January 27th 2021
In a departure from my normal letter, I thought it appropriate to write a small piece to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 27th of January. It was designated as such by a resolution of the United Nations in 2005; one of the few good things to emerge from the United Nations.
The UK is attempting to build a memorial to the Holocaust in Westminster, but it has received 676 comments as part of the planning processing. As expected, one of them is from an organisation with connections to UNESCO (notorious for its anti-Israeli stance). It is to be located in Victoria Tower Gardens, close to the Palace of Westminster and it is fitting that it is sited in such a prominent position, close to the source of democratic power in the UK as a permanent reminder to politicians and the general public of the horrors that took place.
Lord Carlisle voiced his objections on the grounds that it presented as a “self-evident terrorism risk”. Deary me………that misses the whole point of the memorial. It is a symbol of the evils that can happen if allowed to. It is a memorial to all those who were exterminated in the Holocaust and will help to emphasise the sheer scale of the horrors. Hopefully, it will help to prevent the dilution of the meaning of the word “Holocaust” by other groups with an axe to grind who use it to describe their own issues. At least they don’t appropriate the word “Shoah”. We cannot allow time to diminish the perceptions of the Holocaust.
On a personal note, my uncle served in the Royal Engineers during WWII and he was part of the second group of British soldiers that entered Belsen a few days after it was liberated and was tasked with restoring services such as power, water, sanitary arrangements and arranging for the disposal of the deceased. What a typical euphemism that is for what was in effect organising the mass burial of thousands of corpses, estimated at 20,000, found left unburied. When the British entered the camp, 60,000 captives were in various states of survival. They were packed in together without food, water, power or basic sanitation.
My uncle who was a young man in his early twenties at the time very rarely talked about his experiences or his role, but the horrors stayed with him until his death. The hollow faces and emaciated bodies, the despair combined with hope on the faces of the inmates and their attempts to maintain vestiges of decency as they clung to the tattered rags that they were wearing, left indelible impressions with him. This vision embedded permanent memories in this young man’s mind, and the knowledge that he watched thousands die as they couldn’t be saved stayed with him forever.
His brother, my father, was a British paratrooper and served in what was the British Mandate called Palestine after the war (1945/6). He had contact with the Haganah and the Stern gang as well as many inhabitants, both Jewish and Arab. His views were of course coloured by letters he had from his brother and, perhaps unusually for a British soldier in Palestine (as it was called then), he understood the position of the Jewish settlers more sympathetically than most. He understood their struggles, their desire for a home of their own, a land free from prejudice and a haven from whatever the world could throw at them in the future. Before joining the paratroops he had been a rear gunner in Halifax bombers and survived a full tour of duty. He had done his part in the fight for freedom and in conjunction with his brother fully understood what had been done to the Jews of Europe and their desires for the future.
Like his brother, he rarely discussed his experiences, and as he has passed away it is left to the next generation to keep the memories alive. Hence the need for the memorial. We are gradually losing all the generations that had direct experience of the horrors and my generation, the next one down, will soon be gone, and with us the last stories of first-hand experience.
We must have the memorial in London and never, ever forget.
Shalom and l’chaim.
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