It is time to say that attempts to memorialise the Holocaust have failed and may even be counterproductive. The dead are still dead; anti-Semitism still exists and sometimes thrives. Myths of Jewish power circulate, now with the added insult of “playing the Holocaust card (that you presumably picked up at a Holocaust memorial gift shop)”. A clutch of these memorials, all counselling kindness to the refugee, could not save Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy, from drowning in the Mediterranean Sea in 2014.
In January the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, posted a picture of herself signing a Holocaust remembrance book on Twitter. “We must never forget,” she wrote. It reminded me of my favourite line from the 1986 Woody Allen film Hannah and Her Sisters: “The reason they can never answer the question, ‘How could it [the Holocaust] possibly happen?’ is that it’s the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is, ‘Why doesn’t it happen more often?’”
Two weeks later, Rudd announced that the “Dubs amendment” – which aimed to offer sanctuary to solitary child refugees and was sponsored by Lord Dubs, who came to the UK from Czechoslovakia on the Kindertransport in March 1939 – would be discontinued after resettling just 350 children. (Even the Cameron government, no friend to the vulnerable, suggested that it could take about 3,000.)
I do not expect Rudd to know that, in response to the Évian Conference on Jewish refugees, held in France in 1938, Adolf Hitler offered German Jews to the world but the world did not want them. Britain took 10,000 children, sponsored privately, and left their parents to die. After 1945, Britain agreed to take another 1,000 Jewish children but it could not find 1,000 still alive. It took 732.
I now see that, for the likes of Rudd, “Never forget” means “Don’t forget for two weeks” or, if politically expedient, “Don’t forget for three days”. But if that’s what you think, you never knew anything to forget. Rudd couldn’t see the connection between the British government of 1938 leaving children to die in far-off lands and the British government of 2016 doing the same. Her signing of a Holocaust remembrance book was so meaningless that it was, at best, hand exercise and, at worst, a cynical PR gesture.
This act of Holocaust memorialising was a failure. I hope that Rudd is prevented from approaching any Holocaust-related stationery in future. But that won’t happen. The orthodoxy in these circles is: let them all come to bear witness, no matter what they do with it. Some of them might learn something.
This policy led to a friend hearing a young Polish boy, touring Auschwitz, describe a fellow visitor as “a rich Jewish bitch in all that jewellery”. The boy had learned nothing, but the man had. He punched him in the face, and that is the only cheerful anecdote in this article.
Theresa May was caught out, too. After the government abandoned the Dubs amendment, Barbara Winton – the daughter of the stockbroker Nicholas Winton, who organised the Czech Kindertransport and saved 669, mostly Jewish children – pointed out that the Prime Minister had been her father’s MP and had spoken at his memorial service, calling him “an inspiration to us all”. But every inspirational experience has, it seems, its limits.
Turn to Tripadvisor and its users’ reviews of the death-camp sites in Poland. You don’t have to look far to read complaints about the “service” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which should trouble me, but rather makes me howl with laughter. Some complained that their expectations of feeling something – something they had read about (in a Daily Mail piece titled “How the seven dwarfs of Auschwitz fell under the spell of Dr Death”, for instance) or seen in some worthless Holocaust-related film (such as X-Men: Apocalypse) and wanted to feel for themselves – were not met. Auschwitz-Birkenau had failed them, too; you could say they were now, in their small way, victims of the Holocaust. There was also the man who called the site of the Wannsee Conference, at which the Final Solution was planned, “a big disappointment”. Well, yes.
When you allow the Holocaust to symbolise absolute evil, it does not warn you to be vigilant. Rather, it comforts you, because this or that crisis cannot be the same. It allows you to take refuge in distance and in difference; and it becomes trivial enough almost to warrant the terrible phenomenon known as the “Auschwitz selfie”. Aylan Kurdi, goes this line, isn’t Anne Frank. Katie Hopkins isn’t Leni Riefenstahl with a pen.
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This article appears in the 08 Mar 2017 issue of the New Statesman, The return of al-Qaeda