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.

A Sixth Form Debate about the Referendum

This week I went to an academy in our part of the world. They were holding a sixth form debate about the EU Referendum and asked me to put the case for Remain. Arguing for Brexit was a businessman from a place I know well. We had lunch together before the event and found we had a lot in common, not least a love of France. I don't think he would mind my saying that he struck me very much as a Europhile like me. Lesson number one: in this as in most things, there is much more that unites us than divides. He was certainly one of the nicest Brexiters I've met. And although we didn't agree about the EU, it was what they call a "good disagreement".

The school has a fine campus with state-of-the-art modern buildings. Some of the students had just begun A-levels that day which was a pity as they were historians and I'd have liked to have heard what they had to say. The room we were in was bedecked with national flags from all the EU countries which gave it a festive air. A member of staff chaired it in the best tradition of BBC's Question Time. She was scrupulously fair with her stopwatch at the ready.

I began by saying it was a pity that 16 and 17 year olds wouldn't be allowed to vote as their peers had been able to do in the Scottish independence referendum. I expected loud cheers at that, but it just got a respectful silence. Maybe this young audience was a bit shy. Or listening carefully, which they did all afternoon.

If you read my blog regularly, you'll know my "pitch". I asked the audience not to be beguiled by self-interest, the "what's best for Britain" line. It mattered, I told them, but only if our self-interest was enlightened. I begged them to try to see the decision from a global perspective: what's best for Europe, what's best for the human race, especially its most needy members and communities, what's best for the planet in terms of tackling climate change. I urged them to think as Europeans, not grudgingly but out of a conviction that the UK can play a leading role in the EU by helping to reform it and make sure it remains outward-looking in its concerns.

My opposite number spoke for Brexit and, I have to say, did it with humour, courtesy and tact. Then there were questions from the audience. We knew what these were going to be in advance but it was clear that the students had been well prepared for the event in learning about and discussing the EU for much of the summer term. There was one I especially liked about the EU's role in the post-war reconstruction of Europe and was this still relevant today? (No prizes for guessing my answer.) We talked about what it means to hold both a European and a British identity (to which I added English, North-Eastern, Londoner, Haydonian etc.).

Do the economic benefits of EU membership outweigh the costs, we were asked. Thankfully no-one mentioned the discredited £350M per week figure that many Brexit people are still touting despite having been told not to (it even appears on the Electoral Commission's information leaflet about the vote to which both the official campaigns were given the opportunity of contributing). We discussed the nature of risk-taking in connection with In or Out, and (interesting, this) how it compared to religious faith and the place of doubt. We explored democracy in the EU and agreed that reforms were needed to make it more transparent and accountable (although, I added, reforms are needed in the UK too and we should be careful before we throw stones).

It was a pity we didn't have time for more. But the school day ends when it ends and not even the EU was going to deflect the students from the school gate. So a vote was taken. And here was a surprise. After discounting a handful of spoiled papers (by A-level students? surely not, you cry!), it came to just over 50% in favour of Remain, and 43% for Brexit. So that was that. It was a majority, but not a convincing one. It would have been interesting to have taken one before the debate to see if anyone's mind had been changed.

I've thought about that vote. It reflects uncannily accurately the opinion polls across the country which predict a "yes", but not by a wide margin. And here's where I take pause. We are told on all sides that young people are overwhelmingly in favour of our membership of the EU. That wasn't true on Wednesday. So is it connected to the demographic of that part of the world? Or just down to the feebleness of my attempts to persuade whether by impeccable logic or dazzling rhetoric? Someone criticised the school on Twitter for "brainwashing" the young. I replied: you just try brainwashing politically astute sixth formers who in any case heard both sides of the argument. I took from the afternoon that they were not yet really convinced. So there is a lot of work we pro-EU campaigners have to do in the next few weeks.

One last point. As well as being told that the young are in favour of Remain (perhaps because they've never known life without it), we are also told that the challenge will be to get them out to vote. There are still hundreds of thousands eligible youngsters, many of them students who have not yet got their names on to the electoral register. This ought to worry us greatly. Time is running out. So I begged these 6th formers not to let their older siblings and peers off the hook. Their parents too. Our democratic rights are hard-won. To use them well by voting is the first lesson of citizenship. If they heard nothing else, I hope that message went home.