The Herald, UK
Jan 31 2004
Would we have behaved better?
IAN BELL January 31 2005
The TV Week
It was not a big job for methodical British bobbies. Just 16 names to
be registered; 16 faces to be photographed; 16 cards to be filed.
Even in the sleepy Channel Islands, where the police had few enough
resources, the task was not difficult. It was easier still to mark
the registration cards with the letter J, in bold red ink. When the
time came to tell three women refugees that they must report for
deportation, even a mere desk sergeant could convey the instruction
that luggage must be no heavier than the victims could carry.
Despite Nazi occupation, Guernsey coppers had no idea, in the spring
of 1942, that they were sending people to be exterminated. As one old
woman recalled during Auschwitz: the Nazis and the “Final Solution”
(BBC2, Tuesday): “Things like that didn’t happen in England”. But the
authorities on the islands, like their counterparts in France,
Holland and elsewhere, knew perfectly well that their conquerors were
afflicted by an irrational hatred of die Juden, the Jews. No-one
guessed death camps, but they must have suspected something terrible.
Given the incomprehensible scale of the Holocaust, the culpability of
the Channel Islands counts as peripheral. Occupied France, for one,
with no shortage of anti-Semites of its own, had a far greater weight
on its conscience. The patriotic bureaucrat who offered to round up
foreign Jews if French Jews might be reprieved was a prime example of
a widespread delusion: even as the cattle cars pulled away, he
thought it possible to negotiate with a bacillus.
Yet as Holocaust Memorial Day came and went last week, and with it
the 60th anniversary of what we describe, inanely, as the
“liberation” of Auschwitz, those events in Guernsey were prompting a
thought: would Britain, invaded, really have behaved better than
France or Hungary or Romania or Belgium in defence of Jews, or Roma,
prisoners of war, homosexuals, or the mentally infirm? Watching the
documentaries describing how the contagion spread, you can only doubt
it.
The thought leads, in any case, to a question: how do you commemorate
what the Jews call Shoah, the burning to ashes, the habit of
genocide? By having the Queen and Tony Blair turn up at Westminster
Hall (Holocaust Memorial Day, BBC2, Thursday) amid the largest
gathering ever seen of British survivors? By attempting to tell one
story, as in Grandchild of the Holocaust (BBC1, Wednesday), in the
hope that one might stand for many? Or do you remind yourself that
the species had acquired a taste for slaughtering its own long before
the Nazis arrived – Hitler took the killing of 1.5 million Armenians
by the Turks in 1915 almost as an inspiration – and has yet to lose
the appetite?
Some still call on God to show His face. Others might light a candle.
Amid all this, watching television documentaries seems, somehow, like
a wasted effort. But then you recall that, if opinion polls are
believable, generations are growing up who have no idea what
Auschwitz was, is, or might mean. Do you allow them history’s
amnesia, the sleep against which the Armenian Diaspora and the
Rwandan survivors struggle? Or do you try again to educate, to
remember?
Here, I suspect, is the heart of this darkness. In Grandchild of the
Holocaust 13-year-old Adrian, a bright and articulate boy, travelled
to Poland with his grandmother, Rene. For 50 years she had kept her
silence over Auschwitz and Belsen, the circles of hell she had
survived. Now she was ready to speak, to remember the girl she had
been, and the young woman who had married one of the Jewish soldiers
of the British Army, a liberator, after he had seen the camps. Rene
did not lack eloquence; she was not short of courage. Yet all these
years later it suddenly mattered profoundly to her that her grandson
should understand what his people had experienced.
You felt for this talkative, intelligent boy who loved his
grandmother. He wanted desperately to penetrate the mystery, to
comprehend his own history and identity. But Adrian’s problem was our
problem, was Rene’s problem, was the problem faced by Michel Muller,
now an old man but once a little boy torn from his doomed mother by
ordinary French policemen. As Michel said in Auschwitz: the Nazis and
the “Final Solution”: “That French people should do that is still
beyond me.” So how could young Adrian hope to understand something
that even his grandmother could not really explain? Incomprehension
is, I suspect, at the heart of the reverence expressed for the
Holocaust and its victims. Even those who helped to perpetrate the
crimes cannot explain them, or explain how or why the disease of
genocide arose.
It renders commemoration both puzzling and necessary. Auschwitz: the
Nazis and the “Final Solution” contained an interview with one Oskar
Groning, once a mere SS private who had asked for a transfer to the
front-lines rather than continue to work in the camp. His request was
refused and the bespectacled soldier had been obliged to assist in
the “processing” of more than 4000 French children, parted from their
parents.
Herr Groning offered the usual excuses. We believed, he said, that
there was “a great conspiracy of the Jews against us”. But children?
an incredulous, unseen interviewer asked, auf Deutsch. What possible
threat could they have posed?
Said Groning of die kinder, years after the destruction of his
country and his creed, speaking in the remembered present tense:
“They’re not the enemy at the moment. The enemy is the blood inside
them.” Not for the first time, one of those courtly, grey-haired old
men with a memory full of holes put a voice in your head. It said:
what does that mean?
One strand to emerge from all the recent documentaries struggling to
find meaning involves a simple, indisputable truth: even when they
were masters of Europe, revelling in their hatred, the Nazis went to
extraordinary lengths to conceal their activities. It was as though
they knew that one day they would be called to account. Everything to
do with the death camps was a secret. Why so furtive when you
proclaim your cause to be noble? Yet though a photographic record
exists of Heinrich Himmler touring Auschwitz – and promoting the
kommandant as a reward for his efforts – no pictures of Hitler’s man
witnessing the gas chambers at work were allowed.
It amounted to more than perversity. It was hatred that had become
existential. Prisoner of Paradise (BBC4, Monday) was an astonishing
record of the way in which the Nazis forced Kurt Gerron, the
acclaimed Weimar director and actor, to use his film-making skills to
create elaborate propaganda.
Gerron’s talent made the hell-hole of the Theresienstadt camp seem
like a cultural oasis, full of choirs and happy craftsmen with
cheerful, well-dressed children, in a bizarre movie that was never
put into circulation. For thanks, he was placed on one of the last
trains to Auschwitz as the war drew to a close.
Why the obsession with deceit? Perhaps for the same reason the Nazis
began to use gas: even the psychopaths of the SS could not stomach
the consequences of their own creed, the killing, face to face, of
six million. The lie was too much even for them to bear.