens when the world does go to hell? What happens when society seems to be collapsing around you?

Irena Sendler was a social worker in forties Poland, a time when the ravages of Nazism and World War II were scarring Europe. Not global armageddon, sure, but the end of one world and the violent birth of another. A world in which innocent people were loaded into trains on their way to the Camps.Not an end of the world in which everything is snuffed out; no, this was an apocalypse people lived through, an apocalypse in which choices had to be made.

Sendler volunteered in the Warsaw Ghetto, volunteered to check for signs of typhus. This was tolerated by the Nazis, as no-one wanted the disease to spread beyond the Ghetto, but this allowed Sendler to smuggle children out to safety, in sacks and toolboxes and packages. In doing so, she saved 2,500 children from genocide.

The Gestapo eventually caught up with her, but strategic bribery saved her from execution. After the war she was declared to be one of the Righteous Among the Nations and was reportedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, She died in 2008 at the age of 98.

She’s not a household name on the level of Oskar Schindler, and I hope this post can do something towards rectifying that, but in the wake of an apocalypse deferred, it’s worth remembering those who stared down the darkness and made the right decisions when society was going to hell; worth remembering the stories that hold us together when the world is falling apart.

The Holocaust Happened. Deal With It. (a rant against denying genocide)

Sometimes I think the world’s living in denial.

I know that’s always been the case, but nowadays it seems to be a badge of honour among some groups. It helps their self-image – they’re not dumb enough to be taken in by the ‘official’ narrative, and that’s why they’re so comfortable in using phrases like ‘sheeple’ to describe, well, anyone who disagrees with them. And so people deny that Bin Laden was behind 9/11, that climate change is happening, that Obama was born in the US.

Now, some of this is the inevitable result of mainstream authority being eroded by many of its practitioners – why should we trust the media, or politicians, or the military-industrial complex, given their past abuses? And so asking questions is good… But not when it’s fuelled by prejudice.

Which brings me to the point. I’ve just had a scan through WordPress’s list of search terms that have brought people to my blog over the last week. And one if them was “The Holocaust couldn’t have happened”.

Now, most of you will be glad to hear that this isn’t a view that I hold, hence the title of this post. I guess I’m just freaked out that a search for holocaust denial brought someone here.

Who knows, maybe it’s because humans can’t process the idea of millions of people being killed on an industrial scale – we make it abstract, or we don’t think about it, or we deny it could happen. I’d be happy to go along with this theory, but often the denial seems to be accompanied by some pretty overt racism, which makes the whole thing feel more pre-meditated.

Because let’s face it, there wouldn’t be half as much Holocaust denial if the majority of victims hadn’t been Jewish. Yes, there’s denial of genocidal acts elsewhere – the former Yugoslavia, for instance, or Rwanda, or the Circassians, or… – but antisemitism seems more widespread, a prejudice that seems to have inserted itself in the shadowy corners of culture.

Because, the theory goes, if the Holocaust didn’t happen, someone has to be faking all those pictures and news reports and eye-witness accounts. And suddenly we’re into the old conspiracy theory of the Jews controlling everything from behind the scenes, the ultimate Other.

(I was in Egypt a couple of years ago, during which time a shark was attacking tourists at a resort. One theory I overheard being discussed was that the shark had been deliberately released by Israel. It may even have been remote controlled.)

But all this is in the realms of distant politics and strange corners of the internet where even ‘true’ stories of aliens have them doing similar things to grotesque medieval Jewish stereotypes. You don’t expect this sort of thing to bring someone stumbling into your own blog, even by mistake.

So I want to reiterate: the Holocaust happened, deal with it. It’s a cliche that in forgetting – or denying – we make it more likely that history will repeat itself. Heck, even Hitler knew that – when talking about wiping out inconvenient populations, he asked the rhetorical question “Who remembers the Armenians”, referring to another frequently denied genocide. Horrifically, he had a point.

I hope and pray that there won’t be other attempted genocides, but of course there are. There will also be those willing to pretend they never happened. And in some ways that’s the scariest part.

Holocaust Memorial Day 2012

Photograph by Angelo Celedon

It’s January 27th, Holocaust Memorial Day.

The Holocaust happened a long time ago, of course, and so scarred the psyche of humanity that we like to take comfort in the idea that it couldn’t happen again. That’s nonsense, of course, because attempted genocide happens with terrifying frequency, and while it’s easy to see why many victims of the Holocaust want to consign it to the past, “Never Forget” is a powerful weapon against history repeating itself. A couple of years ago, the BBC archive made available Richard Dimbleby’s report on the liberation of the concentration camp at Belsen. Apparently it almost didn’t get broadcast – the powers that be couldn’t believe that Dimbleby wasn’t exaggerating.

The terrifying thing is, some people still think the events described were a myth.

But, as the theme of this year’s events is ‘Speak Up, Speak Out’, It’s also a time to remember the heroes who shone in dark times. Like Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portugese consul to Bordeaux during the Nazi invasion of France. In definance of his government’s orders, he started issuing visas to Jews and other people escaping Hitler’s tyranny, including the Belgian cabinet. As the article points out, Mendes saved more people than Oskar Schindler but he remains fairly unknown today, a situation which the families of those he helped are now trying to change. Hopefully this will result in greater acknowledgement of what he did.

Of course, as a Brit, I’d also like to mention Frank Foley, the ‘British Schindler’; in March 2010, a medal of honour was given to 27 Britons (most of them posthumously) who worked to save people from the Holocaust, similar to Israel’s Righteous Among the Nations honour. I didn’t realise that, after the war, Foley lived, died and was buried in Stourbridge, just seven miles from where I live. That proximity brings Foley’s story home – this was real and happened to people who could, conceivably, have walked past my parents on the street.

There’s also Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Hungary who saved tens of thousands of Jews but who was arrested by the Soviet Union after they entered Budapest – he died as a result of this, although circumstances surrounding his death remain a mystery. Heroism doesn’t always result in medals and parades.

All this makes me wonder what I’d do in the same situation – like everyone else, I’d like to say I’d do the right thing, but put the Nazi war machine behind me and goodness knows what would happen to all those high ideals. But as the rabbinic quotation goes, “He who saves one life saves the world entire.” While we’re not faced with living in Nazi-occupied Europe, we still have the opportunity to do something to help others. Maybe it’s just a case of figuring out what that is and doing it – most of the above don’t seem to have prevaricated too much, they just got on with handing out passports. And yet sometimes handing out passports, or speaking out, or helping a neighbour can have painful consequences. Holocaust Mememorial Day teaches us that sometimes those consequences have to be faced. And when that happens we can start to dream, if not say, “Never again.”

 

Aristides de Sousa Mendes – Follow Up Post

Following yesterday’s post, I received a comment from the Sousa Mendes Foundation. I figured more people would get to see it if I gave it a post of its own:

Sousa Mendes Foundation

There would be no "Curious George" without Aristides de Sousa Mendes. His creators Hans and Margret Rey were rescued by Sousa Mendes, and they were then able to publish the first Curious George book in New York in 1941.

There would be no art by Salvador Dali past 1940 without Aristides de Sousa Mendes as he too was saved by him.

And my father would have died at the age of 7. My family was rescued by Aristides de Sousa Mendes in 1940, and I therefore owe him a debt of gratitude for my entire life.

Recently I helped the Sousa Mendes family (his grandchildren) establish a foundation to raise money to create a museum and memorial to their grandfather and help perpetuate his memory.

The website is www.sousamendesfoundation.org and I urge everyone to go to the page called "How can I help?"

With deepest thanks,