Haunted by the Holocaust, Haunted by Hope

This month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. Holocaust Memorial Day is always a solemn occasion to make us stop and think. This year, perhaps, especially.

I was born a mere five years later. My father was a Londoner and my mother was from Düsseldorf in the German Rhineland, the second child of assimilated middle-class Jewish parents. She had been sent to England as a teenager in 1937 when the fate of Jews in Nazi Germany had become clear. She became a nurse and married my father after the war. The year I was born, her mother, my grandmother, followed her and settled in this country. She and my grandfather had fled for safety to the Netherlands after the outbreak of war. With the German occupation they were hidden underground and looked after by a pair of Dutch Christian women. My grandfather died shortly after liberation, but my grandmother, "Omummy", lived to a great age, it was said till she was 95 though no-one was quite sure.

In my early childhood we spoke German at home as well as English. I'm told my German had a pronounced Rhineland-Westphalia accent, for Omummy was from Cologne. She sang Schubert Lieder to me, and I began to pick out some of his simpler songs on the piano. Heidenröslein was one of them - a sweet little setting of a Goethe poem about unrequited love, how a beautiful flower, a rose, draws the blood of her admiring lover. Erlkönig was another, beyond my capacity of course to make sense of the furious piano part except the hammering octaves that picture a father's desperate ride as he tries to save his child from a delirious encounter with the dreaded "Elf-King". Goethe again.

That Romantic fusion of love, pain and death. I knew it in music before I understood that it was part of my own family history. Sensibly, my parents did not trouble us young children with the traumas of the recent past. My eyes began to be opened when I went to school in 1955. At first, when my mother came to collect me at the school gate, we would speak easily in both German and English. But soon, very soon indeed, I sensed that it wouldn’t do in postwar London to speak German in public. I don’t think anything was ever said, but I distinctly felt as children do, an atmosphere, odd looks, a coolness in the air. I dropped speaking German like a stone. And although I always understood it when my mother and grandmother were talking to each other, I only ever responded in English. Later on I was seduced by classical culture and Romance languages, and heartily wished that my pedigree had been part-French rather than part-German.

It was Christianity that first awoke the sense that my family origins mattered. As a chorister I would sing the Psalms and hear the scriptures read and preached about. As a teenager in the school Christian Union, I immersed myself in the Bible, learned to love it, and found myself amazed that for so long I had been ignorant of this semitic world in which Hebrew monotheism had been forged and in which Christianity had burst upon the world and taken shape. And into which I myself had been born! This story was mine! That moment of recognition came with the force of a real and life-changing disclosure. My Jewish identity (a legal fact in Rabbinic law, since my mother was Jewish) had become not just a matter of historical origin but of lived experience that made a difference to who and what I was as a person.

I began to read about the rise of the Nazis, the growth of antisemitism, the death camps. It was shocking to learn that members of my grandmother’s family, my family, had been deported to Auschwitz. It dawned on me that my grandmother and mother were extremely lucky to be alive, for given the survival rate of Jewish people brought up in Hitler’s Germany, they would have been expected to perish. Were it not for my grandparents’ foresight and the welcome given to German-Jewish refugees by the British government, I would not be here myself. Later I began to understand the ordeals of Holocaust survivors, not only during the Nazi era but since. And my own conflicts and struggles as a “second generation” survivor. As with all forms of cruelty and abuse, the effects are lifelong. You are always a survivor, even in the best and happiest of times.

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Which is why Holocaust Memorial Day is a time when I want to revisit the past and try to understand. “Never again” is a fine aspiration, and an important one. But post-war history shows that even the so-called civilised world is far from owning it. The United Nations Convention of 1948 defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such”. Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and Darfur are just a few of the names that haunt us from well-remembered decades when we saw the images on TV and in our newspapers and were powerless to do anything other than support victims in the aftermath of massacres of innocents. 

I used the phrase haunt us deliberately. I’m aware that as I grow older, I am more and more haunted by the genocide that is imprinted on my own family memory. It’s not my direct experience, thank God. But it feels as though it has become part of my personal take on things. It has given me a world view that is inevitably coloured by dark memories that function “as if” they were my own. I’m struggling to put this into words, to describe why its legacy in me is a profound pessimism about the ability, to say nothing of the collective will of humanity to save itself from instincts and drives that, unchecked, will inevitably destroy us. I recently read a vivid account of a field surgeon who had worked in theatres of conflict such as the Congo and Syria. The capacity in human beings to be cruel seems beyond belief. But it is real and it is terrifying. You only have to look at the images of photographer Don McCullin to see that. It doesn’t take much to inculcate a sense of both helplessness and hopelessness.

So haunted as I am, do I contemplate Holocaust Memorial Day with despair? It would be easy to be gloomy about this year’s seventy-fifth anniversary falling just four days before Brexit Day. The European Union stands as a project fundamentally designed after the last war to safeguard peace in a continent that had been bitterly fought over for centuries. “Never again!” What sense does it make in an increasingly fraught global environment to walk away from such a collaboration of nations and peoples? That remains my question, and I shall always believe, I think, that this is the biggest historical mistake my country has made in my entire lifetime.

Nevertheless, I must not give in to despair. By God’s grace I will not give in to it. Keeping hope alive seems to me to be one of the greatest gifts we human beings can offer one another as so many stories from the death camps testify. People often say to us God-botherers, “You’re so lucky to have faith. I wish I did”. The implication is that we expect God somehow to intervene, deliver us from times of trial, make things all right again. I tried to explain in my last blog why I don’t believe that any more. Religion can’t resort to magical thinking. Faith must “come of age”. There is no deus ex machina to rescue us from war, genocide, natural disaster or the climate emergency.

But I do believe that faith has the capacity to inspire and energise us to bring about personal transformation that makes a difference in the places in which we live and struggle and suffer, the worlds where we find ourselves to be desperate and afraid. At least, this is what I found when I turned to Christianity as a teenager and recognised myself as a child of Abraham. As I approach my eighth decade, that faith continues to sustain me. It binds me to people in every place who stand for truth against the lie. It affirms my solidarity with those across the world who care about justice, reconciliation and the healing of memories. It strengthens my will to stand alongside victims, not least in my own community who have found themselves at the receiving end of racism, sexual abuse, homophobic attacks and other hate crimes. And of course the antisemitism whose revival holds real and sinister echoes of Europe in the 1930s and the horrors it led to.

When you grow old, you’re increasingly aware that your journey is leading you towards an unknown region. Like Abraham, indeed, in all his perplexity, in all that he did not, could not, know. In him, says Genesis, all the world will find blessing. Does blessing happen as we begin to shed self-interest, travel more lightly, learn to look beyond ourselves? Is that how tragedy begins to purify our vision and despair is turned round? Is that how hope begins to be born? Is that how our longing for a better future for humanity begins to be shaped and to lead to action that could change the world?

I won’t answer these questions in my lifetime. But the story of Abraham and yes!, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz point the way, offer a glimpse of what is life-affirming and good, reassure me that there is no shadow so dark that it cannot be penetrated by Light and Love. These are the gifts of the Christ Child that we celebrate in this season of Epiphany. They are life-giving, joyous and empowering. And that means I'm not only haunted by the Holocaust. I'm just as haunted by hope. Because it will not let me go.

Reunion: in memory of the Holocaust

This Friday, 27 January, is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. We now observe it as Holocaust Memorial Day.

I've read scores of books about the Nazi era. It's inevitable when it's part of my own story, for my mother and her parents were Holocaust survivors. (I've preached and blogged about this frequently - those links are just two among many). But there is one book that means as much to me as all the rest put together. It's a slim volume by Fred Uhlman called Reunion. I'm writing about it now in case what I say interests you enough to get hold of it in time to read it this week.

"He came into my life in February 1932 and never left it again. More than a quarter of a century has passed since then...(but) I can remember the day and the hour when I first set eyes on this boy who was to be the source of my greatest happiness and of my greatest despair." It's an arresting opening. The boy in question is the aristocratic Konradin von Hohenfels. He arrives as a new boy in Hans's class at high school (Gymnasium) and at once attracts attention for his fine looks and noble bearing. They become firm friends. Here is the companion Hans has yearned all his life to meet, for whom he might lay down his life.

Who doesn't remember the high ideals, the pain both sharp and sweet, the heartfelt longings of adolescent friendship? Uhlman captures them to perfection in the span of a few lines (for this book is little more than a short story, a novella that's nowhere near full novel length). So much is implied rather than said: the author is a master of understatement. He depicts how this friendship crosses the boundaries of class, for Hans comes from the home of ordinary Stuttgart townspeople who can only dream about what goes on behind the elaborate wrought-iron gates of Konradin's grand house.

There is another difference that their friendship transcends. Hans is a Jew, Konradin a pure-born Aryan. As Hitler's iron fist tightens on Germany, trouble brews for the boys. It becomes clear that Konradin's mother has no time for Jews. "She's jealous of you" he explains "because you, a Jew, have made a friend of her son. She thinks that my being seen with you is a blot on the Hohenfels escutcheon. She believes you are in the service of world Jewry, which is only another word for Bolshevism: 'My poor boy, don't you see that you are already in their hands?'" After that, says Hans, "we both knew that things would never be the same again and that it was the beginning of the end of our friendship and of our childhood".

I don's want to write too much about the rest of the book: if ever a story must not be ruined by spoilers, this is it. Suffice it to say that the tone darkens as Hans begins to feel the awful effects of anti-Semitic persecution at school. Meanwhile the friend he so much needs at this bleak time has gone. Hans' parents decided to send him to America until the storms have passed. Just before he leaves he receives an important letter from Konradin. It is the last contact they have. But it is not the end of the story. And I freely confess that although I've read this book countless times, whenever I get to the final page, I find it unbearably moving. If there were an anthology called Stories That Make Grown Men Cry this would be my choice.

Books can be mirrors that are held up to our own souls and stories. My mother was herself at school in Germany at the time the novella is set, not in Stuttgart but in the Rhineland city of Düsseldorf. At her funeral last summer, every tribute spoke of her childhood and adolescence as a Jewish girl in the Third Reich and the circumstances in which she left Germany. The most painful story was of the celebration of the her eleventh birthday in September 1933. She had invited all her school friends to her party at home. Not one of them turned up for they were all Aryans. I can scarcely imagine what she must have lived through that afternoon.

It would be another four long years before she came to Britain and was welcomed in this country as a refugee. She was one of the very fortunate. And although in later life she would often say that the past is the past and there is no point in dwelling on it, I think she would also understand Hans saying towards the end as he looks back as an adult, "my wounds have not healed, and to be reminded of Germany is to have salt rubbed into them". But it was rather wonderful that the head teacher of her primary school in Düsseldorf came across her name while researching past pupils including Jews who had fled Germany during the Nazi era. They struck up a regular correspondence and sent each other photographs. This meant a lot to her. They became friends. It was a kind of reunion. When she died, the children signed a lovely condolence card they had made. This kind act deeply touched my sister and me.

Holocaust Memorial Day is, I believe, all the more needed today than ever. While the Nazi Holocaust was, in Arthur Koestler's words, "the ugliest tragedy in man's history", we know that cruelty, persecution and ethnic cleansing continue to be visited on innocent human beings in many places in our own time. The Third Reich is an awful warning of what can happen when a people begin to see themselves as a Volk who are stronger or better or more worthy than everyone else, and whose myths and fantasies fuel the evil notion of supremacy. The ascendancy of the far right and its specious but persuasive nationalist rhetoric is a sinister omen for those who lived through the decade before the last war. It re-awakens spectres they thought they had long left behind.

When my mother was in hospital during her last illness, the EU referendum campaign was in full spate. "We're not going to walk away from it, are we?" she asked. "We created the Union so that Europe would never again have to go through what we went through all those years ago." I replied that I didn't know, but I thought that the British were too sensible to vote Leave and pull up the drawbridge. How wrong I was. And now, the threatened "hard Brexit" and the cry "America first" are feeding this isolationist environment in which the beautiful idea that you can be a "citizen of the world" as well as loving your own country is being poisoned. In such an environment, divisions can be more readily sown and hatreds can be fostered.

Of course I am not saying that we are on the verge of a new holocaust. God forbid. I'm simply pleading with people of good will to be vigilant in ways we have not been before. This is what Holocaust Memorial Day is for. The beauty of Uhlman's novella is that with an exquisite lightness of touch, you are made to feel the sheer terror of the Nazi Holocaust and how it destroyed millions of lives because so many people sleep-walked unknowingly into catastrophe. This marvellous book helps us never to forget. If we are people who pray, it will drive us to our knees.
I hope you will read it.

Biographical note: Fred Uhlman (1901-1985) acknowledges that Hans is of course himself, though he had left school before the Third Reich, and he did not have a friend like Konradin. He became an anti-Nazi lawyer who fled Germany in 1933, and after time spent in France and Spain ended up in Britain in 1936. He lived in Hampstead so it's possible that he and I passed in the street when I was at school there. He wrote Reunion in 1960. It was published in 1971 which is when I think I first read it, but it was only when it was reissued in 1977 that it got the critical acclaim it deserved. He became a painter whose work is still displayed in some galleries.