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It's a building you would never notice, on a busy traffic intersection in Hendon, a stubbornly unfashionable part of north London. Inside, there is nothing that would catch the eye: the meeting rooms are filled with basic, functional furniture. A quick glance at the people who have come to visit would suggest nothing more than a regular drop-in centre for the elderly.
But linger more than a moment and you'll realise this is no ordinary place. I have barely taken off my coat when Sam Pivnick, strong-voiced and vigorous at 85, urges me to sit down with him as he finishes off a bowl of thick, steaming soup. We have not been speaking long when he rolls up his sleeve to show me the bluey line of digits that still stains the skin of his left arm: the tattoo that marks former inmates of Auschwitz.
For this is the Holocaust Survivors Centre, the only place of its kind in Britain and the first of its kind anywhere. Its clients, numbering 550 – including 300 regulars – are now deep into their 70s, 80s and 90s. What they have in common is direct experience of the event widely regarded as the greatest crime in human history.
Here, one regular tells me, "If people ask, 'Where are you from?' they mean, 'What did you go through?'" Here, memories of tragedy, despair and the most appalling suffering are not the exception; they are the rule.
It manifests itself in the most unexpected ways. Take that soup. Thick, hot and nourishing, it is served all year round, even in the height of summer. Thin soup is never on the menu, says Rachelle Lazarus, one of the centre's full-time staff: thin soup is too associated with the camps.
Similarly, I notice that a basket carrying big, solid chunks of bread is out all the time, even after lunch has been cleared away. That's a legacy of the time someone took away someone else's bread. "All hell broke loose," Lazarus says. The injured party had saved that bread for later, a habit developed seven decades ago and never shaken off. To this day, many of those who endured enforced hunger – whether in a concentration camp or ghetto – need to know there is food available, just in case. So the bread rolls stay out.
I'm also struck by the appearance of those who have come on this midweek day. Many, especially those in their 70s, rather than 90s, are short. That's how most of the world's remaining Holocaust survivors look – short because starvation stunted their growth as children or teenagers.
Whatever preconceptions you might have about a day centre for the elderly should be checked at the door. The men are smartly dressed, most in jackets and ties; the women are elegantly turned out. Judith Hassan, the centre's founder and director, tells me that, too, is the product of a survival strategy. "If you looked unwell, you were going to be exterminated," she says. Survivors have told her that, back in the camps, they would sometimes prick their fingers, rubbing the blood on their cheeks so they would not look too pale to work. Because if you didn't work, you didn't live.
There are clashes of personality and squabbles, as there would be in any similar centre for the elderly (or youth club, for that matter). But here they have a different quality.
Before I visited, I had been warned that there was a "strong sense of hierarchy" among the survivors, according to who had endured the worst fate under the Nazis, with those who had been through the death camps ranked above those who were, for example, child refugees from Germany.
Sure enough, Sam Pivnick and I had been talking for only a few minutes when another man wanted to join our conversation, standing over us, interjecting with observations of his own. It turned out he was one of those who had escaped Germany as a child, a baby in fact. Soon Sam's patience snapped. "Who wants to hear about you?" he shouted. "What did you survive? You were in your mother's womb!"
Most I speak to don't share that sentiment. "We're a diminishing flock," says Harry Fox, 81, born Chaim Fuchs and a survivor of several camps, including Buchenwald. "If we didn't let others in, we'd be very small." He endorses the centre's inclusion of those who came to the UK as refugees after November 1938 – the month of Germany's Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews – including many on the Kindertransport, the prewar evacuation route that saw Jewish parents in Germany and beyond send some 10,000 children to Britain for safety. Besides, Harry adds, "I feel sorry for those Kindertransport children. Eight or nine, and they were taken away from their parents. I was with my mother till 1942 and my father till 1945. I'm lucky."
The Holocaust Survivors Centre began with a gap. Judith Hassan, then a newly trained psychotherapist with the Jewish Welfare Board – predecessor of today's Jewish Care – was working in late-1970s Swiss Cottage. It was an area of north London she knew had become home to many who had either escaped or survived the Nazis' war against the Jews. Yet they were not coming forward. "They didn't want to seek help," Hassan says now. "These were people who had survived by keeping a low profile; they had learned not to appear frail or vulnerable."
They were especially wary of a formal organisation, even a Jewish charity anxious to help. In the war years, being on a list held by a bureaucracy could spell death. Hassan recalls the attitude: "It's an institution, it's an organisation – it's dangerous."
But it was clear there were people who needed specific help. She remembers one woman suffering terribly as she went through the process of moving house. The woman didn't spell it out, but Hassan soon realised the experience was evoking memories of a forced eviction back in Germany.
Slowly, contact with a single survivor led to the creation of a small, informal social group, meeting at first in people's houses. Hassan did not lead, but listened and offered help. It's an approach she still follows today, ensuring that every decision – from the type of cake served for tea to new fabric for the sofas – is taken in consultation with the survivors themselves. Why? "I can't be the leader, because then I'll be seen as the Nazi." Instead, the centre aims to give a measure of control and autonomy to people who were robbed of every shred of it.
In the same building, deliberately distinct from the centre, is Shalvata, a therapy service offering counselling. This, too, needed careful handling: in the Nazi period, a label of mental illness meant certain death. Survivors had to overcome great fear just to walk through the door.
But what Hassan and her colleagues discovered has proved a revelation. "I had to chuck out the whole psychological model I had learned," she says.
Conventional psychology assumed her clients would be too damaged to function. In those early days, compensation payments were conditional on an assessment by a psychiatrist – with a diagnosis of "Survivor Syndrome" common. "But as I worked with this group, I realised there's not a pathology there," Hassan recalls. "What I saw was their strength, their resilience." Hassan understood it was the horrific circumstances survivors had been through that were abnormal: their reaction to that "extreme and indescribable suffering" was, in fact, entirely normal.
Those informal meetings moved into the current premises in 1992, thereby establishing a model that has since been emulated in France, Israel and beyond. Now other communities, including those who lived through the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, are creating similar places. The animating principle is powerful and simple: that people who have experienced trauma benefit from being together.
All this might suggest that the Holocaust Survivors Centre is a place of horror, drenched in melancholy. But that's wrong. On the walls are paintings from the art group. They depict beaches and woodland, scenes of bucolic beauty from the English countryside. They once had a session dedicated to a shared passion for chocolate. There is plenty of laughter – an emphasis on life rather than death.
Part of the explanation lies in the fact that when the survivors look back, many are keen to focus less on the agonies that were visited upon them by Hitler and his executioners and more on the lives they lived before. Harry Fox remembers being Chaim Fuchs, growing up in a shtetl, a village 12 miles from Lodz in the Polish countryside. He can still hear the sound the pigs made when the Polish farmers killed them, not in a slaughterhouse, but by whacking them with a plank of wood.
On one of the days I visit, there's a session in Yiddish, five men and seven women sitting around a boardroom-style table – laden with pastries – exchanging banter in the language of their childhood.
Instantly, the room fills with the gestures, shrugged exclamations and resigned humour that is Yiddish's signature. Azoi vi a doktor vershtayte de krenk. "Like a doctor understands a sickness," one says, to laughter. Harry tells a joke, moving between Yiddish and English. The teacher asks what they think of the upheavals in the Arab world. Someone responds that Israel should send a message to Egypt, reminding them it was the enslaved children of Israel who built the pyramids – and telling the Egyptians that, if they knock them over, "the Israelites won't build them up again".
Then Bella Kerridge – born Bella Zuckerman 89 years ago – a woman with eyes that sparkle, sings a Yiddish song, acting out the story, delivering a genuine performance. Her voice is sweet and clear as she sings of a now-vanished world – of shabbos, of the rebbe and rebbitzen – a gentle melody of oy's and bim-bom-bom's that ripples through the room like faint signals sent from a once-bright star, snuffed out long ago.
In conversation after conversation, a common theme emerges. They are approaching the end of their lives; in 15 years, they assume, they will all be gone. What if, they worry, the memory of the Holocaust dies with them? Aware that there are deniers of the Shoah all around, starting with the president of Iran, their concern is intense.
Inmates of Auschwitz were marked with tattoos. Sam Pivnick, a survivor of the camp, had to sweep 'shit, piss and bodies' from the trains as they arrived. Photograph: Mimi Mollica
The result of that anguish is an urgent, even desperate desire to tell their story, to ensure it is passed on to the next generation. Freddie Knoller, 90 years old and a tall, charismatic figure who chairs the centre's Camp and Ghetto Survivors Committee, tells me proudly that he spoke at 54 schools last year – more than one a week. "To me it's a mission that I have to tell the young people what happened – so that the Holocaust is not forgotten. That is the fear of us survivors. After we're gone, will the Holocaust be forgotten?" Several have published, or self-published, memoirs. They want to testify.
And so it is that, within minutes of meeting people and at next to no prompting, I hear their stories. Sam Pivnick tells me that as a teenager his job in Auschwitz had been to empty the trains as they arrived bringing Jews to the gas chambers. He had to sweep out "shit, piss and bodies – old people and children" who had not survived the journey. He witnessed the notorious selections, when Dr Josef Mengele – known as the angel of death – assessed the Jews standing before him, deciding who would live and who would die.
Joseph Kiersz, in shirt, tie and a hearing aid in each ear, tells me that he, too, had been a prisoner in Auschwitz, a slave labourer there for 18 months, before he was dispatched to another camp at Nordhausen. They went by train, travelling for six or seven days without food. They survived by constructing a box, attaching it to their belts and lowering it outside to scoop up the snow below. Sometimes it would be covered with oil from the train, but if it came up clean they would push the snow into their mouths, sucking out its moisture.
"We'd have to take off the dead people," he says. "You'd have to pick up the dead people and lay them like you lay herrings, one this way, one that way. I was carrying them. They weighed nothing, they were like skeletons. I carried them under my arm." His breaths are coming faster and heavier as he speaks. Eventually, when he recalls the wife he lost four years ago – "She was a lady, everybody adored her" – he starts to cry. But only then.
Irka Reichmann was six when the Germans came for her family in Warsaw. Her parents hid her in a cupboard: 'They took my father and mother and sister… I saw it through the keyhole.' Photograph: Mimi Mollica
Janine Webber, born in Lvov in 1932, tells me she survived by posing as a Catholic and working as a maid. "I lived with two families: one betrayed me and killed my brother. After that, we lived in a hole, 13 adults and me, hidden by a young Pole. His name was Edek. He hid 14 Jews for nothing, for no money. For a year, in a bunker. We took it in turns to lie down or to sit. For a year, I didn't see daylight. I was 10."
And Irka Reichmann, warm and engaging at 78, tells me her story – one I cannot shake. She was in the Warsaw ghetto. "I was six and my parents hid me in a cupboard." Minutes later, just as her parents had feared, the Germans came. Irka knew they were Germans because, from her vantage point in the cupboard, she recognised their boots. "They took my father and mother and sister, and left me in the cupboard. I saw it through the keyhole." That was the last time she saw her family.
They didn't always speak this way. In the immediate decades after the war, many survivors were reluctant to talk about their experiences. "When you're young, you're busy, you're trying to build up a life," Irka says. "You have children, you're trying to make money." Some feared passing a burden of heartbreak on to their children, not wanting to "bring them up with hatred".
But if they were reluctant to speak, there was also a deep reluctance to listen. Some say their children never asked them about their experiences: "I think my son thought it would hurt me to talk about it," says one. Others say it was the wider society that didn't want to know, even Britain's Jewish community. "People here were not interested, they couldn't understand," says another.
"Our so-called brothers and sisters have so little knowledge," Irka says, remembering the British Jew who once told her, "We had it bad here, too; we had bombing." "People know nothing. They have no insight whatsoever." That will sound harsh to those in the Jewish community who believe they value survivors enormously; they will point to the support they give and the donations they make to Jewish Care, the centre's main funder.
But for Irka the sentiment is real. She felt a barrier, one that separates her even from her own family – one that exists everywhere but here. Which only makes the Holocaust Survivors Centre all the more valuable to her. "It's been my salvation," she says, a "second home", a place where she feels truly understood. "If I'm upset, if I'm hurt, I can come here, have a bowl of soup and talk. There are people here who went through what I did."
And the need is greater now than ever, now that many are alone, without the daily distractions of raising children and earning a living. "This is the worst time in a survivor's life," she says. "I think of my parents more now than when I was younger." Now a great-grandmother, Irka longs for just one photograph of the woman she last glimpsed through that keyhole. "I would like to know what my mother looked like."
What, besides a tragic past, do these people have in common? "We don't give up easily," says Janine Webber. "Resilience, that's the common thread."
Freddie Knoller agrees: "All those who survived were optimists. The pessimists gave up, but we are optimists. I love life. Most of the people here love life and love people."
But Harry Fox is having none of it. He knows the part chance, random acts of kindness or savagery, played in deciding who died, including his parents, and who lived, including him. "I can't stick my chest out. If you survive, it's luck. There are no heroes." He pauses. "The heroes are all dead."
Comments
14 May 2011 12:40AM
A good article
14 May 2011 12:54AM
A very sobering piece, thank you for writing it Jonathan.
14 May 2011 1:03AM
I agree with beamengine. The soup connection made me read this at this late hour as it would ring a bell with my mother.
We need to never forget this. I never found out the labour camp my mother was sent to in Germany as a Ukrainian 14 year old. Its effects are still felt in the next generation. If only she had someone to talk to. The centre can only be a healthy thing.
I learnt that much as a survivor my mother was, she always had help at the key points in her life whilst she was in Germany. And this article made me think deeply about her subsequent life here too.
14 May 2011 1:09AM
With such emotional stories I imagine it was hard not to sentimentalise, but I think it's a great article. I'm glad these people have each other. There are many who don't want to listen to what older people can tell them.
14 May 2011 1:10AM
And wonderful photographs too, I should add.
14 May 2011 1:27AM
We have come to expect this standard of writing from Jonathon Freedland but it is still something for which we should be grateful.
14 May 2011 1:27AM
Fantastic article.
Holocaust survivors ought to be treasured. One visited our school once, and recounted how he had only survived Auschwitz because he was an apprentice watchmaker, and a Pole working in the kitchen shared his trade and, out of fellow-spirit, gave him extra food every day. The fact that survival could hang by so fragile a thread, in terrible places of death like the camps, made a huge impression on me.
I wish I could say that the survivors can breathe easy in the knowledge that the Holocaust will never be forgotten or belittled, but the continued attention paid to deeply creepy Holocaust deniers like David Irving proves me wrong - or, rather, proves that we all have a duty to push back against such hateful ignorance whenever and wherever we encounter it.
14 May 2011 1:36AM
A very moving article. Thank you.
14 May 2011 1:38AM
What a wonderful place for the survivors to gather.
14 May 2011 1:41AM
It's a good article.
I note that the headline on the front page is - "Soup is never on the menu". The article then describes several people eating soup: "you can always come here for a bowl of soup". Slightly confusing.
14 May 2011 1:41AM
Never forget.
14 May 2011 2:53AM
i had been feeling sorry for myself of late after a relationship ended and it felt good to cry for a real loss. thanks for the article. harry fox, lucky or not, you're my hero.
14 May 2011 3:07AM
No. Never forget.
It's always distressing to read these kinds of narratives, but one must, always, read them. One must take one's mind into places where truly no-one should venture and there reach out to people who were forced to venture there; and in that place gives one's attention, give one's understanding, give one's respect and sadness for the people tortured and for the millions of lost lives. One must share in the grief, even invisibly, at a distance, because to do so means that one will indeed never forget.
My family wasn't there. I wasn't there. But I have read about this in many memoirs and am permanently branded by it. You wear your numbers branded on your flesh, you survivors and I wear your numbers in my mind only, but I see you and wish I could tear you out of your history and replace you back inside what ought to have been your real ives.
Frequently, when I walk up the road to my home, I reflect that I am safe, and imagine the same street in a different place and time and that around the corner there are the deepest horrors imaginable, imagine that at any second I could be confronted by violent men who would shoot me dead or worse, take me to the darkest place on earth.
The educational work these courageous men and women do in schools is valuable and must give them a sense of meaning at this time in their lives, even as they revisit trauma.
I don't think these events will be forgotten.
However, I do worry terribly that, 70 years on, the world is still engaged in multiple disturbing wars of the utmost horrof. Men fighting everywhere - everywhere, brutal, violent, savage, torturing men as terrible in their cruelty as ever they were, still destroying lives. It is beyond understanding how the world at large continues to be run as a violent playground for psychopathic rulers and how many millions of men sacrifice their development as human beings, forgoe the meaning of their life, the journey of discovery and self-realisation each ought to take - to engage in brutish savagery.
Personally, I don't believe the human race will survive climate change. As I look thousands of centuries into the future, when the burned out and flooded planet gradually stirs back to life, and then when I peer millions of years beyond that, deep into the future, when life has grown again and perhaps there are human beings, of some sort or another - I can only hope that it will be entirely different order of human being, a race of beings which, if it is divided into two genders, does not perpetrate itself by one half of the race behaving wholly without empathy. The world would now be a beautiful place, it could literally be that longed-for 'paradise', it could indeed be a 'paradise on earth' - if it were not for the male of the species huge capacity for psychopathic, emotionally cold cruelty.
Roll on the future, for I have, frankly, little hope of the present.
14 May 2011 3:46AM
Yes, I acknowledge, there were horrors perpetrated by women at the camps, too.
Personally, I see it this way. Lack of empathy is what causes 'evil'. More men than women lack empathy, but not all. Fewer women than men are capable of behaving without empathy, but some do.
Historically, however, the conditions that result in wars of attrition, of competitiveness, of mutual destruction are set up by men. Historically that is the case. Men's exaggerated ego needs, their overwrought competitve drive and their overriding instinct to dominate, control and be superior in the pecking order, combined with obliterating selfishness and blank self-centeredness, is what makes this all possible.
Let's hope the next human race have equal dollops of empathy and compassion, strength and sensitivity, courage and wisdom, humour and humility, modesty and kindness - and much else besides. At present, the human psyche is wildly out of kilter through out-of-control consumerism, combined with social behaviour unleashed from decorum and moderation. Probably we'll wipe ourselves out even before climate change gets us.
14 May 2011 4:09AM
A very worthwhile read. About time we start paying attention to those who have survived the horror of the Holocaust. I am extremely glad that they have someone to talk to and someone who will listen to them.
And we can do our part by simply remembering them.
14 May 2011 6:52AM
Previous comment on the supposed confusing headline of soup - it is headlined thin soup, which is why thick soup is served. In the camps it was groul that was served lacking vitamins.
14 May 2011 7:23AM
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14 May 2011 7:39AM
Wonderful article. Thank you.
14 May 2011 7:45AM
I can't imagine that the loathesome David Irving reads The Guardian which is a great pity.
14 May 2011 8:31AM
i think the guardian do try to cover all human suffering regardless of race,religion or etc, you can not deny that the people in the article have suffered greatly and beyond what we can imagine , so have and so are many people around in the world
this article does not make their suffering less because some greater forces are abusing\profiteering from the holocaust
it does not make the suffering of others anywhere in the world less
it does not justify the imperialist war moves and almost genocides practices
every race, religion, has blood on their hands no one is innocent
learn your history first before you thrash others, its always the elites of every race/religion who are treating their own people like dirt and selling them by the pound
remember its hte conquers who write the history books and they like to divide to conquer, sufferers of the world please unite dont make the division bigger
finally ignorant truant like trolls should always be ignored into a dark hole where they belong
14 May 2011 8:35AM
A fine article.
Bassim, I'm not entirely sure that this is the right place to compare one great evil with another.
peace.
14 May 2011 9:13AM
thanks confusedmore
if only there was more people who can see things from a more balanced kind of view
like you
so many people think one evil is better than an other or that one propaganda is superior than another,
nothing is black nothing is white, when you will see the grey which is in the middle a rainbow of colours will appear to you
please dont believe in the hypes that the suffering of one creed was worse or more important than an other, its all the same but dont deminish the actual suffering of the survivors
there's loads of articles in this newspaper describing the suffering of palestine and muslims, and rightly so but dont try and portray this platform as a pro suffering/killing of a particular race/religion as if you would do your research you would find out exactly the opposite
peace/shalom/salaam
14 May 2011 9:21AM
Nice article and I take the point about the withering away of the Holocaust from public mind. One point though, you didn’t have to be a Jew to be shipped to the camps, Poles of every creed could end up there. That is not make light of the Jewish experience, for example one cannot deny that a Jew had a much greater risk of ending up in a camp than any other ethnicity, yet to restrict the narrative to an entirely Jewish story is unfair on history.
I think if the story is to be taught and remembered then it is as much a story about Europe of that period (including the UK). If taught properly it would give an insight into the Israel of today.
14 May 2011 9:28AM
I am not Jewish but I remember as a child watching "the world at war" on tv and as a child could not comprehend the evil I was seeing in the concentration camps, I am now 51 and still can not even begin to comprehend the pain and suffering the survivors went through. We live in a world of great and small evils but the one inflicted by the Nazis goes far and beyond any evil we have ever seen. Each of the survivors have a story to tell a story of hope over hate, a story that we know will horrify us but a story that must never go unheard and must never be denied its voice.
14 May 2011 9:32AM
Thank you for this excellent and timely article.
I live in Antwerp where there is a sizeable Jewish community and they have privately funded a state-of-the-art care home just for eldely Jewish people. On Belgian TV one commentator, discussing dementia, said that they had lavished so much money on the home because of the risk that Jewish Alzheimer patients with impaired memories, would be locked into the nightmare of what happened to them during their youth in the camps. This comment has always stuck in my mind.
Last Sunday I paid what was supposed to be a routine tourist visit to the Great Synagogue of Budapest with some friends and we came out wrecked at what we had seen and heard.
It seems that Hungarian Jews had been relatively safe until the Germans occupied in early 1944 then, even knowing they were losing the war and that the Russians would be invading, they proceeded to liquidate as many of the Jewish population as possible. Of 725,000 Jews, 560,000 were sent to the slaughter.
How does a people survive psychologically after being in the eye of such a storm of hatred? How they could remain so civilised (I know many in Antwerp) and determined to regain their lives is in itself a tribute to their extraordinary courage.
When I think back on the young women I went to school with (Jewish girls made up 30% of our classes) or the young men enjoying themselves in the nightclubs of Antwerp, I sometimes have to tell myself that, had the Nazis prevailed, these people were never meant to live.
Which is why I'm appalled at the creeping rise in anti-semitism in Europe under whatever guise.
14 May 2011 9:33AM
It was interesting was that this unique group of people seemed entirely lacking in self pity.
14 May 2011 9:34AM
I think it is about time that Britain built a Holocaust Museum.
The Imperial War Museum has a permanent Holocaust exhibition that is very good but maybe it could be spun-off into something in a dedicated structure....after all not everyone wants to visit a war museum.
Holocaust museums around the world serve a necessary purpose, they teach us and remind us and hopefully we WILL learn from history and not merely repeat it.
A Holocaust Museum should be an obligatory visit for every school.
Holocaust deniers need to be challenged continually.
14 May 2011 9:38AM
Time and again the most important fact to hold onto in many survivor's stories is that one person made the difference, once person risked their own life to help save others.
Let us hope that we can all be that one person to make a difference.
14 May 2011 9:45AM
@ sparebulb
Indeed the Nazis shipped off jews, homosexuals, gypsies to the camps and exterminated the physically and mentally disabled....it was a campaign that targetted any non-arayans....ethnic cleansing
14 May 2011 9:53AM
One of the best books about the psychological conditions in the Nazi prison camps is written by Jewish psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart - A study of the psychological consequences of living under extreme fear and terror.
While other books describe the physical conditions in the camps, the author goes deep into the souls of the prisoners and describe their transformation from ordinary human beings into creatures whose only goal is to survive using all possible means.
14 May 2011 9:59AM
i hope also that the future holocaust musea will include all people victimsed by the horror, of course the jewish first of all but as well the artists , the gypsies, the homosexuals, and whoever did not fit the aryan picture or whoever did fit in the ''its their fault'' frame
also elucidating all the aspects of the horrors commited should be respected as if we want to know the truth we need to be critical and not just swallow what or whoever is feeding us with little spoons of precooked historical propaganda
as we know that history is usually not reported very accurately but more like written in the favour of certain elites we should go the extra mile to find out
on the other hand there are deniers who would like to believe that one race is inherently evil and has constructed certain fairytale stories
i do not stand with any of the elitist propaganda or the deniers,
one thing is sure people have suffered bringing out the truth should be key to try and avoid future sufferings regardless race/religion
salaam/peace/shalom
14 May 2011 10:01AM
@ greedymonkees
history is always written by the victors unfortunately
salaam, peace, shalom
14 May 2011 10:05AM
@AlanRedman
During war in Bosnia in 1993 I was imprisoned together with my Muslim neighbours in a prison camp. I have seen with my own eyes what people are able to do each other, We Bosnian Muslims were like Jews, Serbian solders not only killed people, but cut their throats only for fun and raped women in their thousands.
Everyone knows what had happened in Srebrenica. 8000 innocent men were killed before the eyes of UN soldiers. We all believed that the West will save us. But the West was silent. Then I came to that so called free West as a refugee and soon I understood that we Muslims in the eyes of the people in the West are not human beings. Some of you have more respect for your dogs and cats than for Muslims.
So all that talk about Holocaust sounds hollow when we all know that there are many small Holcausts which happen even today. But the victims are Muslims or some other people, which the politicians in the West see as expendable.
I do not hate anyone, I simply do not like to see the media manipulating their own citizens and turning their attention from the injustices in the present to the past, which we cannot change.
14 May 2011 10:13AM
Many scholars argue that the term Holocaust should now be an umbrella term that
in addition to the 6million Jews exterminated also includes homosexuals, Romani, Soviet prisoners of war, Soviet and Polish citizens, disabled people, Jehovah's Witnesses and other minority religious groups. When these are included the total exterminated by the Nazis is estimated to be between 11 and 17 million.
It is a crime against humanity that must never be forgotten.
14 May 2011 10:13AM
@andygibb
I think it is you that is using inflammatory comments. A bit more sympathy all round could go a long way. Pot and Kettle and all that.
14 May 2011 10:20AM
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14 May 2011 10:22AM
It is awful how you can't publish an article on the holocaust anymore without some idiots coming along and leaving comments on the Palestinians and Gaza. Are people not supposed to write about the holocaust anymore without mentioning the Palestinians? This is ridicolous. We should not let these people hijack the memory of the holocaust.
14 May 2011 10:27AM
@Bassim
Well your experience certainly does put your comments in context so I'm very sorry for assuming you would have no experience of conditions talked about in the article. I think my points however remain valid, if feeling empathy with the people described is too difficult for the many reasons you have mentioned then I think the correct course of action would be to desist from posting under this article.
That doesn't mean you don't have a valid point to make, it just means it would be more appropriate under an article which actually was trying to miss use the holocaust to justify Israeli crimes which this article certainly wasn't.
I am however very sorry that you feel people in the West view Muslims as " not human", there certainly are strains of that but the strength of the language you use is disproportionate to the reality. Many people here have absolutely no problem with Muslim people (myself included) and even of the people that maybe do very few would see you all as "not human".
That's not to try to talk down a serious issue, I despise racism in all it's forms, it is probably the aspect of human nature I can't stand the most.
14 May 2011 10:28AM
@AlanRedman
My intention was to point out that this article is about Holocaust survivors and not Palestine.
14 May 2011 10:45AM
i too have no prejudices about anybody's religious beliefs ( i might draw the line a satanism), race, colour, creed, sexuality or whatever. I object to racism and prejudice for whatever the motive. It should hold no place in the modern world.
salaam, peace, shalom
14 May 2011 10:49AM
@ClareLondon, I count myself a feminist but if you're talking about bullying, egotism and lack of empathy, I've seen as much evidence of that in women as in men. Equality and respect, yes, but this idea that we're immune to the cruelties and injustices of history is rubbish. Bullying is about power and control, not gender, and Nazism essentially was built upon these bullying instincts. The fact that for most of history power has rested in the hands of men does not mean that women are automatically off the hook or were not complicit in these crimes – don't dismiss Nazism as a male disease.
Anyway - very moving article.
14 May 2011 10:54AM
Clarelondon pointed out the key word: empathy is what prevents us from demonising and detaching ourselves from others to the point where we can look them in the eye and destroy them.
Jonathan brings us closer to empathy, as do the people whose stories he tells. Empathy makes us aware of the humanity we share, and it makes manifest the highest form of that humanity.
Bassim is right to point out the suffering of his own people. I don't think that by doing so he attempts to diminish the suffering of the Holocaust: rather, he emphasises that man's inhumanity to man continues in spite of the horror of the Holocaust; that selective empathy is a contradiction in terms; and that its embrace must encompass all of us. The Holocaust must now be used relentlessly for good: to build the empathy that will make future holocausts inconceivable.
14 May 2011 10:57AM
Basically this is a heartwarming article about people who survived a tragic situation and went on to live long and hopefully happy lives.
We bring our own baggage to any argument but I sincerley hope that we do not forget the Holocaust and the we learn from history.
There is still hope for us. Reading this article you can see this.
14 May 2011 11:13AM
Thank you
14 May 2011 11:16AM
@andygibb
Right fair enough
14 May 2011 11:18AM
Of course we should be able to write and read articles about the Holocaust, Israel, Palestine, and Bosnia, without the idea that writing about one means not-writing or somehow 'dissing' the other. As if taking in something about the suffering about one group means instantly excluding another group. How small-minded.
There is an oppressed group that is not being written about at all, as far as I know, and that is the women of Palestine who are often being abused by Palestinian men. Women who are being bullied into wearing the veil and then much worse.
When are we going to hear from Muslim women? They must be some of the most silent sufferers of all.
Wonderful article, Jonathan Friedland.
You didn't mention if there is any systematic recording of the Holocaust survivors' stories taking place, for something like the Lifestory Archive (does it still exist?) I have started interviewing my own parents, in their eighties, about their own many experiences of loss, dislocation, emigration and immigration during the war. I am learning and recording much that I would not have without a systematic approach. One thinks one will remember one's parents' stories but they ebb and flow through one's childhood and then the details are gone when you want them. So I've been both writing down and using a tape recorder and making time regularly, if not very often.
14 May 2011 11:24AM
The tragedy is that humankind seems not to have learnt a lesson from the Holocaust.
Governments and political leaders do not see the world in therms of humanity, but rather as a place where their political and economical interests take precedence over all other issues. In such world-view human life has no importance and ordinary people are seen as expendable.
The genocide in Rwanda happened around 50 years after Auschwitz was liberated, and nobody tried to prevent the genocide. If Rwanda was rich in oil and minerals it would be another story. But the victims were poor black people and as long as they were killing each other politicians in the West could simply ignore them.
14 May 2011 11:30AM
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14 May 2011 11:39AM
Hats off to these ladies and gentlemen for their courage and humanity. I know however that many survivors suffer from terrible Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD). As a third generation German I am most impressed by survivors who visit schools and co-operate in other initiatives telling their story. This must be incredibly difficult, however it is so important and for some it is part of a healing process. I for my part had the great opportunity to meet survivors visiting Germany again after they had not been able to do so for many decades. Some had not been able to even speak their former native language for a long time, for understandable reasons. They visited German schools and gave talks e.g. at the excellent Jewish Museum in Berlin. It turned out to be a healing process for them and for us Germans too. Some now visit Germany on a regular basis to tell their story, often in co-operation with one of the several (international) organisations, who have programmes in place so that their stories are recorded and that Holocaust deniers and racists will not be able to succeed again unstopped. It is very important, that the Holocaust and the evils of the Nazi-time are not to be forgotten. It is also very important to improve the understanding between cultures, nations and religions so that this will hopefully never happen again. Keeping the memory alive, combined with international meeting programmes I guess are key. I can recommend for example the "Action Reconciliation Service for Peace", which do an amazing job. There German volunteers help e.g. in retirement homes in Israel, Poland, Russia....and people of all generations and nations can meet in intercultural meeting platforms. Thanks for this article!
14 May 2011 11:53AM
Great article. Go back every week until you have all of their stories, all the little first hand details should be preserved it makes the unimaginable real.