The Holocaust - truth is stranger than fiction

It has often been said that truth is stranger than fiction.

There are just some real-life stories that seem so astonishing, so preposterous and so implausible that they would be dismissed out of hand if we knew they were just the product of somebody’s imagination.

In my experience the Holocaust is the prime example of this.

And on Friday night, in the Guildhall in Bath, we heard another story that no-one would have believed had we not heard it from the lips of an actual witness.

I’ve written before in this blog about how the Holocaust has had a profound impact on my life.

It started when I was about 10 and, while off school ill, I stumbled over a TV documentary about Hitler’s genocide which was aimed ay older teeenagers.

As I watched open-mouthed, I found it simply incredulous  to understand how a civilised nation in my parents’ generation could have tried to wipe an entire race of people off the face of a continent.

It just didn't make any sense.

Of course I saw this through the eyes of a naive, innocent pre-teen but even after all this time  that sense of bewilderment and bemusement about the whole horrible event has stayed with me ever since. My journey to try and actually understand how this uniquely evil event could have happened has taken me to Auschwitz and the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem via countless books, films, radio shows and TV series.

But, sadly, I’m still none the wiser.

And in many ways it makes even less sense now than it did through the eyes of  a stunned 10-year-old.

That is why Holocaust Memorial Day is so important to me and so many others and why I’m grateful that in the Bath area Councillor Sarah Bevan has done so much to make sure the day is marked locally. Her latest initiative was to arrange the fascinating talk we had on Friday from a man who survived being in a concentration camp as an 11-year-old child. Yes, 11. He 'lived it' at the age I was just watching TV shows about it and barely coping.... 

Our speaker was Professor Ladislaus Lob, a Hungarian Jew, pictured left, who admits he’s only here today because of a highly controversial character. And here we truly enter that ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ dimension.

The man in question, Reszo Kasztner, pictured below right, saved 1,700 people – including our speaker – by paying the Nazis to give them freedom. The story of how those on the ‘Kasztner train to freedom’ ended up in the horrific concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen but were then taken from it after a number of months and allowed to go to neutral Switzerland was riveting. It would make a film drama every bit as nerve-wracking as the Spielberg depiction of how Oskar Schindler saved ‘his’ Jews from Auschwitz.

However, after the war while Schindler was generally regarded as a hero, the fact that Kasztner had dealt directly with the architect of the Holocaust – Adolf Eichmann – meant he was a highly-divisive man in Israel. After rising in the Government he was accused publicly of collaboration with the Nazis which led him to face a lengthy, gruelling court case – a case he never saw resolved because he was assassinated by a Jewish group.

An incredible life indeed.

Professor Lob, an elegant, humble and entirely dignified man told the story of the Kasztner train and the man himself beautifully. He helped vividly create a new and unforgettable chapter to add to the the book of an era when evil truly did seem to be in the ascendancy

As we all trooped out of the Guildhall (and how good it was to see the place packed) I’m sure we all felt privileged and honoured to have heard this remarkable story. It is one of thousands of astonishing Holocaust stories but no two are alike and all must be heard to get the best possible overview of this distressing period.    

Of course, tragically, there have been other, smaller, genocides since 1945 but the Holocaust remains in a terrifying league of its own and is a chapter of our history that must never be re-written. Or distorted.

We must never forget. And all credit to all of those who arrange events such as this to try and ensure we don’t.

This is a day we SHOULD remember

It seems these days as though every worthy charity – and quite a few less worthy commercial groups – have their own awareness months or weeks. Sometimes these are very important ways of helping to remind us of issues and concerns – but at other times they are just very silly and rather throw-away.

However, today, Wednesday, January 27, we are having an awareness day that was anything but silly. And it is one which truly does matter as a way of offering a chance for collective reflection on a hugely important subject.

For today is the day that the world recognises Holocaust Memorial Day. January 27 was chosen because it was the anniversary of the day in 1945 when the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated.

Even in a world which has a very bloody history, the Holocaust stands out as being an almost uniquely evil event.

The scale and the methodical process by which a politically-warped movement attempted to systematically destroy everybody that didn’t fit into their perfect world should be the stuff of mad science fiction or extreme horror fantasy. And yet this was (despite attempts by contemptible revisionists to say otherwise) not a work of fiction.

This ‘story’ was tragically all true and ended with the death of six million Jewish people and millions of other political prisoners, disabled people, homosexuals, gypsies and anyone else that fell short of the Nazi ‘ideal’.

As regular readers of this column/blog may recall I visited Auschwitz myself last year and wrote about it from my hotel the same night. I said then that I was struck by the sheer banality of the place and its unremarkable features considering it was about as near the earth has come to creating a living hell.

As I walked around the Polish camp I just could not imagine the suffering that took place on that soil and that is why I felt it was vital that we all kept this in our consciousness. After all if I found the Holocaust hard to believe when I was standing in its epicentre, how much harder is it for new generations to get to grips with what happened in the early 1940s?

The idea of the memorial day is two-fold. One is to remember the victims and the other is to focus our minds on making sure that whatever our political or religious views we never allow anything as catastrophic to happen again. Sadly, however, it seems we may be failing. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust believe it is vital not just to focus on the Nazi horrors but to use the day to highlight and remember the suffering in more modern genocides including Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. That list, tragically, remains open....

So, while we can all have a smile at genuine events such as Sneakers at Work Day, World Hello Day and even Be Kind To Editors and Writers Month (it is September!) let’s hope they never take attention away from the really important days for us to think about a certain issue.

And for me nothing can be as important as remembering the Holocaust.

Never forget.

Why I respect, admire and support our servicemen

The context for this piece is that in the Chronicle letters two weeks ago a writer, Tony Culver, said we should be ashamed of our British military history and he said our armed forces did not deserve our respect. He has since repeated that claim in a new letter this week - and this was the response I made in my column, printed on November 12.

Whenever I talk to local community groups it is usually only a matter of time before the Bath Chronicle’s famous (or should I say infamous)? letters pages are discussed.

I know that our pages are avidly read by people and the contents are widely discussed and debated.

This is because, by and large, we have an exceptional letters section which allows our readers to pontificate on all manner of hot topics which really gets their debating juices flowing.

I am just like everyone else in that a number of the letters that appear are ones I fully agree with and others are totally against my own personal view. And that is fine, because they are your letters pages – not mine.

However, occasionally, just occasionally, one letter gnaws away at me so I cannot ignore it. And that is what has happened this week with the second letter we print by Tony Culver who has attacked our armed forces and their long history.

It is his view, one he passionately believes, and he has every right to be heard (and printed). But so do we who fundamentally disagree.

I could talk at some length about many of the issues Mr Culver raises about war, peace and our armed forces generally but I just want to focus on one core subject, one which I think challenges everyone who believes in ‘peace at all cost’.

And that is the Second World War.

You could make a fairly powerful argument against nearly every war that has been fought but the Second World War was different – very, very different. When you are growing you play games with goodies and ‘baddies’, and this was a war when those terms genuinely (and uniquely?) apply.

Yes, there are many innocent German people who lost their lives in that conflict, but there is no denying that the Nazi regime that led them to war was pure evil. And pure evil can not – and must not – be ignored.

Mr Culver’s plea of peace is absolutely commendable – but it only works if both sides sign up. As we know Britain did everything it could to appease Hitler – and all he did was to sneer at our weakness.

Had we ignored his growing militarism to keep our own ‘purity of peace’ we would have seen Europe enslaved, Britain completely overrun (the Nazis would hardly have respected our ‘neutrality’) and we would probably have seen the total and utter destruction of the Jewish race on our continent.

I visited Auschwitz last year and saw for myself the appalling effect of Hitler’s insane beliefs and anyone that can possibly think he would have been stopped in his evil plans to create an Aryan master race by ‘peaceful methods’ is almost dangerously naive. Hitler had to be stopped – and the only way, sadly, he was going to be stopped was at the end of a gun.

In his latest letter, Mr Culver also said that the freedom we have now isn’t worth the price of the millions who died for it. He is wrong. Freedom, like democracy, is something that we in the west take for granted – ask the millions in the world who don’t have it how much they were prepared to sacrifice to gain it and you may not see such a flip attitude to freedom. And that has been earned mainly by our brilliant, committed and dedicated armed forces for whom we all owe our pride, respect and loyalty.

I will, as editor, continue to print Mr Culver’s words and those of people who support him but as an individual I feel nothing but incredible pride for the people who lost their lives in British uniforms so that I, and Mr Culver, can have the right to debate these issues.So, yes I will remember them all.

And with genuine pride.