It has been said often enough that Holocaust denial takes many forms, from the brute mathematics of those who jotted down the dimensions of Auschwitz to prove that it was no bigger than Butlin’s, and probably more fun, to historians who claim to have found evidence that Jews had done it to themselves to justify invading Palestine. Of all forms of denialism, the worst minimises the slaughter by arguing that Jews were always just Nazis in waiting anyway, thereby forfeiting in advance the world’s pity, first by showing none themselves, and then by claiming what we might call “Shoah exemption”.
I have yet to meet a Jew in real life – as opposed to on a panel or at a literary festival – who believes that what was done to his grandparents in Bergen-Belsen gives him the right to murder children in Gaza, but this passes as psychology in some quarters, especially where Jews of a certain over-educated sort get together and squirm whenever Jews without degrees and from the wrong side of the tracks make a dog’s dinner of defending Israel.
There has always been a reluctance to embrace Zionism among professorial Jews, as much for social reasons as political ones. It is part of the parochialism you are eager to put behind you when you leave Hendon for Oxford, and one of the reasons you march alongside people who don’t know where Hendon is.
I am not a marcher myself. I don’t care for their mood-music. But I have occasionally forgotten to be cautious – or tactful, if you prefer – and allowed myself to stray too close to what’s left of a march late on a Shabbes afternoon. “How dare you?” I have muttered under my breath at the straggling churchy people wrapped in Palestinian scarves who don’t want to go home. “How dare you, as members of a society or practitioners of a faith that made Jews pariahs for two thousand years, sit in judgment yet again in a matter of which, frankly, given what you chant, you know nothing?”
Towards those who have an unborrowed grievance I feel differently. It wasn’t centuries of Arab contempt for Jews that led ineluctably to the camps. But I would like them to know more of what it is they accuse Jews of exploiting, if only to understand the nature of Jewish apprehension. It appears at times as though Israel’s neighbours view the Holocaust as just another of the ways Jews have stolen a march on them, one more Jewish advantage, akin to controlling the media and running Hollywood. Call it Holocaust Covetousness.
My brothers, I want to say to them, believe me, you wouldn’t want it. Go and see A Real Pain if you doubt my words. Played in a low key, it is not a film about the horrors of the Holocaust or any advantage Jews have tried to wrest from it. Without fanfare or self-pity, it tells of the slow-burn of depletion and depression that endures all these years later.
One way or another, the lesson of the last 15 months is that the greatest calamity to have befallen a people – to have befallen the Jews, anyway – remains unknown or disbelieved, no matter how often we recount it or how many schlock Holocaust novels people read. The Chartered Accountant of Auschwitz might while away a tedious hour, but it hasn’t brought knowledge or enlightenment.
The true story cannot be told often enough – not only as history of terrible events we are duty bound to commemorate, but as an honest reckoning with the aftermath. And we Jews have to stop being apologetic about repeating it.
