Lest We Forget

Last week it was the 75th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust. There were a number of programmes I watched on the television. Terrible times. The survivors’ stories never cease to shock and appal. The ritual humiliation, removal of citizens’ rights, rampant propaganda, extreme nationalism gradually increased until no one could be in any doubt what the Nazi attitude to the Jews was.

The television programmes include scenes of concentration camps being liberated by British troops, the words of Richard Dimbleby reporting on what he witnessed at Bergen-Belsen. Ordinary soldiers spoke of the shock and horror they felt. This is a story with which I am familiar: Allied troops as heroes, liberators, saviours. And indeed they were.

I have only recently become familiar with another story, thanks to a meticulously researched biography by Jack Fairweather, of a former Polish cavalry officer Witold Pilecki. He was a member of the Warsaw resistance. When his group learned of the existence of Auschwitz he volunteered to be captured so that he would be taken there so he could learn what was going on and organise a break out. He managed to smuggle a message out and was hopeful help would come. It did not. He persevered, continuing to document and pass on details of the barbarities he witnessed: the creation of the first gas chamber, the creation of a new camp called Birkenau. His comrades in the the resistance passed the information to the Polish government in exile who shared it with the allies, begging them to act. They did not.

Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill believed the genocide of Jews merited a direct response, and one British diplomat even said the Poles wee “being very irritating over this”.

Perhaps it is because we find it hard to believe stories of acts of such evil if we do not see them for ourselves that we can shut our ears and minds to them. In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing he writes “He said the wicked know that if the evil they do is of sufficient horror men will not speak of it. That men have only stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.”

But small evils gathered together become large ones. As John Dryden wrote of ill habits, they “gather by unseen degrees, as brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas” until something on the scale of the Holocaust happens.

Watching these programmes, hearing the testimonies of survivors, I am chilled by parallels with our times, with the naked nationalism, the hatred and aggression of some, thankfully not all, Brexiteers. The letter posted on the walls of a block of flats in Norwich yesterday titled Happy Brexit Day telling residents that only English was to be spoken there, and anyone who spoke a different language should go back to their country of origin. It is being treated as a hate crime. When the Prime Minister states that his evening meal on 31st January was made up entirely of British foods cooked to traditional recipes, and certain newspapers resound with loathsome jingoism, it does not bode well for diversity and acceptance, knowingly or in ignorance they are encouraging a narrow view of what it means to belong on these islands.

We have to be vigilant, to speak up for ourselves, for refugees, for immigrants, for anyone who is perceived as different, to challenge bigotry as and when we come across it. The British Empire was built on exploitation and slavery. It was not the glorious past some people seem to imagine. Let us build a new future on openness, fairness and respect, in or out of the EU.

What happened in Germany between the wars could happen anywhere. Nationalism is not patriotism whatever the nationalists say. It is not wed to a particular time in your country’s history, a particular group of people or a particular leader. Patriotism is loving your country, not being blind to its faults, and wanting it to be an honourable place in the world, a place of which you can be proud.

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