Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Holocaust Day - And Why its is Dangerous
by Fay Weldon, The Scotsman - January 31, 2001, Wednesday
Posted: Friday, February 02, 2001 01:53 am CST

I AM GLAD Holocaust Day is over. People kept calling it the Holocaust Celebration, not the Holocaust Commemoration, and not even noticing. It gave the TV opportunity to show more footage of starved, broken, humiliated bodies in piles, and radio to tell yet more victim stories, though the press, thanks to Mandelgate, didn't have many column inches to spare for the day.

Tony Blair and his Commemorative line up - likewise preoccupied with their tea-party squabble, probably swore like hell when they realised that they could hardly not turn up for the photo opportunity initially designed to get the Jewish vote. (This may be unfair, but I am angry.) There have been unseemly squabbles about whether to offend Turkey and include the 1915 Armenian massacres, and scarcely any attention paid to the hundreds of millions disposed of by Stalin. But then the massacres of the Left get less attention than the massacres of the Right.

I have read various accounts of why for so many years no-one mentioned the Holocaust. It was because we were in denial, or didn't want to offend Germany, or we were unconsciously anti-Semitic. It was not this. On the contrary. It simply went too deep for words. It was too terrible to deal with in fiction, or in visual images, in articles, or anything. There was no-one qualified to do it, only the Jews themselves, and for a long time they weren't doing it either. Only that great writer Primo Levi was given special tacit dispensation, and in the end he killed himself because the memories were too terrible and the effort of forgiveness too great.

After the war, all children in this country were compulsorily made to watch footage of the camps. A generation was, quite rightly, lost for words. Our silence was respect for the dead, and guilt because we, with our apparently civilised institutions, our progressive thoughts, could still do this to one another. We included ourselves in the guilty, seeing that all human beings are capable of great and organised cruelty, and vowed always to remember and never to let it happen again.

Little by little the inhibitions have been lost, the guilt externalised, Schindler's List is a great feelgood hit, and our children have Hitler and his atrocities coming out of their ears, as if he were something demonic and special and not just another politician looking for scapegoats the better to win elections. Now we have Holocaust Day. And the danger that it, or something like it, could happen again, is just as real as ever. More perhaps, because we have become de-sensitised to images of those piles of broken bodies which for many decades were seen as too obscene to show, but now flash blithely over our screens, guaranteed to get ratings.

Just after the war, I went to a North London girls' school which had a largely Jewish intake. Family members had camp tattoos and nearly everyone had lost someone, and few talked about it. There was no bullying. We were very kind to one another. Real life, which included so much death, was too close for anyone to devalue others. (Now that our young live by feelgood, and by blaming others for their own flaws, bullying is rife.)

In 1948, as a young girl, I spent a summer in France working for Youth Aliyah, a Jewish organisation which was gathering up Jewish children still surfacing from hiding places all over Europe: getting rid of the lice, treating the venereal diseases, teaching them the rituals, singing the songs, explaining to these lost orphans who they were and sending them off to sanctuary in Israel.

A group of seven children was brought in while I was there, with their young teacher, who was as it happened a Christian. She had walked out of her Munich classroom with her charges one day in 1939, when the Gestapo came to fetch them for the camps. She had kept them in hiding throughout the war, moving on whenever discovery was imminent, always just one step ahead. They were thin but clean and well versed, and all but ready for the journey to the promised land. Does that teacher get remembered, is she honoured? I hope so. The hope then was just that the British wouldn't bomb the ship they travelled in to Israel, and the children and their teacher would not drown. Yes, we British were doing that. This doesn't get much of a mention in the Holocaust celebrations, sorry, commemoration.

Holocaust Day, they say, has been the brainchild of Tony Blair and Jack Straw. It seems out of character in a government which likes to believe that New Britain began the day New Labour swept into power in 1997 - other than to blame the past doings of the other side whenever trouble looms - and in which it is assumed no lessons are to be learned from history. One wonders why. Holocaust Day isolates evil as being somewhere else and far away, leaving us the goodies, and so not open to self-acknowledgement, self-improvement. It's consoling, but dangerous.

If we'd had a Civil Liberties Day - now there would be something. A day in which we could study and lament and even reverse the small gradual erosions of rights we once took for granted and no longer have. To keep our bank accounts private, our communications unobserved, to be able to endorse cheques, to keep our children out of school and not subject to curfews, have our sex and family lives free from governmental control. But we're not going to have that, are we? The past is a whole lot safer to deplore than the present.

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