One of the more dignified and striking responses to Prince Harry’s “poor choice” of fancy-dress costume came from a holocaust survivor interviewed for TV News. She simply said, ‘He understands nothing because he knows nothing’. She has probably been saying that of people for sixty years.
It’s not just the 50% of the British population (or 60% of those under 35) who don’t know the meaning of ‘Auschwitz’ that understand and know nothing. To a greater or lesser extent, it’s all of us who are not survivors of the holocaust. A contributor to the Holocaust Memorial Day website astutely reflects, ‘You may think you understand the enormity of what happened during the holocaust. Then you find out something more and realise you’re never going to fully grasp the sheer horror of it all.’
Prince Harry has highlighted an ignorance that has always been there in British society – and it’s partly wilful. Whether we have had the best education money can buy, or the best education that the state provides for free, we still struggle to hear stories that we don’t want to hear, of atrocities that we don’t want to believe are possible. Remember that it was decades before holocaust survivors were able to tell their stories and be believed.
Initiatives like Holocaust Memorial Day and the Anne Frank Exhibition are important because the education must go on. We need to know what Nazism meant to its perpetrators and victims then, and what it means to people now. We need to know about the past, yes, but we also need to make connections with the present – with contemporary racism, discrimination, xenophobia and genocide. We need to use our knowledge to combat these evils and our own constant complicity in them. For, as Rowan Williams puts it in his endorsement of the churches’ resource pack for Holocaust Memorial Day: ‘One of the lessons we still struggle to learn is how frail our commitment can be to what we profess.’
A feature in the Guardian on the same day as the furore over Harry’s ‘mistake’ said all that needed to be said through seven moving stories of Holocaust survivors. One was Leon Greenman, now 94 and living in Ilford, whose wife and baby son were gassed in Auschwitz. He has spent the last 60 years campaigning against racism. He told how he received a Christmas card two years ago from the local fascists telling him that he would make a lovely lampshade. As the journalist said: ‘Don’t tell Leon Greenman that Nazism is a dry-as-dust historical phenomenon.’
Alison Webster is Diocesan Social Responsibility Adviser
The narrow focus of Alison Webster’s piece on Holocaust Memorial Day (The Door, February 2005), was disappointing although familiar. To focus on the sufferings of one section – and that not the largest – of the tens of millions of non-combatant victims of the Second World War tends to obscure the memory of others.
This is not entirely Ms Webster’s fault – the very fact of a Holocaust Memorial Day on the Anniversary of the arrival of the Red Army at Auschwitz deliberately focusses attention on a particular group at the expense of others. It would be far better if Holocaust Memorial Day were to be replaced by a memorial day for all non-combatant victims on either the anniversary of the outbreak of war (1 September) or the anniversary of its end (8 May).
When, I wonder, will we have a memorial day for the estimated 70 million Christians foully done to death in Russia – in the name of equality – after that great Christian empire fell into the hands of a hate-filled alien creed?
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