I met my friend Irma for coffee this week and during our conversation she told me of the plans to celebrate her mother’s forthcoming 90th birthday. Nothing remarkable in that you might think, except that her mother’s longevity is in itself something of a miracle. For in 1943, at the age of18, Lottie, a German Jew, was taken along with the rest of her familyto Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp in Poland.
Over a million Jews – possibly many more – died there. Upon arrival, Lottie clearly remembers seeing the infamous sign over the entrance gates, inscribed with the phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“work makes you free”).
Alas, she soon discovered that this was nothing more than a cruel parody of what lay in store for her and her family. Lottie’s sister and mother both died in the gas chambers, but she was selected for hard labour and survived. She was later sent to Kurzbach, Gross Rosen and Bergen Belsen, from which she was liberated in April 1945. Thankfully she was somehow able to put the horror of those years behind her, which is why, some 70 years later, she is still very much alive and kicking and about to celebrate with her own family in north London, where she has lived since the 1950s.
Lottie’s impending celebration was given added context by the date. Seventy years ago last week, Auschwitz was liberated by the invading Soviet army; and the world began to hear, for the first time, of the terrible atrocities that occurred there and at other camps like it. The anniversary of the liberation has received commendably widespread attention here in the UK media. Yet the most sobering aspect was that it reminded us of just how recent it all was.
“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it” runs the oft-quoted phrase by American philosopher George Santayana. Yet modern Europe, for all its economic woes and political squabbles, seems a world away from the war-torn continent of 1945. Little wonder then that to the younger generation of the 21st century, the events of the Second World War and of the Holocaust must seem as distant and improbable as a medieval fairy-tale. Indeed, in a recent survey, many British teenagers had not only never heard of the Holocaust, but associated the name Churchill not with Britain’s great wartime prime minister (whose funeral also occurred 50 years ago this week), but with a mechanical bulldog puppet of the same name used to advertise car insurance on TV.
It seems unthinkable, 70 years on from the fall of Nazism, that any European should still live in fear because of their religious faith: yet there is increasing evidence in recent months of how quickly the fragile status quo can unravel.
In the aftermath of the January terrorist attacks in Paris (during which four French Jews were killed in an attack on a kosher supermarket), British Jews have reported a sharp rise in anti-Semitism, with some openly admitting they are now afraid to attend synagogue. And it’s not just members of the Jewish faith that are experiencing increased religious intolerance. Islamophobia, too, is on the rise. Indeed, Muslim groups recently accused the British government of stoking the problem, after ministers wrote to imams asking them to explain “how Islam is compatible with being British’.
Fiyaz Mughal, director of Tell Mama, an organisation that monitors anti-Muslim attacks, said it had registered an increase in hostility since the Paris killings, with death threats and hate mail being sent to London mosques. The notion that people of any religious persuasion should feel unsafe in their country of birth is deeply troubling, and has prompted mainstream politicians on all shades of the political spectrum to move to reassure them. And so they should. For the path from tolerance and democracy to persecution and hate can be a much shorter route than many imagine. As Lottie can attest.
My meeting with her daughter ended with a story. When filmmaker Stephen Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List came out in 1993, Irma went to see it along with her mother. Spielberg’s extraordinary recreation of daily life in the Nazi death camps somehow managed to capture, in all its unimaginable horror, the workaday brutality and terror of daily life for those who lived and died there.
At the end of the film, and with the closing credits flitting across the screen, Irma wiped away her tears and looked across at her mother. “Why aren’t you crying?” she asked in consternation.
“Why should I?” replied her mother with a wry smile. “I’ve seen it before …”
Michael Simkins is an actor and writer based in London
On Twitter: @michael_simkins