Holocaust Memorial Day - thoughts from a BBC studio...

...where I was being interviewed

Today I spent an hour and a half in a studio at the BBC, talking to 12 local radio stations, one after the other, about Holocaust Memorial Day. I talked about people in my family (Jews) who were arrested, imprisoned, deported and killed in Auschwitz. I talked about how I got to find out the details of how each of them was trapped as the net closed in round Jews in France (where my father’s uncles and aunt lived.) I talked about how the Nazi project was to not only eliminate living Jews but to try to remove them from German history and that my project to ‘find’ them and write about them, was to not let them disappear from memory, or from being known.

Several themes emerged in the interviewers’ questions and the answers I gave - and in my thoughts.

1. The Holocaust was a way of eliminating people. It wasn’t a war in the usual sense of the word. It wasn’t a fight between two or more combatants. You could say that it was a war on people.

2. The Holocaust was carried out by the Nazis and their collaborators. If we say ‘Never again’ or anything similar, one of the things we have to do is investigate what it was that the Nazis did, before they came to power and during the time they were in power. This involves facing up to the fact that they were the largest political party when they won power, that they brought in two key acts of parliament (the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act, which mean that a) they had total dictatorial power and b) that they eliminated most of the political opposition through terror, imprisonment and violence). That their ‘project’ progressed as their rule progressed and as the war progressed. In short from persecution to genocide.

3. Much as we’d like to say that the Nazis were ‘beasts’ or ‘animals’, the really distressing and difficult thing to say is that they were human. And not only that, some of them were clever. We have to try to understand what does it mean to be the kind of clever human who can be someone who can organise, run and enact genocide - several genocides.

4. There was a Nazi project. They wrote about it and explained it. They enacted it. It involved on the one hand producing a new kind of human, one that would require them to eliminate elements that they thought prevented this human from becoming its true form. On the other hand, it involved creating an empire by absorbing lands in the east. In order to achieve this twin aim, the Nazis had ‘get rid’ of people. Millions and millions of people.

5. If we say ‘never again’, it is possible to say, this means ‘never again for Jews’ or ‘Jews must never again be targeted in that way’. It is also possible to see ‘Never again’ as a hope or wish that there should never again be that kind of genocide for anyone. I’m of this second school of thought, which is all well and good, but since 1945, when that aspiration surfaced there have been acts of genocide. One of the reasons we can and should say it’s about all of humanity and not only Jews is that the Nazi project involved killing millions of people who were eg Poles (ie non-Jewish Poles), Roma and Sinti people, Russians, gays, mentally ill and physically disabled people, Afro-Germans, and even people who refused to swear an oath of loyalty such as Jehova’s Witnesses, and thousands of civilian oppositionists - socialists, Communists, trade unionists, in camps like Dachau and Sachsenhausen.

6. For those that say, there have been many other terrible acts of genocide down through history, shouldn’t we commemorate them? I say yes. I wish there were other Days when we mark the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery, or the Bengal Famine or Stalin’s starvation of the Ukrainians, or the Famine in Ireland etc. There should not be any kind of league table. Each of these terrible moments of mass suffering should be moments we dwell on, investigate and learn from. How did they happen? Why did they happen? I guess I think, it’ll be hard to progress unless we do investigate and understand these things.