A Few Thoughts Before Holocaust Memorial Day

"Still Dachau seemed to me the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory.. For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau, and all other places like Dachau. and everything that Dachau stood for, and to abolish it forever." Martha Gelhorn

But it did not. And the further we get away from the reality of the Holocaust the easier it is for the memory of it to be become indistinct that people can think it is amusing to dress up as SS Officers on their Stag Weekends as opposed to an insult.

When I first read about the Holocaust I could not understood what could make one group of civilised human beings so despise another group of human beings that they would want them wiped off the planet. The more I read the more frightening the explanations. The manipulation of a people struggling with economic uncertainty on a grand scale who had never properly come to terms with their defeat in the First World War was masterful. Hitler scapegoated entire races of people, they were dehumanised and debased. They were compared to diseases and to rats. Old anti-semitic tales were dug up and re-told. The result was to create an atmosphere where mass murder could eventually be the solution, the Final Solution, to a question that did not need an answer: the Jewish Question.

Of course it was not just the Jews that suffered under Hitler. It was pretty much anyone who did not fit the criteria: Jews, Roma, Gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, Communists, Trade Unionists...the list goes on and on into the shadows. Not all of them were doomed to extermination, but extermination was their fate. Or experimentation. Or both. The stories are too well known to repeat but have to be re-told for fear that we may forget what man is capable of. What a man can justify in the name of ideology.

Martin Niemoller wrote famously, "First they came for the Jews. But I didn't speak up because I was not a Jew...Then they came for me. And by that time no one was left to speak up." This poem has had a great impact on me. It has informed my view of the world. It is why I believe that if any of us are to have 'rights', all of us must. That means those people who hate and despise us have as much right to speak as we do. We will not win by silencing them, for who is truly silenced in those circumstances? We win by taking them on in arguement and showing people that a commitment to human rights is not the usual hypocriscy. That if our values are to mean anything we can not abandon them at the first sign of difficulty or danger. That the price we pay for freedom is the risk of a terrorist getting through.

It is easy, when things go wrong, to find scapegoats. To pin the blame. The Nazi's had an excellent way of clipping a nation's conscience. They did it in France, in Italy and elsewhere. They would introduce anti-Semitic laws but start with the stateless (made stateless in their flight from Germany & Austria). After all who can quibble about the rounding up and dispatch of illegal immigrants? Then they'd introduce the laws more widely and suddenly hardly anyone has a conscience left. It's why you have to be careful with the laws you pass and the language you use in politics, even now. Once you take away the rights of the people no one likes, cares about or even notices then it is easier to justify taking them away from the next group and the next group. Until there is no one left to speak up.

So as we approach Holocaust Memorial Day we should remember how easily neighbour can be turned against neighbour. How fear and desperation can be twisted into something darker and nastier. How justice denied to even a single individual in the name of ideology can just be the beginning of a process that destroys hundreds and thousands of lives.

Remember also that there are people out there that deny it happened. Or that the numbers have been exaggerated. It takes some historical blindness to believe that. The Nazis were very thorough, there's a lot of paperwork out there. All it takes is a little effort to read one or two books. The danger of course is that as old age removes the last of both the survivors and the perpetrators this historical trickery becomes easier to push but the evidence is there. Read The Hon Mr Justice Gray's summing up in the Irving Trial, read Hitler's Bureaucrats by Yaakov Lozowick or The Origins of the Final Solution by Christopher R Browning. Read.

I'm sorry if this is a little rambling but I wanted to try and sum up what impact the study of the Holocaust had on me. I don't need to make the case for its importance, that would appear to be self-evident.

Never forget.