Let us never forget, or neglect, holocaust survivors | thearticle

As the youngest survivor, I am told, of the ghetto in Munkacs (then in Hungary and now in Ukraine), I ought to be grateful for the increasing prominence of Holocaust Memorial Day as part of

our national life and that of other countries. My life was saved on 4 May 1944 by a great aunt, who arranged for a Christian woman, Hadji Maria, to travel from Budapest with forged papers,

enter the ghetto on grounds of collecting money owed to her by Jews incarcerated there, and smuggle me out. Two months later, by that time a year old and thankfully too young to recall, I

found myself in the brickyard in a Budapest suburb used as an entrainment camp for Auschwitz — brickyards were frequently used for the purpose since they were situated near railway lines. A

recent trawl through the archives of the US War Refugee Board reveals that a senior official of the Swedish legation in Budapest (as a neutral country, Sweden was able to maintain a

diplomatic presence) visited the camp and was shocked by what he saw there. Weeks later, he told an American official based in Sweden what he had seen and Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of

State issued a protest, followed by an indignant denial from the Hungarians that they would ever permit such ill-treatment. By then, the thousands trapped in the brickyard had long been

despatched to Auschwitz, where most were gassed and a minority were selected for slave labour. All, that is, except a few daring persons who had dared to escape from the lightly guarded

brickyard and some 80 people fortunate enough to be on a list of those to be included in a ransom deal — rightly controversial — between a Zionist rescue committee and Adolf Eichmann. Though

dubious about the wisdom of the Kasztner-Eichmann negotiations, I cannot but be personally grateful since I was among the saved. That almost every survivor of the ghettos and camps has an

exceptional story is no coincidence. How else would they be able to have lived? This year marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army on 27 January 1945. It

is likely to be the last round-number memorial day in the lifetime of most remaining survivors. The ceremonies have been particularly high-profile, not only today in London but also last

week in Jerusalem, where a remarkable array of world leaders and heads of state, ranging from Vladimir Putin to Prince Charles, gathered last week. My wife has gently and justifiably chided

me for my discomfort about the events being staged on the ground that, for all her own criticism of some of them, they are better than the alternative — allowing the Holocaust to be

forgotten. It has been a relief to read an editorial in the _Jerusalem Post _and a piece in _The Times of Israel_ expressing reservations very similar to mine. The twin regrets being

expressed in Israel are, first of all, that the gathering of 49 heads of state and other national leaders in Jerusalem was being used by Israel’s premier Benjamin Netanyahu for political

purposes ahead of forthcoming Israeli elections and against the background of his quest for immunity from prosecution for various corruption charges. Second, that it was being used by the

United States as the backdrop to announcing hawkish proposals for a settlement of the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict heralded as the “deal of the century”, and that the speeches

by national leaders, in particular Vladimir Putin, inevitably gave interpretations of the Second World War adapted to national claims. For me the most important qualm was that the razzmatazz

placed the emphasis on the great and the good, at the expense of Holocaust survivors. With the notable and gratifying exception of Prince Charles, whose address mentioned the survivors

before the standard “Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Presidents, ladies and gentlemen,” it was as if the Jerusalem gathering were a continuation of the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Within the United Kingdom, Holocaust Memorial Day has been marked not only by a main event at a venue kept secret for security reasons, but by some 10,000 local meetings as well as school

assemblies. More effort has been made to give a role to survivors. But the very character of the memorial project inevitably marginalises the main body of elderly victims and provides a

platform for political and religious leaders and other well-known personages. Perhaps I am over-sensitive to this, because I attended the gathering twenty years ago held in Stockholm at

which some thirty heads of state and of government set up the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and established International Holocaust Memorial Day. It was important to me to

attend, since a London-based group of Auschwitz survivors had asked me to assist them in their negotiations with the German authorities to establish that their slave labour had been illegal

— a claim then fiercely denied before US courts by the German Foreign Ministry. This meant that, if successful, they would become entitled to a measure of payment for their toil, equal at

least to the payments to which members of the SS who had served in Auschwitz and their families had been entitled. In a distressing process, during which the survivors were let down by most

of their class-action lawyers (who stood to gain contingency fees if they agreed to settle), by established Jewish organisations, by the US authorities, as well as by successive Israeli

governments, the lawyers made an insultingly small settlement with the German government and major corporations which had employed slave labourers under the Nazis. Minimal payments were

contingent on survivors who accepted them signing away any future legal rights. It was to protest against this outcome that I came to the Stockholm gathering. Not surprisingly, the UK

Foreign and Commonwealth Office was not keen to include me in its delegation, despite my close associations with it. If refused, I warned, I’d be obliged to come as a delegate for a small

former Communist nation. And so it came to pass. The Stockholm Forum was probably the largest diplomatic and political gathering to discuss Holocaust remembrance before last week’s World

Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem. As usual, an orchestra played music composed by Jewish prisoners in Theresienstadt before their eventual transport to Auschwitz. As usual, the late Elie Wiesel

spoke. He was a powerful representative and symbol of the survivors and, by then, clearly thought of himself as on a par with the presidents, premiers and royals. The following week, Wiesel

mentioned, he’d be addressing the Bundestag. In my mind were the interests and silent sufferings of ordinary survivors, who had formed their protest group in London precisely because they

felt they were being ignored by self-appointed survivor leaders. Though I do not wish to ignore care projects offered to elderly victims of the Nazis (including, for example in Los Angeles,

preferential access to the main Jewish old age home, meals on wheels and a lively social centre), their psychological and financial problems all too often have been relegated. The survivors

most often lauded are those who have been willing and able to act as witnesses on visits to schools and public gatherings. It was the feeling that victims of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen too

often were living in poverty in Israel that, thankfully, has been promoted recently in the Israeli press. There tends to be a division among former inmates of the concentration and death

camps. For a small number of leading figures in the survivor community, the priority has been to establish major museums, memorial events and teaching schemes. For others, mundane, but

crucial, welfare needs have been even more pressing. It is well established that Jews who emerged from the horrors of Second World War Europe were able to repress their traumas while they

married, raised families and had working lives. With age, those traumas tended to affect them again. This has applied not only to active members of Jewish communities, but even more to those

with partial Jewish ancestry or non-Jewish victims. They emerged with uncertain identities and a lack of organised support. For Jews who remained in Europe after the War and who continued

to live in and were trapped in Communist-ruled countries, there were special problems. Jewish or partly-Jewish adults who had managed to avoid death, and who typically married non-Jews,

frequently would disown or even conceal their heritage from their children to save them from suffering and prejudice. In my home town, here in the UK, a group of largely non-Jewish sons and

daughters of Jewish or half-Jewish Holocaust survivors sometimes meets to discuss their mutual condition. A rarely mentioned issue is the guilt and shame felt by those who managed to live

only because, at one time or another, they did something dishonourable. Two of my main friends in the Campaign for Jewish Slave Labour Compensation eventually trusted me sufficiently to tell

me. In one case, the cruel act had been committed by someone in the same survivor group. Whom could he tell? Did he really wish to dishonour the person who had committed the deed in the

extreme conditions of the ghetto or the camp, a person now head of a family with children who likely knew nothing about it? A further source of trauma was that those emerging from Europe

after the War now report that they were treated as soiled goods in their new countries. In Israel, they were called names such as “soap” and derided for coming from communities whose members

had gone like sheep to the slaughter. “Soap” referred to fanciful stories that the Nazis had used the body fat of the murdered to make soap. The focus of Holocaust Memorial Day is on

teaching the general public and, in particular, schoolchildren. It is to place continued awareness of the Holocaust in the public mind. However worthy is this aim, it is wrong that the human

needs of those who went through the Holocaust do not gain more attention, especially in their final years. It is notable that Prince Charles, whose grandmother lived in Nazi-occupied Athens

and who risked her life to hide a Jew, has seen the Holocaust and its annual remembrance in personal terms. I hope he realises how much this means.