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    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.
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