Posts by Monica Porter

Two transvestites get the best of briefs

Monica Porter — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 14:44:48 +0000

It was one of the 19th century’s most sensational court cases. In April 1870, two young, cross-dressing homosexuals had been arrested in full drag at London’s Strand Theatre, where they had been deporting themselves outrageously, flouncing about and flirting with the men. Victorian society was scandalised and the camp pair were tried in the Court of Queen’s Bench (how deliciously apt), where the presiding judge was none other than the Lord Chief Justice himself.

But it wasn’t just “Fanny” Park and “Stella” Boulton on trial; it was the whole “scourge of sodomy” prevalent in the country’s seedy demi-monde that the stiff-collared moralists of the era hoped to extirpate.

They wanted the trial to serve as a terrible warning to any young men tempted to indulge in the “criminal folly” of gay sex. But they hadn’t reckoned on Fanny and Stella’s legal defence being taken on by the formidable — and Jewish — George Lewis (later Sir George Lewis), the pre-eminent solicitor of the day, whose father James founded the family law firm.

The story is entertainingly told in Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England, by Neil McKenna (the outstanding biographer of Oscar Wilde).

Everyone advised Lewis against taking on the “unwinnable” case of the “Young Men in Women’s Clothes” but he took it on nevertheless. Perhaps it was because, as a Jew, he understood what it was like to be an outsider: “Mr George Lewis disliked injustice in any shape or form. The case of Boulton and Park, friendless, despised and beleaguered, and with all the apparatus and power of a merciless State ranged against them, may have touched a chord of sympathy and compassion within him and prompted him to offer his services.”
Lewis fought ferociously and won; Fanny and Stella were acquitted.

Lewis was involved in a number of causes célèbres and, in 1895, he famously represented the Marquess of Queensberry against the charge of criminal libel brought by Oscar Wilde. (Had he acted for Wilde instead, the course of history might have been very different.)

Lewis was also instrumental in the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal. He died in 1911 at the age of 78 and is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Willesden.

In defence of a maligned state

Monica Porter — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 10:40:05 +0100

Hungary, the country of my birth, gets a fairly bad press in the antisemitism stakes. Naturally, the recent rise of the ultra-nationalist Jobbik Party - blatantly no friend to Jews or Gypsies - hasn't helped. But, last spring, when a Jobbik MP gave a pointedly antisemitic speech in parliament - citing a 19th-century "blood libel" - he was fervently denounced by politicians of all stripes, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban reacted by inviting a prominent Budapest rabbi to parliament and pledging his government's support for the Jewish community.

The Catholic, Reform and Lutheran churches followed with a joint statement in a Jewish magazine, declaring: "It is our duty to protest against incitement of hatred."

In another positive step, in July, Hungarian authorities arrested 97-year-old Laszlo Csatary, a "most wanted" Nazi war criminal accused of sending 16,000 Jews to Auschwitz. It may or may not be true that the arrest came about due to international pressure, but the point is that it took place.

This brings us to Hungary's Holocaust record. I don't deny that, in common with the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, there was an ingrained, centuries-old antisemitism in Hungary that was effectively tapped by the Nazis. But it's a matter of degree. For most of the war, Hungary was in fact a refuge for Jews (except for the poor souls in the labour battalions). Despite its being an Axis ally, under the regent, Miklos Horthy, Hungarian Jews were not deported, put into ghettoes or made to wear the yellow star. All that happened only after March 1944, when the Germans occupied the country and Adolf Eichmann arrived, determined to implement the Final Solution where Hungary had failed to do so.

The German arrival marked the start of deportations. From May to July 1944, some 440,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz, and the majority perished. But, before the planned mass deportation of Budapest's Jews could take place, a newly emboldened Horthy halted it. He was toppled that October and the Nazis put a rabid Arrow Cross antisemite in charge. But the Jews had gained a precious three months. By then, the Red Army was closing in, the Germans were on the run and there were no more trains for transports to the death camps.

Some 120,000 of Budapest's Jews survived the war in large part thanks to Horthy's reluctance to implement German orders. In the summer of 1944, New York Times correspondent Anne McCormick wrote: "As long as they exercised any authority in their own house, the Hungarians tried to protect the Jews."

Today, the small nation has continental Europe's third largest Jewish population, after France and Germany - up to 100,000 people, mostly living in Budapest. The capital's many shuls include the beautifully restored Dohany Street Synagogue. There is a much-lauded Holocaust museum, as well as the "shoes along the Danube" memorial to Jews killed by the Arrow Cross.

Budapest has a kosher pastry shop and kosher butcher - even a kosher pizzeria - and a Jewish theatre group. The city hosts an annual Jewish Summer Festival with a book fair, art exhibits, Jewish gastronomic delights and a "kosher cabaret". Each winter, there is a Chanucah festival in the flourishing Jewish district (site of a wartime ghetto), where hip young Hungarian Jews scoff latkes and listen to ethno-fusion-klezmer-punk bands.

These are hardly indicative of a society in which antisemitism plays a dominant role. So let's look at the broader picture. Hungary is not such a bad place to be a Jew.

The couple defying Munich’s Nazi legacy with meatballs and dumplings

Monica Porter — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:33:27 +0100

Of all the cities in which a Jewish Holocaust survivor might choose to open a restaurant, a mere 15 years after the end of the Second World War, Munich, birthplace of the Nazi movement, would be the least appealing option. At least, you would think so.

But that is exactly what Kurt Cohen and with his wife, Mirijam, did. And the restaurant they established in 1960 on Theresienstrasse, a short stroll away from the site of the Nazi Party HQ at the Braunes Haus, is still going strong in the hands of the Cohens’ son, Jacques, and his Israeli-born wife, Yochi.

Cohen’s is Munich’s only Jewish restaurant, not counting the one in the local Jewish community centre. Bright and airy and sited in a small, pleasant courtyard, it lies in the heart of Schwabing, the student district. Nearby is the imposing Munich University, along with many of the city’s art galleries and museums. (A couple of streets away is another restaurant, the Osteria Italiana, once Hitler’s favourite.)

Jacques, who is 65 and sports a straggly grey pony-tail, looks more like an ageing rock musician than a restaurateur, while Yochi is a redhead with an impish sense of humour. They met in Israel in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War; Jacques was there as a volunteer to help in the war effort. The following year, they married and Yochi joined her husband in Munich, with no qualms at all, although her mother had been an inmate at Bergen-Belsen. “I’m a cosmopolitan person,” she says, by way of vague explanation.

The Cohens were originally a Hamburg-based family, able to trace their roots back to the 17th century. Kurt Cohen was a 22-year-old university student, fluent in English and French as well as German, when Kristallnacht shattered the remaining hopes of the country’s Jews that they could ride out the Nazi storm.

He smuggled himself on to a ship and ended up in Antwerp, where he secured forged documents and met Mirijam, also living in Belgium with forged papers. They married in 1942 and survived the rest of the war in Belgium, returning to Germany together in 1948.

After staying in various displaced persons camps, they settled in Bavaria and in 1955 moved to Munich, where, a few years later, they opened Cohen’s.

Why a restaurant? Had Kurt been working in the catering business? “No,” Jacques explains. “It was because Mirijam was a good cook, having worked as a private cook for a family during the war.”

The restaurant’s original premises were at 60 Theresienstrasse, a little way up the street from its current location at no 31. It hardly needs saying that the business has been an enduring success, and boasts numerous stamm Gäste (regular customers) who have been going there for years.

One of them is Dr Thomas Ruzicka. A professor of medicine at Munich University, he says he has been eating at Cohen’s since he was a child in the 1970s.

“My parents would take me. It was a social gathering place for them, not just a restaurant. They would meet their friends, play cards.”

Now he brings his own companions to eat at the restaurant — Jews and non-Jews alike. At his table sit visiting friends and medical colleagues from Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Israel.

“My parents are no longer alive but I’m continuing the tradition.” he says. “And here you can get the best Wiener schnitzel in town.”

Yochi, hovering nearby, flashes a proud smile. “Yes, that’s true.”

She explains that they serve “kosher-style food — traditional but secular”. So, a pork-free zone but no kosher kitchen as such, “because,” she says, “we would have to pay for a mashgiach to supervise our kosher status, and that’s expensive”. In any case, Yochi estimates that 90 per cent of their customers are non-Jews.

Mirijam Cohen died in 1990 and Kurt in 2006. Jacques and Yochi have been running Cohen’s for the past 14 years.
And they have added an educational aspect to it. They run Sunday “lunch and lecture” events, at which Dr Michael Heinzmann, of the university, speaks about Jewish culture while his audience munches on pirogi (dumplings) and Königsberg meatballs.

And during the week they host a “schools and tolerance” programme: lunchtime talks for groups of children from schools throughout Munich (“including Muslim schools,” Yochi points out), at which the pupils sample Jewish food as they learn about Jewish life and traditions.

But as a very visible manifestation of Jewish life in a city forever associated with the Nazis, have the Cohens experienced antisemitism?

“We have had no real trouble,” Jacques says.“But every year on April 20 [Hitler’s birthday] we get a phone call asking to reserve a large table that night for a birthday celebration. A joke, in very bad taste. I just say: ‘You’re crazy’ and hang up.

“Otherwise, I feel very comfortable here. The Munich police are diligent and helpful. On Jewish holidays they send officers to keep an eye on the restaurant, to make sure there is no problem.”

Business is brisk, Yochi says. This month they are catering for a large Jewish wedding (Munich’s Jewish community is 10,000-strong) and soon after that they will host a book launch for a (non-Jewish) author.
The Cohens’ sons, Pascal and Herbert, both worked at the restaurant before deciding it was not for them. Now they are living abroad, so there will be no third generation to head the family business.

“When Jacques and I are gone,” Yochi states matter-of-factly, “the restaurant will die. But that is OK. Children must be free to choose their own lives.”

Soviet shame over hero's name

Monica Porter — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 15:13:53 +0100

Let's give the Russians a little kicking, shall we? Lord knows they deserve it. Throughout the 20th century, they blighted whole populations with the evils of communism, now they poison our world with their chief exports of organised crime and corruption. But these are vast themes and I want to narrow the Russians' mountain of heinous doings down to a single, specific issue: the death of Raoul Wallenberg, the ultimate hero of the Holocaust.

Wallenberg was the Swedish envoy who, while based in Budapest, rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis and their Arrow Cross disciples. He was captured by the city's Russian "liberators" in January 1945. Accused of spying for the Americans, he is widely believed to have perished in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka prison two years later, aged 34.

You might think: but wait a minute, weren't the Americans and the Russians allies in the war against the Nazis? And wasn't Wallenberg clearly an ardent and courageous anti-Nazi? Don't bother trying to ascribe logic to paranoid fanatics.

I have always felt very acutely the tragic fate of this brave and selfless young Swede, a personal hero of mine. In part, this is due to an indirect link to him, inherited from my mother. In the dark and treacherous days of the Nazi occupation of Budapest, my mother saved the lives of several Jewish friends by sheltering them in her home.

She was also closely involved with two men who were active in the Hungarian Resistance and assisted Wallenberg in the operation of his safe-houses - one was a doctor, the other a film director.

My mother never met the Swedish envoy herself, but through those two intimates she was aware of some of his rescue work.

Wallenberg was born on August 4 1912, so next month marks the centenary of his birth. Sir Sigmund Sternberg, the Budapest-born philanthropist and interfaith campaigner, recently wrote a letter to The Times calling for Great Cumberland Place - the site of a statue of Wallenberg - to be renamed Wallenberg Place. He said that he felt that it would be a fitting tribute to this "noble man".

It's not such an outlandish proposal. After all, other cities have bestowed similar honours on him. There's Place Raoul Wallenberg in Montreal, Raoul Wallenberg Gasse in Vienna and Raoul Wallenberg Walk in Manhattan. There are two streets named after him in Berlin and five in Israel. And that's not to mention the 18 schools around the world that bear his name.

So to have a Wallenberg Place in London's West End, appropriately opposite the Western Marble Arch Synagogue, is rather a good idea.

But I've got a better one. Why not erect a new statue of Wallenberg in front of the Russian Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens? President Putin often praises Stalin and openly hankers after the Soviet days when Russian leaders didn't have to pretend to be democratic or interested in trifling matters such as civil liberties and the rule of law.

Under Putin, the Russian authorities are as pernicious as ever. They should be made to confront the image of Wallenberg - and his mysterious disappearance - on a daily basis.

The inspiration for my initiative - a cracking one, no? - dates back to the early 1980s, when the block in front of the Soviet embassy in Washington DC was renamed Andrei Sakharov Place in protest against the dissident Russian scientist's arrest and detention in 1980. I heartily approved of the Yanks sending this sharp anti-Soviet, pro-freedom message. But I remember how a lefty-liberal acquaintance tut-tutted about the block's re-naming, saying it wasn't "very nice" to "rub the Russians' noses" in the Sakharov case.

Not very nice? Only an archetypal useful idiot could have uttered such a stupid statement. In my opinion, we should rub their noses in their crimes until the cows come home. The Katyn forest massacre? Betrayal of the Warsaw Uprising? The alleged poisoning in London of Alexander Litvinenko? Murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya? So much to choose from. Let's rub away.

The Russians would prefer us to forget their sins. But I say we must remember them, and demonstrate that we do.

Good riddance to Dr Williams

Monica Porter — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:45:00 +0000

So the Archbishop of Canterbury, has finally announced his resignation. I believe the operative word is "Hallelujah". I have long felt that the incumbent of this illustrious office has been what we nowadays call a "waste of space". An airy-fairy academic out of touch with the feelings of common folk and a spouter of politically correct twaddle, a man of zero leadership qualities at a time when we require strong direction from the head of this country's official religious establishment. Under Dr Rowan Williams' watch the British have been in danger of utterly devaluing their ancient Judaeo-Christian tradition, which would have been tragic for both the religious and secular alike.

Never was this more clearly illustrated than when he advocated the introduction of Sharia law for Britain's Muslims in 2008. Is he insane? For years our society has been plagued by a militant anti-Western sub-culture of young Muslim extremists. They're not all terrorists, like the July 7 bombers. Some just stalk London's east end, as they did last summer, painting over M&S bikini adverts and sticking up threatening posters declaring "zones of strict Islamic law" that ban smoking, alcohol, music and canoodling.

Instead of working to counter this lunatic brigade, Dr Williams thought it best to hurry along their obscene agenda. (Yes, he said he favoured only limited Sharia law, but the words "thin" and "wedge" spring to mind.)

As you can see, I'm no fan of the bearded one. But even I was shocked at an anecdote told to me by the widow of a well-known
Jewish writer and an active - if secular - member of London's Jewish community.

She was once in the audience at a large
Jewish gathering at which Dr. Williams spoke. He droned on at length in his hifalutin, at times impenetrable fashion, and chief among his topics was a justification of his call for Sharia law. "I was disappointed no one challenged him on this," my acquaintance told me, "neither the other speakers on stage nor the members of the audience. Perhaps as Jews we felt we mustn't criticise the head of the Church of England, who had been good enough to come and speak to us."

She decided to approach him herself, remarking that British Jews had long felt safe in this tolerant society and that the benevolent influence of the Anglican Church was partly to thank for that. But things had changed. The relatively small Jewish community of 300,000 felt under threat from the growing Muslim population - now almost three million strong - which included a vociferously antisemitic segment. Could Dr Williams understand why Jews,
perhaps even more than gentiles, were alarmed by his pro-Sharia stance?

"What did he say?" I asked, all ears. She looked at me sadly. "He didn't say anything. He just turned around and walked away."

No reassuring words, no "pastoral care". No answer at all. He just blanked her. The sheer arrogance is staggering. Why was this man ever installed in Lambeth Palace? Let's hope that whoever takes over from him will be more in the mould of his predecessor, Dr George Carey.

Dr Carey was a model archbishop - sensible and sensitive. Even at a time when the influence of the church was waning, his presence provided a bulwark for our Judaeo-Christian heritage, which as we all know is about much more than religion - it is the foundation for our enlightened modern ethics. It should be defended at all costs, not eaten into by alien, anti-Western influences.

Carey was from a humble working class background and the first holder of his office never to have studied at Oxford or Cambridge (Dr Williams attended both). He understood the concerns of ordinary people and spoke their language. Since his retirement in 2002 he has continued to speak out on controversial issues, including criticising moderate Muslims for failing to denounce extremists and lamenting the lack of
democracy in Muslim countries. Predictably, he's been accused of Islamophobia.

If only Dr Williams had one scintilla of Carey's courage and clear-eyed sense of purpose, the church would not now be such a lame duck, failing to serve Christians, such as myself, and the Jewish compatriots with whom we share common values.

Taking a walk through time to the old East End

Monica Porter — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:34:13 +0000

London Walks, one of the capital's longest established walking tour companies, offers an "Old Jewish Quarter" tour of the East End. I have been on several of their enlightening guided walks - they have scores of them - but I wondered about this one. Hasn't that Jewish past been swept away by the curry houses and mosques of later Asian immigrants? What is there left to see? Quite a bit, actually.

On the day I take the tour, it is led by Shaughan Seymour. Like many of the company's guides, he is a professional actor, his face familiar from many British films and TV shows. Acting and guiding are a good match; trained thesps have the vocal technique to make themselves heard above the traffic and can add dramatic flair to the stories they relate.

Seymour leads a variety of themed walks (which he likens to "doing Trivial Pursuit on your legs") but says the Jewish one attracts people from farther-flung parts of the world than any other. "It's the diaspora walk. About two-thirds who come are Jews eager to learn about their ancestors. I get people from South Africa, Israel, Australia, the US and Canada…"

It is an overcast, midweek morning. The tour group meets outside Tower Hill underground station and I count 19 participants. We have a good view from here of the Tower of London - an apt starting point, as we discover.

Seymour launches into the story of the coronation of Richard I in 1189. Richard had issued an edict that there were to be "no women and no Jews" at his coronation, but a number of wealthy Jewish merchants turned up anyway. When they were recognised, they were beaten, many were killed, and this sparked a massacre of Jews in London and elsewhere. "Some Jewish usurers sought refuge in the Tower and the King said: OK, as long as the money keeps rolling in. Like a Mafia boss, he made them pay for protection. A century later, in 1290, King Edward I expelled the Jews from England."

Soon we are walking along Jewry Street (named after the Jewish community which settled in this area on their readmission to the country in 1656) and then on to Duke's Place, where a plaque reminds us that the Great Synagogue once stood there. For centuries, this was the heart of Ashkenazi life in London, until the synagogue's destruction in the Blitz.

From here, we head for the highlight of the tour, a visit to the country's oldest surviving synagogue at Bevis Marks. The vaguely phallic-shaped office block known as the Gherkin, towers above us and Shaughan recalls an elderly Jewish lady on an earlier tour who bemoaned the fact that it was built so near the historic synagogue. "It's all right, dear," Shaughan told her, "it's been circumcised."

Maurice Bitton, the shamash of Bevis Marks, welcomes us into the beautiful building, which dates from 1701. Tucked away in a courtyard, because Jews were not allowed to build on public thoroughfares at the time, it is virtually unchanged since it was built. The great brass hanging candelabra, austere dark oak benches, magnificent ark - everything is original.

Bitton recounts with relish the history of the Sephardi synagogue, and regales us with tales of the congregation's most famous son, the 19th-century philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore. He shows us the great man's seat, now roped off. The congregation has shrunk since then, but Bitton says it is starting to grow again, as young Jews move back into the area.

For me, the visit brings back memories. In the 1970s, long before the City was redeveloped, I worked for a magazine whose creaky Dickensian offices overlooked this synagogue. On dusky winter evenings, I peered down through its windows into the warm, candlelit glow, mesmerised by the sound of chanting.

From here we walk north-east to Petticoat Lane (aka Middlesex Street), home of the shmutter trade. This is in Spitalfields, the beginning of the East End proper. Jews fleeing the pogroms in the late 19th century set up their stalls in the market here. Later, Alan Sugar, too, started life as a Petticoat Lane stallholder. Now it is abuzz with Asians, hawking shmutter of their own.

On Goulston Street, Seymour points out the Wentworth Dwellings, lodgings built for poor Jews in 1870, and on neighbouring Brune Street we stop before the well-preserved 1902 "Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor", now a luxury apartment block. Further east we arrive at the handsome, early 18th-century Fournier and Princelet streets and learn that their original residents, French Huguenot silk weavers, made way for Irish immigrants, who were replaced by Ashkenazi Jews, who were in turn superseded by Bangladeshi newcomers. "And now they're leaving," Seymour explains, "to make way for yuppies. These Georgian townhouses are being done up and sold to them for huge sums."

As we saunter down Brick Lane, in Whitechapel, I chat to others in the group. Danielle has been carefully taking notes en route so as to help her son with a Jewish history project. "It's not a very serious project," she admits. Her son is six.

Carol and Stan are a middle-aged American couple from Maine. They know little about their Ashkenazi forebears ("Our families wanted to forget - too much pain and sadness") so, whenever they visit a major city, they tour its Jewish quarter in a quest for knowledge.

The two-hour tour ends here. "Shalom everyone!" calls Seymour, but not before directing us to that East End institution, the Brick Lane Beigel Bake. Well, it is lunchtime.

Blind Brits and sighted Yanks

Monica Porter — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 11:14:51 +0100

So, for those pro-Palestinian demonstrators who disrupted the Proms and forced the BBC to take its live broadcast off the air, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra was a proxy for the "repressive" Israeli state.

We are all entitled to engage in non-violent protest, but I do get that Groundhog Day feeling whenever our anti-Israeli agitators rear their ugly heads.

For decades now, we have heard the same mantra from this blinkered brigade. The world around them might change - 9/11, the 7/7 bombings, global jihad, evil doings by regimes from Iran and Sudan to Uzbekistan and Syria - but they remain stuck in their "anti-Zionist" loop, forever claiming that they are merely concerned with the protection of human rights.

Perhaps we should recognise the fact that anti-Israeli sentiment is so hardwired into Britain's cultural DNA that it is unlikely ever to be erased. This partly stems from the contrasting, historic enchantment with the Arab world displayed by so many eminent people in this country, notably such celebrated adventurers as T E Lawrence and Freya Stark. Couple this with the antipathy towards Jews fostered during the British Mandate - when militant Zionists gave their British overlords a run for their money - and it is easy to see how it has come about.

The British in Palestine showed scant sympathy even for the desperate Holocaust survivors hoping to start new lives there, but whose boats they prevented from docking.

My late (Jewish) father-in-law, then a British Army major stationed in Haifa, once left a dining table in disgust at a senior officer's joke about the latest boat full of refugees: "We should pull the plug and drown the lot!"

The anti-Israeli convictions of later British generations may come from different sources, but are no less ingrained. They stem partly from the national predilection for championing the underdog, and Israel long ago stopped being that. Even if the underdog is now represented by Hamas, which delights in the killing of Israeli civilians, the attitude seems to be "so be it".

It has also long been "cool" to be anti-American - which sits comfortably with being anti-Israel. Americans, of course, have never romanticised the Arab world. When Yanks look at the Middle East, they don't come over all misty-eyed (cue theme music from Lawrence of Arabia) at a mystical landscape spoilt by a pushy little Jewish state.

They see a vast region of despotic regimes, surrounding a solitary democracy which - while not beyond criticism - shares their own, enlightened, Western values.

Americans regard not only Israel, but the wider Jewish socio-cultural influence, in a different light to Brits. This was brought home to me during a recent visit to New York. I gave a talk at the Holocaust Memorial Library about my mother Vali Racz, a Righteous Among the Nations, to an audience of high-school history teachers from across the US. They had come to Manhattan for a two-week summer seminar on the Holocaust, so that they could be better equipped to teach the subject to their pupils. Full of questions, they seemed eager to learn.

There were few Jews among the teachers, and many taught in schools with few, if any, Jewish children. One teacher, Sam, came from a school in Massachusetts that he told me had a high proportion of refugee children from turbulent countries such as Honduras, Ecuador and Guatemala. "They've never even met a Jew," he said. "But they are fascinated by the story of the Holocaust, because it's all about betrayal, fear, courage, loyalty - concepts they understand".

I can't imagine a group of teachers from our political-correctness-mired British comprehensives spending a fortnight of their summer holiday enriching their knowledge of the Holocaust. A seminar on diversity studies, on the other hand, sponsored by the Guardian and with a keynote speech from Ken Livingstone - now that could get them fired up.

Could Bloomberg be the man?

Monica Porter — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 10:16:03 +0100

As we near the 2012 American presidential elections, once again there are rumours that the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, might enter the race, thereby making himself potentially the country's first Jewish president.

The Committee to Draft Michael Bloomberg, which unsuccessfully urged him to run in the 2008 elections, has announced that it will try to persuade him to wage a campaign next year.

As for the 69-year-old media mogul himself - with an $18 billion fortune, the 13th richest person in the United States - he denies that he has any plans to run. But, as we all know, the denials of politicians are never carved in stone.

Personally, I had never found him a very attractive figure. For a start, I'm not sure a billionaire can possibly understand the plight of the common man. This impression was reinforced for me a few years ago when someone who had regular dealings with him described Bloomberg as "lacking the empathy gene". Not ideal for a President.

I had also been vaguely aware of newspaper stories about his alleged sexual harassment of some of his female employees. These may well have been completely unfair and certainly Bloomberg himself denied the allegations, but any kind of negative coverage is not exactly going to shift an already established, negative view.

So, all in all, Michael Rubens Bloomberg was not my cup of tea. But, following a recent stay in Manhattan - my first in many years - I have revised my opinion of the man.

I met up with my old high-school chum Jeremy, a journalist who now works as an editor at Bloomberg News. He related two surprisingly positive anecdotes about his billionaire boss.

Firstly, Jeremy recently wrote some articles about dissident Cuban journalist Normando Gonzalez's years of abuse and imprisonment by the Cuban government. When the Cuban authorities threatened to close Bloomberg's Havana office if they published any more articles about Gonzalez, Bloomberg told them to "get lost". He would run the stories even if they shut it down. Which they did.

On another occasion, Jeremy was somewhat anxious when asked to review a snobby Manhattan restaurant which he disliked, because he was aware that Bloomberg sometimes ate there and was friendly with the owner.

Nevertheless, he gritted his teeth and wrote an honest, critical review. On the morning it appeared, Jeremy's phone rang. It was Bloomberg. Uh-oh. But he was calling to say that he'd enjoyed the slating. "Apparently they always fawn over him at that restaurant," said Jeremy, "and he can't stand it."

So, not such a bad fellow. But a candidate for the White House? Well, let's think about it. The US is in the thick of a monumental fiscal crisis. Surely the country needs a President who is good with money. These tough financial times call for a hard-nosed businessman like Bloomberg, not an idealist like Obama.

And there's something else. Although he was initially a Democrat and then a Republican, since 2007 Bloomberg has been an Independent. He's politically unaffiliated. After the recent spectacle of the tooth-and-claw battle between the Democrats and the Republicans to reach agreement over the "debt ceiling", it could be refreshing to have a non-partisan leader in power.

If Bloomberg does run for the presidency, it will be to his advantage that he's seen to have just the right degree of Jewishness. He was brought up near Boston in a kosher home, but didn't raise his own daughters religiously. He puts in an occasional appearance at his Reform synagogue but lives a largely secular life.

He is a supporter of Israel and of Jewish causes but once remarked that, while he was happy to be a Jew, it didn't make him better or worse than anyone else: "You are what you are". He rarely discusses his faith.

In other words, he's comfortably assimilated. And he personifies the American dream - the ordinary Joe, grandson of immigrants, who became a successful, self-made man.

He can be inspirational, too. "We've shown the world that New York can never be defeated", he declared in relation to the 9/11 attacks, "because of its dynamic and diverse population and because it embodies the spirit of enterprise and the love of liberty."

Whether or not he has the makings of a President, there is a lot to admire about Michael Bloomberg. Just don't fawn over him. He doesn't like it.

So, will the left blame Islam for Breivik's acts?

Monica Porter — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:06:40 +0100

There has been a tidal wave of media coverage about Anders Behring Breivik and his murderous rampage in Norway. Was he a solitary monster or part of a network of virulent white supremacists? Sane or a psychopath? Could he have been influenced by our own extreme nationalists, the English Defence League?

Speculation has been rife. But one line of thinking has been absent. No one has pointed the finger of blame for his horrific crime at the target of his hatred: the Muslim world, with its ever-growing presence and influence in the West.

No one has argued: Yes, he was a mass murderer but consider the provocation. Al Qaeda, global Jihad, radical imams spawning terrorist cells in Europe and a liberal European political establishment that refuses to recognise the dangers. Perhaps Breivik's violent act was the predictable consequence of all that. Should we not factor it into the equation?

Such reasoning, of course, would be obscene. The only one to blame is Breivik himself. He planned the attacks and he executed them. Chillingly, he was able to look innocent people in the eyes and calmly slaughter them. The suggestion that there could be some socio-political, ideological or cultural grievance that might explain - or even excuse - his actions is not one that any rational person would entertain.

In 2005, on another July day, four British Muslim men travelled from Luton to London, where they boarded three Underground trains and a bus and detonated their suicide vests. They murdered 52 and injured hundreds more. They, too, coolly observed the innocents on their way to work or school - people of all ages, backgrounds and ethnicities - and blew them to pieces. Ruthless killers with no regard for human life, they were every bit as culpable for their evil crimes as Breivik is for his.

Yet, in the aftermath of London's 7/7 atrocities, there was a rush of leftist apologists laying the blame elsewhere. They claimed it was down to the war in Iraq. That ill-conceived war had made Muslims really mad, they argued, and 7/7 was the inevitable response. "The victims of the London attacks can blame Tony Blair's government for their sufferings," declared George Galloway, then an MP in the left-wing Respect Party. Well no, actually, they can blame four Muslims in suicide vests.

Within days of 7/7, London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, publicly defended the use of suicide bombers in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because "Palestinians don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons". He didn't want people blown up in his city, obviously, but it was okay if it happened in an Israeli one - that was some other mayor's problem and Israel had only itself to blame.

A few years earlier, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in America in which nearly 3,000 perished, there was a clamour of voices from the left, shifting responsibility for the abomination from its perpetrators to its victims. They said it was the fault of America itself.

For decades, so the argument went, the superpower had flexed its muscles around the world and 9/11 was the understandable backlash. (Never mind that the victims were from a multitude of nationalities and ethnic groups, and included dozens of Muslims.)

One would expect this view from Iran's President Ahmadinejad, for whom America is the Great Satan, and naturally he didn't disappoint. But the Rev Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's erstwhile Chicago pastor? The Reverend's hatred for America evidently outweighed any qualms about Al Qaeda. "The United States has brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own terrorism" he asserted, "… and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is brought back to our own front yards."

A tirade so wilfully ignorant that it almost beggars belief… except, of course, that this is exactly what we have come to expect of so many public figures, from the green Johann Hari to the elderly wit, Gore Vidal. The late Harold Pinter consistently blamed the US, Britain and Israel for the world's ills. Had his vitriol been directed instead at truly brutal regimes in the Middle East and Africa, he would never have won the Nobel Prize.

The violent Jihadists who threaten us all are a source of anxiety among many around the world. For some, this has extended into a general aversion to Islam and its followers. But Galloway, Livingstone et al won't be citing Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda's catalogue of massacres as the root cause of Breivik's killing spree.

The unhinged Norwegian is wholly, personally accountable for what he did and, by the same token, responsibility for Islamist atrocities lies squarely on the perpetrators' own heads and not at the door of Blair, Bush or anybody else. It's time the left stopped playing its hypocritical blame game.

The deli that became a film star

Monica Porter — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:24:54 +0100

Manhattan used to rejoice in two landmark Jewish-owned restaurants. Elaine's - the haunt of film stars, rock stars and writers - closed down last May following the death of its owner, Elaine Kaufman. That left Katz's Delicatessen as the most haimishe place to eat in the most Jewish city on the planet.

Katz's is the home of the world's most celebrated pastrami sandwich. Its time-honoured slogan, "send a salami to your boy in the army", was coined during the Second World War, when many parents ordered Katz's salamis to be shipped to sons fighting overseas. (The tradition continues today with shipments to troops in Afghanistan.)

The business was established in 1888 by Willy Katz, one of thousands of Jews who fled the Russian pogroms for America. He opened the deli on the Lower East Side, the hub of immigrant life at the time, and it still occupies the original site on the corner of East Houston and Ludlow streets. It was enlarged in the '50s but has not changed much since.

The current owners, Fred Austin and his brother-in-law Alan Dell, took over from the Katz family in the deli's centenary year, 1988. Now in their sixties, they are grooming Alan's 24-year-old son, Jake, to succeed them.

Entering the deli you are left in no doubt about its popularity among America's celebrities. Their smiling photos, posing with Fred or Alan or Jake, adorn almost every inch of wall-space. Naturally, Jewish faces abound: Ben Stiller, Barbra Streisand, Richard Dreyfuss (although not that embodiment of Jewish New York, Woody Allen, who is more closely associated with the theatre-themed Carnegie Deli.)

Fred Austin comes from a Polish-Jewish immigrant family and was born and raised in the Lower East Side. He sports a stubbly grey goatee and wears a loose, loudly patterned shirt. Jake, in worn jeans and tee-shirt, is likewise stubble-chinned. Their casual air is deceptive, however - they run a tight ship. An employee caught chewing gum, for example, is swiftly reprimanded.

The staff are almost as ethnically diverse as the city itself, and Austin says while he has some Jewish workers, there are also blacks, Hispanics, Russians and Asians. "But I'm down to one Muslim," he notes.

The kosher-style menu has remained largely unaltered since the early days and they still make their own pickles on the premises. Jake, who clearly enjoys the traditional ethos of the place, had his barmitzvah at Katz's and went to Tufts University, near Boston, where he "majored in economics and pastrami studies". He and his uncle crack a lot of jokes.

"We developed as a neighbourhood restaurant,' says Austin, "and Jewish families had been coming here for generations. But now we've been discovered by the world at large and we get everybody."

Katz's fame spread not only through word-of-mouth, but via the movies. It was here that Meg Ryan performed her fake orgasm scene in the 1989 romantic comedy, When Harry Met Sally. An arrow points to the table where Ryan sat with co-star Billy Crystal. Austin says that at least once a week "a group of kids come in to act out the scene".

The deli also served as the venue for Johnny Depp's meeting with his FBI contact in the Mob movie, Donny Brasco. And in the 1977 detective film, Contract on Cherry Street, starring Frank Sinatra, a corpse was found hanging in the meat locker. "But please - that was only fiction," jokes Austin.

He points out that as well as the showbusiness crowd, the deli has fans among the political elite. Four Presidents have eaten here. "Bill Clinton came here," says Austin. "Meant to stay for 10 minutes and was here two hours. Talked to everyone, ate a big meal. About six months later he's back in New York. His motorcade stops outside and a Secret Service man runs in and orders a pastrami sandwich. Then he runs back out to the President's car and gives the sandwich to an outstretched hand."

And yes, there is a large picture on the wall of a smiling Bill and Fred.

It is lunchtime now and the place has filled up. There is a ticketing system which avoids staff having to handle both food and money. On entering, each customer receives a numbered ticket on which all the food and beverages ordered from the different service areas are recorded. The bill is added up and paid to the cashier on leaving. If you lose your ticket, you have to pay a hefty surcharge.

Austin leads me behind the meat counter to watch a Filipino employee expertly carve a hunk of beef.

"He trained as an A & E doctor, you know," Austin remarks. I take this to be another joke. But amazingly, it is true.

On the other side of the counter, customer Alan Meizlik, a 39-year-old executive at a pharmaceuticals company, is eagerly waiting for his sandwich. He wants to know who I am writing my piece for and I say it's for the JC, in England.

"That's fantastic," he replies. "I'm so glad to meet you." Then he adds: "My grandparents survived the camps."

Sitting nearby are middle-aged married couple Robert and Louise Bailey, visiting from Memphis, Tennessee. "But it's not a tourist thing," says Louise. "It's an eating thing. We're eating our way around New York." They had heard good things about Katz's and had finally made it to the deli. They describe themselves as "honorary Jews".

Having finished their meal, they are ready to leave. "Now we're going for a little walk, to digest," Louise says. "Then we're getting a pizza."

It's bleak in the halfway house

Monica Porter — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 10:49:32 +0000

I was in my early 20s when I found out that I was half-Jewish. Until then, as far as I was aware, I was merely a lapsed Catholic who, by the age of 10, had had enough of the confession-and-communion game and heartily embraced the secular life (my Catholic mother didn't seem to mind). Then in adulthood came the stunning discovery of my Jewish blood.

This is how it happened. One day, my father and I were chatting about our antecedents, when he made some throwaway remark that implied that his mother was Jewish. "Was she really?" I asked, intrigued. "And what about your father - was he Jewish, too?" Yes, he was. I reflected on this for a moment. "But that means that you are Jewish… and I am half-Jewish!" My father nodded, smiling a little. I had always known him to be a Protestant but he now explained to me that he had converted to Christianity as a teenager in Budapest in the 1930s.

Like many who had, at some time or another, been subjected to antisemitism, my father understood all too well the advantages of belonging to the social and cultural mainstream. That was what he wanted for me. He had never raised the subject of his Jewish family background because he felt it wasn't relevant to my life and that it could potentially have an adverse effect on it.

Since then, I have heard quite a few similar stories. The eminent journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens has spoken of his amazement at discovering - at the age of 38 - that his mother was Jewish. I believe it was kept from him for much the same reasons. Hitchens has claimed he was thrilled at the news of his Jewish ancestry, and so was I. Suddenly, I became a lot more interesting to myself, more multi-faceted, more colourful, more mysterious.

But over the course of the three decades since then I have had occasion to ponder the peculiar position of the half-Jew. I don't think many fully-leaded Jews really appreciate our predicament. So please, spare us a thought.

Being merely half-Jewish, we miss out on the strong bonds that traditionally exist within Jewish communities, with their supportive networks for helping people through life both socially and professionally. Perhaps we are seen as self-sufficient "free agents" who have no need of such community support. But it is lonely out in the mainstream and we need all the help we can get. After all, it is not as if we can call upon those other useful networks, the ones for WASPs and society toffs, churchy folk and the Establishment. We fall between all the stools.

On the other hand, we are Jewish enough to be able to tell a Jewish joke with the appropriate shrugs and gestures, to enjoy the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, to love Woody Allen's films (except the later, ponderous ones) and to go for the smoked salmon bagel over the bacon sandwich.

More seriously, we are Jewish enough to feel personally the pain of the Holocaust, to be outraged by antisemitism and to be passionate defenders of the state of Israel when it is castigated (ie all the time). I am fed up with having to tell some blinkered, knee-jerk leftie: "No, I am not a Zionist, anti-Palestinian-underdog, fascist stooge of the powerful American Jewish lobby" (and try saying that with a mouthful of bagel).

When Groucho Marx was once informed at a country club that the swimming pool was off-limits to Jews, he famously is said to have replied: "My daughter's only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?"

That sums it up perfectly. To be half-Jewish means to be let in "only up to your knees". It means that you don't get the benefits, but you do take the flak. I am not asking for much. Just a little sympathy, that's all.

Cut the baby-boomer boasts

Monica Porter — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:15:02 +0000

My high-school graduating class of 1970 recently held its 40-year reunion in New York. This has been followed by copious emails between the attendees and other class members who (like me) did not attend but have re-connected via cyberspace. And it's been a typical exercise in baby-boomer myth-making.

My high school in Hartsdale, New York, was one of the first American schools in the 1960s to experiment with mixed-race education. It had been a sedate, middle-class, largely white school when the local education authorities ruled that kids from a nearby, poorer, black district, as well as others from the neighbouring affluent and heavily Jewish town of Scarsdale, should all be bussed into my school. Left-leaning Jewish educators championed this development.

Before long, however, like something out of West Side Story, the school car park was the scene of ugly fights between gangs of black boys and gangs of white boys, armed with chains. Some of the white girls got bullied by their black counterparts (only the tough Italian-American girls knew how to strike back). And the Jewish kids? They edited the school literary magazine, did silk-screen printing and staged plays by Arthur Miller.

Yet genuine inter-racial friendships were formed and our multi-hued, multicultural graduating class would have made civil rights proponent Bobby Kennedy proud. The experiment was deemed a success. And the recent reunion seemed to attest to that - the 70-odd erstwhile classmates in attendance came from all the various backgrounds and, by all accounts, the event was one big multi-racial love-in.

The euphoric emails that followed were full of typically self-congratulatory baby-boomer talk. Weren't we amazing back in the Sixties? We with our bold new counter-culture, our social revolution, our happy-clappy Woodstock and our love beads. Man, we changed the world!

Except that we didn't. None of my old classmates could, or would, confront the glaring truth. By as early as 1985, when I made a return visit to the school, there were few white pupils left. It was almost wholly black and Hispanic. The Jewish and other white middle-class families simply put their kids into private schools or moved away. Today, only eight per cent of the school's pupils are white and academic standards have dropped sharply. Ultimately, this high-minded 1960s experiment failed because, given a choice, most people will reject being guinea pigs. The nirvana of harmonious integration is still, sadly, a long way off. In fact, American schools across the country have been re-segregating in recent times.

Instead of crowing about how we invented equality and social conscience maybe my "radical" generation should view our self-declared mission to make the world a better place as a work-in-progress. Admittedly, this will not be easy while so many of us get dewy-eyed at the strains of John Lennon's druggy, disingenuous All You Need is Love. So we can start by replacing the superannuated callow idealism of our youth with the experience-led pragmatism of our mature years - a prerequisite to doing any lasting good.

Meanwhile, I have set the cat among the pigeons with my email to the Class of '70, pointing out the above. It got a cool reception and was ignored by the sole teacher (Jewish, liberal) who'd attended the reunion and described her glowing recollections of our "proud history" and "great experiment" - omitting to mention that it ultimately failed. And I received a hostile email back from the ex-classmate who, for no reason, once gave me an almighty slap on the school steps. I reminded her of that long-ago incident. She had forgotten it but told me that I'd probably deserved the slap and should "stay in England and have a rotten life".

All you need is love, eh?

Names are there to be changed

Monica Porter — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:17:47 +0100

I have just been reading the most recent autobiography of nonagenarian movie star Kirk Douglas (his fourth). The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Douglas started life with the name Issur Danielovitch. It was Americanised for the sake of his film career.

In his book, Douglas remarks that sometimes he still mourns the passing of Issur, the erstwhile identity he was forced to "kill off". Particularly since the major stroke he suffered in 1996, which caused him to re-evaluate his life and embrace Judaism.

This is a sentiment with which those French Jews now fighting for the right to regain their old names would sympathise. As reported in the JC, a group of French Jews whose parents had earlier changed their "foreign-sounding" names for fear of antisemitism, have been battling with the government for the right to reclaim them.

They regard their original Jewish names as an integral part of their family history. But, under French law, you are not allowed to revert to a former name. Nothing daunted, these Jews are taking on the government.

Kirk (or Issur) observes that, with changing times, later generations of Hollywood actors were not compelled to alter Jewish-sounding names. This is undeniably true. What's more, nowadays there even seems to be a sort of Jewish-chic in the movie world, whereby a Jewish name actually enhances a star's aura of "cool". Think of Jeff Goldblum, David Schwimmer, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jerry Seinfeld, Rachel Weisz and Alicia Silverstone.

The business of changing Jewish names to non-Jewish ones has been a running theme throughout my life. In Budapest in the 1930s, my Jewish grandfather and my father (then aged 10) changed their surname from the identifiably Jewish "Fischer" to its Hungarian version, "Halasz". There was an atmosphere in Hungary then of increasing antisemitism, and many Jews became "Hungarianised" during that period.

Fast forward to the 1970s, when, at the tender age of 22, I married a fellow called Robin Porter. Sounds a pukka Englishman, right? In fact, his Polish-Jewish grandfather's name of Potaszevicz was changed -in the blink of an eye - to Porter, at Liverpool docks, by one of those perpetually flummoxed immigration officials incapable of spelling or pronouncing any foreign name at all. It was the early 1900s and Grandpa, as you have probably guessed, was a refugee from the pogroms.

Alas, my marriage to Mr Porter didn't stand the test of time - although, as you can see, I've no objection to the continued use of his user-friendly surname.

Move ahead another decade and my partner is the equally English-sounding Nick Winton - the son of Kindertransport founder Sir Nicholas Winton. Occasionally someone asks Nick whether he's related to the TV presenter Dale Winton, which always makes me laugh. The name Winton was plucked at random out of a London phone book in 1938. The German-Jewish family's original name was Wertheim, but in the run-up to the Second World War, with "enemy aliens" being rounded up all over Britain, it was an undesirable moniker to have. So they anglicised it, while keeping the initial "W" as a nod to the family's origins.

Take another famous actor, Tony Curtis -born Bernard Schwartz, the son of an émigré Hungarian Jewish tailor. Once, in the 1950s, Tony attended a big Hollywood bash and brought his father along. Spotting the MGM mogul Sam Goldwyn (formerly Schmuel Gelbfisz), the actor went up to him and said: "Mr Goldwyn, I'd like you to meet my father, Emanuel Schwartz". Whereupon Goldwyn smiled and enquired of Tony's dad: "Why did you change your name, Mr Schwartz? Curtis is such a nice name". (This story might be apocryphal, but with the "verbally eccentric" Goldwyn, you never know.)

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as the Bard observed. And I agree. Throughout history people have changed their names to suit their purposes. So what? I have no less feeling for my family roots as a Porter than I would as a Halasz… or a Fischer. And you don't need a ""Jewish" name to lead a good Jewish life.

Perhaps those feisty French Jews should save their ammunition for the more crucial battles which face us.

Review: Young Hitler

Monica Porter — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:11:37 +0100

By Claus Hant
Quartet, £25

German scriptwriter Claus Hant's "non-fiction novel", is an unusual book. First comes a 300-page fictionalised chronicle of how an itinerant would-be artist and sociopath rose to head up the nascent Nazi Party in 1920 and set himself on course to becoming the Führer, via the crucible of the First World War. This is followed by 150 pages of notes detailing the evidence on which the novel is based.

So, in effect, it is two books, involving much flipping back and forth.

The novel's narrator, Martin, is Hitler's "best friend", who knew him from their schooldays in Austria, throughout Hitler's early struggles in Vienna and Munich, his time as a soldier in the First World War, and into Germany's post-war revolutionary turmoil.

Hant explains that Martin (who calls Hitler by the nickname Dolferl) is a composite of four of Hitler's real-life friends. Although often shocked by the fanatical and egocentric Dolferl, Martin remains fatally under his spell, which makes him an obvious metaphor for the German people as a whole.

Hant suggests that the 1918 mustard gas attack that caused Hitler's temporary blindness also triggered a psychosis for which he received psychiatric treatment at a remote hospital for "war neurotics". It seems his transformation from mere windbag to messianic leader stemmed from this episode, during which his "divine mission" was revealed to him.

When Hitler came to power, the relevant medical records disappeared, his psychiatrist "committed suicide" after a visit from the Gestapo, and the hospital was razed to the ground.

According to Young Hitler, the Nazi Party emerged from the Thule Society, a secret brotherhood of wealthy occultists obsessed with Teutonic mythology. Their bankrolling of Hitler propelled him to prominence but he later airbrushed them out of his past so as not to be associated with such crackpots. You couldn't make it up (as Mr Hant might agree).

A Holocaust survivor hierarchy? How absurd

Monica Porter — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:22:30 +0100

After all that I have read, researched and written about the Holocaust over the past four decades, I considered myself fairly au fait with the subject. I have known a number of survivors, as well as rescuers - starting with my own mother, the Hungarian singer Vali Racz, a Righteous Among the Nations. But I guess there is always something new to learn, and recently I was able to add to my general knowledge of the Holocaust a little-known - and somewhat disturbing - aspect of it.

I was attending a function at the offices of the Board of Deputies, and got into a long conversation with two men who belong to the Child Survivors' Association of Great Britain - part of the broader World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust. The British group is about 100-strong and based throughout the UK. Its members are people who, as young children, experienced Nazi persecution. Some came here on Kindertransports, but most arrived after surviving in ghettos, in hiding or in concentration camps.

One of the men I talked to was originally from Holland and had been hidden by a gentile family in Amsterdam. Even as a small boy, he understood the peril he was in and lived every day with the fear of being discovered, or betrayed.

The other man was an inmate in Belsen between the ages of four and five. Although he, too, was Dutch and had been living in Holland, his mother was British-born and had family in the UK. As a result, he and his mother were imprisoned in a special section of the camp reserved for inmates with Allied connections, who might be useful for prisoner exchanges, so they were treated a little better. He and his mother survived. His father, with no Allied connections, perished.

The members of their association meet regularly to share their experiences and feelings; to some degree they are all psychologically damaged by their past. The Belsen man, for example, said his lifelong difficulty with relating to people who "couldn't possibly comprehend" his past made him unemployable. He felt he had no choice but to start his own business… a successful one, as it turned out.

Then they told me something I found truly shocking: as child survivors they feel less aggrieved by the indifference of non-Jews or even instances of outright antisemitism, than by the way that other - adult - Holocaust survivors callously dismiss their sufferings as "inferior" to their own. In other words, as the men explained, there exists a pecking order of Holocaust suffering and child survivors are deemed to be at the bottom.

This is as absurd as it is sad. Should there not be total solidarity - rather than a sense of competition - among all those who managed by great good fortune or a miracle or a twist of fate to survive the Nazi extermination machine? Of course some starved more than others. Some witnessed more horror, experienced more ill-treatment, lost more family members. But whatever the details of their survival stories, they are bound together by a powerful factor which supersedes their differences:

They and their descendants are living testimony to the failure of the Nazi project. And it is vitally important to avoid rivalry and seek empathy.

Do mention the war (if you're German, that is)

Monica Porter — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:28:58 +0100

Who can forget the hilarious Fawlty Towers episode from 1975, in which Basil goads his German hotel guests about the war with his mocking jokes and goose-stepping, until they are reduced to despair? Basil's line, "don't mention the war", has become a sardonic catchphrase in our language, precisely because we do mention the war rather a lot, to the dismay of the Germans.

They are especially un-amused by the antics of our tabloids. There was the notorious Achtung! Surrender headline in the Daily Mirror the day before England played Germany in a semi-final of the Euro '96 football championships. (The Sun went with Let's Blitz Fritz.) And earlier this year the Daily Star ran a piece entitled Return of Ze Blackshirts, referring to Germany's new World Cup football strip, which is black. The article was illustrated with a photo of the German captain Michael Ballack beside a mugshot of Hitler. Crass indeed.

But here's the curious thing. If it appears that we are still obsessed by the war, the Germans might be even more so. My (Hungarian) father lives in Munich, so I go to the city fairly often. While visiting last month, I was interested to see that they are about to construct a vast new documentation and education centre to house the documents relating to the Third Reich.

The intention is to aid historical research and "embed memories of the Nazi era topographically into the city", to better understand Munich's role as the cradle of Nazism.

Most aptly, the centre is being built on the site of the Brown House, the one-time national headquarters of the Nazi Party, destroyed by Allied bombs in 1945. It has been an empty lot ever since the rubble was cleared away.

This new project fits right in with the Germans' constant spotlight on their warmongering Nazi past. Their television channels are full of it. This was our TV viewing on my recent visit: one evening we saw a documentary about Edward VIII's relationship with Hitler in the 1930s; the following evening we saw a programme comparing the Soviet medical experiments carried out on American POWs during the Korean War with Mengele's experiments on inmates at Auschwitz; the evening after that, there was a film about the Mossad operation to capture Eichmann. And, believe me, this is typical fare.

There is a major difference, of course, between the German obsession and ours. In a penitent country which has criminalised Holocaust denial and the trade in Nazi memorabilia, they want to make sure everybody knows about and remembers the evils of Nazism. They are proclaiming before the world that they have changed, and learned.

We want people to know and remember, too, but as victors of the war we enjoy revelling in our triumph, through our feature films, TV shows, books --- and cocky tabloid newspapers. Even Prince Harry thought it a jolly jape to don a Nazi costume for a fancy dress party.

Every so often, a German government spokesman publicly expresses his consternation over our tasteless jokes and persistent gloating. Like Basil Fawlty, we can be so unkind. But we need not worry too much about mentioning the war, for however often we do so, the Germans will have got there first.

Do not relegate Stalinist tyranny

Monica Porter — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:55:01 +0000

At an event hosted last week by the Holocaust Educational Trust, the keynote speaker was Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem. This dedicated, passionate Nazi-hunter delivered a riveting talk explaining how he tracks down ageing, unrepentant Nazis and brings them to book. So far, so admirable.

Then Dr Zuroff went off on a tangent. He urged us all to combat current moves in Europe to create a single day of commemoration for the victims of both Nazism and communism. He declared that the two tyrannies were not comparable. But I would suggest that, had he been born in one of the post-war communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe with his family experiencing first-hand the horrors of it all (instead of being a born-and-bred New Yorker), he might take a somewhat different view.

Zuroff further argued that equating Stalinism with Nazism — considering that many Jews were involved in implementing Stalinist dictatorships in Eastern Europe — implied that Jews have been not only the victims of evil, but its perpetrators, too, a notion he rejected. Yet, however unpalatable this may be, the point surely is that it is true.

Take Hungary, for example. For a decade after the Second World War, it was run by the bloodthirsty Matyas Rakosi, and we cannot pretend he wasn’t a Jew (albeit not a practising one). Of course, by then Hungary had already suffered under the short-lived Red Terror regime of 1919, installed by Bela Kun, another secular Jew. Antisemitism persists in those countries because people have long memories and, sadly, don’t always recognise that communist tormentors such Rakosi and Kun, along with many of their henchmen, were Muscovites first and Jews a very distant second.

My mother’s name is engraved on the Honour Wall at Yad Vashem for rescuing several Jewish friends in Budapest during the Nazi occupation. She risked her life for them, was ultimately arrested and very nearly killed by the Gestapo. Yet after the siege of Budapest, when the Germans had been routed and the Red Army installed, a group of newly empowered Jewish partisans, hungry for revenge, wrongly accused my mother of collaboration. It was a Russian colonel who narrowly prevented them from executing her.

Surely, facts like these bring home the great truth that all people are capable of both good and evil — not to mention appalling misjudgment. I believe that Jews are an outstandingly gifted people, who make invaluable contributions to any society lucky enough to have them. But the kind of double standard espoused by Dr Zuroff does the Jewish community no favours.

I had a brief chat with him after his lecture, although he did most of the talking (he’s a bit of a bulldozer, doubtless a useful trait for Nazi-hunting). He reiterated his view that the Nazi genocide was in a different class to killing millions in the name of communism because, while the Nazis targeted all Jews, whoever they were, “with the communists, you could choose to work with them”.

Oh, really? Virtually the entire Ukrainian peasantry was annihilated in Stalin’s artificially created famine of 1932-33 (an act often described as genocide), in which an estimated seven million people starved to death in the USSR. Those victims were not given the choice of working with the communist regime. And what of the countless fervently loyal communists who were tortured into signing false confessions and executed, as part of the depraved Communist Party agenda? No, working with (and for) the comrades did not necessarily save you.

The Holocaust was indeed unique. So, in its way, was communist tyranny. But murder is murder, whichever wicked beliefs are used to justify it. Ultimately, whether you are tortured to death by the Gestapo or the KGB, whether you die of starvation and disease in a Nazi concentration camp or in the Gulag, the end result is the same. Let us stop comparing and contrasting the crimes of the 20th century; let’s just apply their lessons to the 21st.