You'd have to have a heart of stone not to understand why her defence of the Warsaw Ghetto graffiti is hurtful, writes Rosa Doherty
September 3, 2019 13:21
Ash Sarkar, a prominent leftwing journalist, has said it is just “the usual suspects” who are angry she is appearing as an expert on a BBC programme about the rise of the Nazis – given she defended someone who wrote “Free Palestine” on the wall of the Warsaw Ghetto.
I am not a usual suspect. Or at least I don’t think I am. I’m not sure what one is. I am Jewish, and I grew up in a left-wing family that taught me the values of socialism which made a deep impact on me.
To my knowledge, we didn’t lose immediate members of my family to the Nazis. My grandparents and their parents were settled in Britain. We had no stories of escapes, no tales about generations wiped out, just a funny tale about how Grandpa Sam was shot in the bum fighting the Germans.
I knew it could have always been worse for my family. And nothing brought that home to me than my first visit to Auschwitz. I was paralysed by the pictures on the wall, a baby Rosa, a Pozner, reminders that at another time, in another life, that could have been me.
It is why you’d have to have a heart of stone not to understand the horror that many have expressed at Ms Sarkar’s appearance on that programme.
For some reason the BBC asked her, a senior editor at Novara Media, to be part of its three-part documentary, Rise of the Nazis.
She says she was asked because she knows about Ernst Thälmann, Stalinism and the red-brown alliance. I’m sure she does.
But last year she defended two people who sprayed “free Gaza and Palestine, liberate all ghettos” on one of the last remaining pieces of the Warsaw Ghetto wall.
Jews, many of whom had family among the 400,000 imprisoned there and deported to mass-killing centres, expressed their revulsion.
I can only imagine how devastating it would be to think that someone had desecrated it If I had lost family there.
As many who did said, it is “an open grave for our families.”
Call me naïve but I think you can make a political point about the plight of Gazans without desecrating the place where many Jews under the Nazis spent their last days.
If you defend the graffiti, ask yourself this: What do people who were murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto before the state of Israel was founded have to do with Israel?
Because if the answer is ‘they are Jewish’, you and I are going to have to part company.
I don’t know why Ms Sarkar and others on the left can’t concede anything on this. I don’t have to agree with people’s politics to feel empathy for their pain, nor to recognise what happened was genuinely hurtful.
Watching the left’s most vocal representatives discuss antisemitism has left me shocked at how the Jewish community as a whole is consistently stripped of its humanity by people who think of themselves as progressive.
It is worth remembering how small we are - 0.5 per cent of Britain's population – a community that has always until recently kept its head down.
We are using our voice to say 'enough' only now, after years of growing fear and anxiety, which has grown deeper with each mistake, each dismissal of our experience.
For any other community, the left would make space for that fear, that hurt, that pain, it would be the left that heard us first and held us with compassion.
Instead Ms Sarkar has reacted to the concern by suggesting that people are upset because of her “support for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.”
She said people were saying that “should disqualify me from talking about the Communist Party of Germany.”
No one who guides themselves by left wing principles should be that disingenuous.
Most people’s concern is simply this - how can there be, as part of a programme about the steps that led to the murder of six million of us, the opinions of someone who defended the desecration of our graves?
The Jewish community’s stories cannot afford to be told by people who show - all of us - anything less than respect.
Politics shouldn’t compel you to ignore that.
