A Syrian Ready to Perish: a plea to the Prime Minister

I've tweeted an open letter to the Prime Minister in 138 characters. Here it is:

@theresa_may I beg you, as a Christian, remember the #Kindertransport. Please reinstate our promise to care for 3000 child refugees. #Dubs

I don't need to explain the background. This week the Government quietly announced that it was closing the "Dubs Amendment" Scheme under which the UK had undertaken to welcome lone child refugees from camps on the European mainland. Lord Dubs had suggested a figure of around three thousand refugees. The UK has to date received 350.

If anyone thought that with headlines about Brexit and President Trump, it was a week to bury bad news, they were mistaken. There has been an outcry from people of every political persuasion (or almost every - perhaps someone will tell me if UKIP has associated itself with this chorus of protest). At one level, there is something very un-British about going back on your word - which is what we all assumed it to be. In particular, refugee children who are hiding where the Calais Jungle used to be had their hopes raised and then cruelly dashed. It was heartbreaking to read about some of them in The Guardian recently.

My tweet appealed to Mrs May on two grounds: her memory and her religious principles.

Remember the Kindertransport is an invitation to recall how Britain responded the last time there was a refugee crisis in Europe on this scale. This was in the late 1930s when the scale of Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany and central Europe was at last recognised for what it was. Lord Dubs was himself rescued as a six-year old Jewish boy in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. In 1939 he boarded one of the famous "Winton Trains" which, thanks to the late Nicholas Winton, brought Czech refugees from almost certain death to safety and a new life in Britain. Thanks to the Kindertransport, ten thousand Jewish children were saved from the death camps and came here to the UK. They had their lives and futures given back to them. It is forever to Britain's credit that our country offered asylum to these youngsters.

I've blogged before about my own family's history, how my Jewish mother, then a teenager in northern Germany, was rescued from the Nazis in 1937 and made her home here in Britain. So I owe everything to this country's act of generosity to people who were desperate. If it were not for that, I wouldn't be here. I am sure the Prime Minister is as proud of that courageous decision as I am thankful for it. In the light of it, three thousand of the world's most helpless, vulnerable children does not seem a lot to ask of a nation that is so privileged. So I am begging Mrs May to reverse this week's announcement, and for the sake of being true to a history of British compassion in the face of need, do the right thing.

What is that "right thing"? This is where Mrs May's religious principles come in. As is well known, she is a committed Christian woman who attends her local church whenever she can. (I'm not going to invoke her upbringing as a daughter of the vicarage - it's her living faith I'm interested in today.) So I've appealed to her "as a Christian". Because the Judaeo-Christian scriptures are full of injunctions to care for the people who most need help - the destitute, the desperate, the economically dependent such as orphans and widows, and most strikingly, those whom the texts call the strangers who are in our midst. Add to that Jesus' impossible requirement that we should love our enemy and we see how exacting it is to live out of this faith tradition.

Where does this ethic of universal compassion come from? It's derived from the nature of God himself. A noble passage one of the books of the Torah tells us that "the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and loves strangers, providing them with food and clothing" (Deuteronomy 10.17-18). So while Israel is the particular people of the covenant that is given the teaching we call Torah, Yahweh's concern and care are nothing short of universal. This is the essence of the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It's a perversion of them to narrow the scope of God's mercy in any way.

But the Torah's appeal to care for the "stranger" is not grounded only in the character of Yahweh. The appeal is also to Israel's own history. "You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" the passage in Deuteronomy goes on to say. In other words, if you won't show kindness out of imitation of the God you worship, at least show it for the sake of being true to your own memory of having been aliens yourselves. "A Syrian ready to perish was my father" is how the King James version of the Bible translates a saying later on in the same book (Deuteronomy 26.5), "a wandering Aramean" says the contemporary translation. Imagine it - the people of God were born of a Syrian parent! We can't escape the resonances for our own time when we read those words.  Mrs May must have heard them in church hundreds of times.

These two appeals to memory and to religious faith are combined in another book of the Torah: "You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God" (Leviticus 19.34). It's extraordinary to see how in the Hebrew Bible, showing compassion is not, or not only, a matter of duty. It springs out of love. Indeed, to care for the refugee or resident alien is "just" a special case of the universal command found in the same chapter of Leviticus, that we must "love your neighbour as yourself". People sometimes imagine that when Jesus commanded this in the Sermon on the Mount, he was announcing some dramatic new insight into what God requires of us. It's true he filled out these words in ways that no doubt arrested his hearers. But the words themselves come directly from the Hebrew Scriptures. It's an inescapable requirement of our faith. We may wish the Bible didn't make it quite so explicit. But I'm afraid it does.

Who am I to remind Mrs May of all this? I'm sure she knows it better than any of us. Hence my appeal to her Christianity as well as her memory. But the comma in my tweet is meant to be a trifle ambiguous. I beg you, as a Christian, remember the #Kindertransport. In other words, I who am doing the begging am a Christian too. It's the Christian faith we hold in common and rejoice to affirm together that ought to make this conversation possible. But in a crisis, my Christianity is under scrutiny just as yours is.  How we respond to the most vulnerable people in the world tests us all in demanding ways. Part of that scrutiny is to shine a light on our biblical interpretation and social theology. The Archbishop of Canterbury and other church leaders have recognised this by registering their dismay at the Government's decision to resile from the Dubs Amendment. 

I tweeted yesterday that to turn back on our promise would be unBritish, unEuropean, inhumane and unChristian. So in the name of this nation's history, and in the name of the compassion that the great world faiths inspire us to show, I reiterate my plea to Mrs May. Please will you show principled leadership and reconsider? Please will you reinstate this country's commitment to do what it promised? Please will you enable our nation to act with big-heartedness and integrity and do what we can to help at a time of such great need? And maybe save Syrians, among others, "ready to perish"?

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.

In France: the view from the hill

We spent last week in France, in our little Burgundian hilltop village where we are lucky enough to have a small house. It's lovely at all times of the year but especially in autumn when the landscape is shot through with reds and golds, and wood smoke from the first fires hangs in the air, and the village goes quiet as it draws itself in for the winter.

 

It was our first trip to the continental mainland since the Brexit vote. You'll know if you read my last blog that we were curious to see how it would feel. Vézelay is not a place where you hear politics being debated in the street. Our village, a UNESCO world heritage site, is officially listed as one of France's most beautiful. Its economy is almost entirely dependent on tourism - it's said that nearly a million visit it each year. So the talk is more likely to be about the ups and downs of the hotels and restaurants, car-parking (always guaranteed to get villagers going) and of course the weather. Contrary to what's commonly thought, the British are not unique in loving to gossip about the weather. And you'll also hear about it if Monsieur le Maire has been up to something that means change in the time-honoured village way of doing things such as new office hours in the Mairie, the introduction of differently coloured bin bags or alterations in the one-way traffic system.

So the streets were not reverberating to heated debates about Brexit. Anyway, that's old news now.  But it wasn't difficult to get a reaction when I raised the topic myself. On our first day there I went to the Mairie to get my resident's car-parking permit. Benoît (not his real name) who sits in the office each morning and deals with enquiries had plenty to say about it. "Ah, la grande bêtise anglaise! What fools you English are!" he said without ceremony. "I've never cared overmuch for the English" (looking at me with affection - or was it pity?) "but surely, for God's sake, we were better off together than apart. Have you forgotten the war?" (It's characteristic of the French to elide "English" with "British" but of course he was right in that it was the English vote that largely swung it for Brexit.) I managed to get in my désolé de la part de mon pays before he rushed on: "and here we are in Burgundy, of all places. In the Middle Ages, it was England and Burgundy against France, as Joan of Arc knew to her cost. How could you do this to your historic ally?"

This last bit was laced with a heavy sarcasm: even my hesitant French could pick that up. But he had a serious point to make. "I'm deeply committed to the European scout movement and have been for many years. It's completely internationalist in its outlook, bringing young people together from across the continent. It's how the world should be in miniature: a place of friendship and reconciliation where we each out to one another and despite our differences try to understand and live alongside one another as neighbours." Then he proffered a Gallic shrug of the shoulders. "Ah well, so be it. I dare say that where the English lead, we too may follow one day. Tant pis for us all. And then what will have become of all our fine dreams about a better world?"

Our expat friends in the department of the Yonne had plenty to say about the referendum as you'd expect. Those who had lived in France longer than fifteen years were especially sore about having been denied a vote for reasons that seemed to them entirely arbitrary. More serious was the likely effect of Brexit on whole areas of their lives in France. Already their sterling earnings or pensions are worth a quarter less in euros than they were before June. They do not know whether the excellent health care they enjoy in France will continue to be available to them in the future, whether there will be implications for owning property, what the tax regime and welfare benefits will look like, what formalities there will be for travel to and fro between the UK and France, and a thousand other concerns.

More than anything else I was aware of what I would describe as a low level sense of dislocation, suddenly feeling more "foreign" than before. It wasn't big, yet, but it was there. Some mentioned worries about relationships in their local community. None of them had experienced any direct hostility, though one friend said she had been harried on a narrow local road and almost driven into the ditch by a driver who, she presumed, had seen her UK number plates and was making a point. No one was talking much about returning to Blighty - all the people we know are well embedded in Burgundy; they have made their life there and feel part of their communities to which they contribute in many different ways.

 

But the air was charged with unspoken "what-ifs". They had all voted Remain, or would have done if they'd had a vote. But now there was a degree of uncertainty around that was troubling. One or two said they were surprised by the strength of the anger they felt at a turn of events that would not only prove hugely damaging but had been unnecessary to begin with. But now the genie was out of the bottle. There was nothing anyone could do but wait and see what happened, and practise the art of resignation. I suppose that's true of all of us who think that something incredibly precious has been needlessly wrecked as a result of the referendum. But expats understandably feel it all the more sharply when it seems as if the place they've come to call home isn't quite the same as it was before.

 

Today we sailed back across the narrow stretch of water that divides Britain from France. As I write this, the refugee camp at Calais, the so-called Jungle, is being dismantled. Some of its children have been granted asylum in the UK, but too few, too late and in circumstances that hardly bring credit to this country. Meanwhile, France is dispersing the many who are left behind to other camps across the country. The man most likely to be elected as President next year is talking about relocating the UK border where it belongs after Brexit, on the English side of the Channel, and letting us deal with the refugee problem ourselves. It's just another symptom of a pulling up of the drawbridge and the fracturing of good relations and fruitful collaboration that once characterised our place in the European Union. We may claim that Britain is "open for business" but it sounds pretty hollow at the moment, whether we're talking about the economic business of trade or the political business of day to day relationships between states.

 

No-one in France made us feel unwelcome or gave us the cold shoulder. We love being on our Burgundian hill and last week was no exception. But somehow, being there brought it home to me that by voting to leave the EU we have treated our European neighbours and allies with little less than contempt. We have turned our back on people who thought of us as friends, bound together by more than a century of entente cordiale. That feels deeply uncomfortable. And I haven't the faintest idea what to do about it.