‘We cannot lack the courage to stand up, together, and say that we will not tolerate intolerance’ – Business Secretary Sajid Javid MP
Last night Business Secretary Sajid Javid addressed the Holocaust Educational Trust annual dinner about the dangers of letting intolerance go unchecked:
“It happened, therefore it can happen again.”
Primo Levi’s words capture with an almost beautiful simplicity the central lesson of the Shoah … so much so that they are carved into the subterranean walls of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Yet today, more than 70 years since the liberation of the death camps, both the Holocaust and Levi’s warning are slipping to the fringes of living memory.
Now more than ever we cannot allow that to happen. Because in 2015 history is beginning to repeat itself. Across Europe, anti-Semitism is on the rise.
It’s easy to dismiss.
To see ‘liars’ painted across an advert for a Holocaust Memorial event, and say it’s just petty vandalism.
Or to hear Dutch football fans chanting “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” and say it’s just a few bad apples.
Or to see a Rabbi being chased through Gateshead by a gang and say it’s an isolated incident.
To do so ignores the grim reality.
In the past three years Jewish schools, shops, museums and places of worship have been attacked by gunmen in Toulouse, in Paris, in Brussels and in Copenhagen. In civilised Western Europe, in the 21st century, Jews are once again being murdered simply for being Jews.
But mass murder is not the beginning of the process. It never is. The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Indiscriminate killing is simply where hatred, left unchecked, reaches its tragic conclusion.
The Holocaust began with nothing more than words. Then came the insults, boycotts, discrimination.
The noxious weed of anti-Semitism crept insidiously into everyday life: degrading, denouncing and dehumanising its victims until the stage was set for violence, oppression and finally murder on a scale unprecedented before or since.
That steady escalation meant that the 6 million individuals who died were not the only victims of the Holocaust. Countless more were forced from their homes, abandoning everything they owned, often leaving family members behind as they desperately sought a friendly harbour in desperately unfriendly times. Many found that harbour in Britain.
For that we have to thank people like Sir Nicholas Winton.
In 1939, as darkness descended across Europe, he organised the rescue of 669 Czech children as part of the Kindertransport. Today, there are literally thousands of people – the children and their descendants – who can say they owe their lives to him. Sir Nicholas died earlier this year at the age of 106.
But his daughter Barbara is here this evening, along with two of the children he brought to the UK. Barbara, I know your father was a reluctant hero. But a hero he truly was. He deserves our eternal gratitude.
Anyone who fled murderous extremism 75 years ago will find the refugee crisis we face today depressingly familiar. Despite what some say, ISIL are not the Nazis. What we’re seeing in Syria is not genocide or a Holocaust.
But when we see armed police herd refugees onto a train, telling them they’re heading for a new life when in fact they’re on their way to a detention camp, when we see the shutters come down and the ‘we’re full’ signs go up, it’s a chilling reminder of what happens when we forget the recent past.
Of the lack of empathy, education and awareness of history that allows such scenes to unfold in modern Europe.
Of how easily and quickly we forget what went before.
A migrant leaves their home in search of a better one. A refugee has no home to go to.
And it is incumbent upon those of us who are more fortunate to offer such men, women and children the safe haven they desperately need and they truly deserve.
If we look the other way, if we say it’s nothing to do with us, if we say a refugee’s not welcome here because of his or her religion … well, then we are no better than those who tried to bar the door against Jewish refugees two generations ago and we have failed to learn the lesson that Levi so clearly set out.
That it happened, and therefore it can happen again.”