A few Sundays ago I was leafing through the newspapers, when I came across an interview with Marceline Loridan-Ivens, a survivor of Birkenau.
The occasion of the interview was the English publication of her memoir, “But You Did Not Come Back.” Her memories are as harrowing as you’d expect, but it wasn’t her description of the camp which pulled me up short; at least, not only her memories are disturbing.
The interview describes how Marceline was listening to the radio news recently, as it covered a demonstration in Paris. And that she heard voices shouting “Mort aux Juifs.” Death to Jews.
In Paris. In the twenty-first century.
So it is understandable that she said to her interviewer: “We should not pretend that the world has changed.”
What makes Marceline’s account – all accounts – of the Holocaust so harrowing, yet necessary, is the multi-fold aspect of the horror she describes.
First, the horror that it happened at all.
Second, that some of the views which first led to genocide are still here, among us, in our “modern”, “secular”, societies.
As figures from the Community Securities Trust show, that’s not a question which Britain can ignore. The CST recorded 473 antisemitic incidents in Britain in the first half of 2015.
Antisemitism requires certain conditions to flourish; chief amongst those conditions is the requirement for people who aren’t Jewish to look the other way. The soil of hatred is fertilised by indifference to wickedness.
As William Wilberforce said: “You can choose to turn away, but you cannot choose to say you did not know”. That’s why the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day, Don’t Stand By, is so fitting.
Thanks to the CST, which our Government fully supports, and the work of the Holocaust Memorial Trust (at whose annual commemoration I was privileged to speak, alongside the Chief Rabbi) no-one in Britain can choose to say “we do not know.”
And once we know, we must act.
At the Government level, we are solid in our commitment to help with security for Jewish faith schools, synagogues and other communal buildings.
We will continue to work with police to tackle issues such as the flag-flying for proscribed organisations. And we support the commitment of the CPS to crack down on online antisemitic abuse, and to track the handling of all antisemitic crimes and prosecutions.
And there is always hope. Hope is painful because it implies risk, but there is goodness in the universe; remember Lassani Bathily, the Muslim policeman who helped the shoppers in the Kosher supermarket in Paris, even as it was under attack.
On a smaller scale, a friend of mine offers a useful example. He won’t pass by any “Boycott Israel” demo in his home town without challenging the demonstrators on their motives.
“Leave it,” pleads his partner, worried about the fuss and the stares. “No,” he replies.
“It means something that they only ever attack Israel, the Jewish and democratic state”.
He said to me: “If we turn the other way, ignore these people and carry on shopping, isn’t it obvious where it will end up?”
We cannot stand by and ignore prejudices, whether based on ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality or any other part of our identity. Otherwise, it ends up with a Holocaust survivor, sitting alone in her Paris flat, listening to French people – her fellow citizens – calling for her death.
At least: that’s where it ends up for now. We must choose to look, and choose to know, and choose to fight antisemitism wherever and however it is manifest. The British Government will be on your side.
Greg Clark is Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government
