Lessons from The Holocaust

I didn't write this but I want you to read it. I want everyone to read it.  I don't agree with David Finkelstein about the settlements, but that's another argument.

Lessons from the Holocaust? Try these two

(An article by Daniel Finkelstein that appeared in The (London) Times on 30 January 2013)

The Jews have learnt all about Man’s inhumanity to Man. But also that you cannot rely on others to keep you safe.

 
By the time my grandmother boarded the train from Belsen she was close to death. For a year she had given every scrap of food she had to her little girls, to my mother and her two sisters. Now starvation meant that she could scarcely stand. But somehow she managed to hold herself upright and stumble on board.

She had to, for this train was the only chance of liberty. A prisoner exchange had been arranged and somehow, using false passports, my family was on it. But the Nazis were excluding anyone whose illness might disclose to the Allies the hunger and disease in the camps. My grandmother knew that, starved though she was, she would have to walk to freedom. If she did not, her girls would die, as so many, many more had died and were still to die.

On board she collapsed as the train made its winter way through frozen countryside to safety in Switzerland. And then, stranded in the middle of nowhere, the train stopped. A guard appeared. He waved his hands at my family and told them that there were too many people on the train. They would have to get off. They would be left to die in the snow.

My aunt, the eldest child, protested. My grandmother was too ill to be moved, she said. The Nazi guard looked. He shrugged. OK, he said. And he moved on.

My grandmother lived just long enough to see her little girls through their ordeal, to deliver them from the camps to safety. She crossed the border to Switzerland and before the day was done, she died.

Last week, in anticipation of Holocaust Memorial Day, David Ward, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East, said that the Jews — my Mum, perhaps, her sisters — hadn’t learnt the lesson of the Holocaust. “It appears that the suffering by the Jews has not transformed their views on how others should be treated.” I’ll give my Mum a call when I have a moment and pass on his complaint.

The comparison the MP made, between Jews and the Nazis, is a distressingly commonplace one. It pops up all the time in the anti-Semitic mail that I receive on a regular enough basis that I have developed a standard reply (“Dear Sir, Thank you for your note. It is kind of you to warn me about the Jews. I will certainly keep an eye out for them. They sound terrible. Daniel”). But in public, most people are subtle enough to use the word Zionist when they mean Jew.

Even in this more socially acceptable form, the charge is outrageous. It suggests a complete failure to understand the sheer scale and intent of the Holocaust. As it happens, I am very critical of the Israeli settlements policy. I regard it as both wrong and strategically disastrous. I am critical, angry, about its human consequences. But to compare Binyamin Netanyahu’s policy to that of the gas chambers of Auschwitz is shameful. Nauseating, actually. Which is not a word I am given to employing often in political debate.

Gerald Scarfe’s deeply misconceived drawing in The Sunday Times was, at least, not guilty of this error. But I hope I can be excused if I found his explanation that he hadn’t remembered that he was supposed to be remembering the Holocaust more darkly amusing than I usually find his cartoons.

While lecturing the survivors of the concentration camps and their children on the lessons they would have learnt if only they had been good people like him, David Ward did not only show a lack of proportion. He also showed a lack of insight.

It is true, as Mr Ward says, that what happened to my grandmother shows the dangers of Man’s inhumanity to Man and the need to avoid it. But that is not the only lesson it teaches. And not the only lesson Jews have learnt.

When the Nazis invaded Holland, and arrested my family in their home, and stole their property, and killed their friends, and destroyed their community, and put them on trains to go to death camps, they were able to do it because they had the army and the soldiers and the guns. They were able to do it because the Jews were defenceless. They were able to do it because speeches and books and ideas about liberty, for all their great truth and power, weren’t enough.

How could the Jews not have learnt that lesson? How could they not have learnt it, David Ward, when they went home to the East of Europe and found they couldn’t live in their houses or reclaim their property or be safe with their neighbours? How could they not have learnt it sailing round and round the harbour because no country wanted to take them?

The Jews have learnt the same lesson as everyone else about humanity and compassion, and been as good and as fallible as anyone else when trying to show it. But we have also understood a harder, harsher truth. That we cannot rely on others to keep us safe. And Israel exists precisely because of this.

On New Year’s Day, the artist Yoko Ono paid for a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. She then left it blank save for two words. In the middle of the page it read “Imagine Peace”.

After it appeared, The Guardian conducted an online poll, asking readers: “Will Yoko Ono’s advertisement help bring world peace?” A third of respondents, hundreds of people, reviewed the white space of the ad, then considered the massacres in Syria and Algeria, the murders in the Sudan, the conflicts of the Middle East, before responding that yes, in their carefully considered opinion, Ms Ono’s commercial would help world peace.

Wouldn’t it be marvelous to really think that? To really believe that the cause of peace can be advanced by imagining it? Wouldn’t it be good if no one ever had to die to allow others to live, and freedom didn’t need to protect itself with a rifle, and little girls could go to school in Pakistan without being shot? I want that world as fervently as anyone else.

But one of the lessons of the Holocaust is that wanting it is not enough. Israel is deep in a struggle to defend the Jews who live there against more death and confiscation and terror. Because the Jews have had enough of that, thank you very much.
It’s right to be critical when Israel gets it wrong. It is creditable to make the human rights of Palestinians a cause. But to forget that after genocide and destruction the Jews wanted a home they could defend? Never again.