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My views on the subject of Holocaust Memorial Day are well known. We Jews do not need HMD to remind us just how close the Nazis came to wiping out the Jewish people. HMD has also (as I once predicted) been skilfully if spitefully manipulated by multifarious enemies of the Jewish people for their own anti-Jewish ends. I am thinking primarily of Islamists, Palestinian nationalists (and their British admirers) and neo-Nazis. I refuse invitations to HMD events and shield myself from the media extravaganza that inevitably accompanies them. But last week I broke this rule, deliberately.
Last week, HMD coincided with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Red Army. But, by 1944, Auschwitz and other death camps were already within easy reach of Allied bomber aircraft. On June 30, Chaim Weizmann led a delegation from the Jewish Agency to the Foreign Office asking that the railway lines from Budapest to Birkenau be bombed. Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden favoured the plan, but they were out-manoeuvred by Foreign Office officials, who argued that Comrade Stalin might not be pleased by such precipitate action and that the saving of Jewish lives in Hungary might lead to further "illegal" Jewish emigration to Palestine, which would not please Muslims throughout the British Empire. Besides (the officials argued), any attempt to bomb the death camps would divert the Allied war effort - which was to destroy the Nazi regime. The plan was dropped.
So, initially, the reason I broke my rule not to take part in HMD was to see whether any media outlet explained that lives at Auschwitz might have been saved, and its entire killing machine disrupted, but that the FO vetoed the idea. Well, none of the media outlets I watched and listened to did so. I'd like to say I was shocked. But I wasn't.
To put the matter in context, not one media outlet that I watched or listened to had the courage to make clear that successive British governments from 1933 to 1945 could have saved countless Jewish lives, but deliberately chose not to. Of course, individual British citizens - one thinks immediately of Sir Nicholas Winton (who happens to be Jewish, incidentally) and the late Frank Foley - made heroic efforts to save Jews from deportation. Foley, a Catholic and at that time passport control officer at the British embassy in Berlin, actually disobeyed the rules in order to give German Jews forged travel documents; he went into internment camps and hid Jews in his own home. None of Foley's work was done with the approval of the British government, whose overriding concern was to ensure that as few Jewish refugees as possible entered Britain or territories of the British Empire.
As for Mandate Palestine, this obvious escape route for Jewish victims of Nazism was severely restricted. In 1939, Neville Chamberlain's government issued a White Paper effectively ending the promise of the Balfour Declaration, endorsed by the League of Nations. And, once Germany had been defeated, the British did their damnedest to ensure Holocaust survivors did not reach Palestinian shores; some who attempted to do so were returned to the concentration camps from which they had fled.
The plan to bomb Auschwitz was dropped by officials
Little if any of this sordid story featured in last week's HMD extravaganza. One programme dwelt severely on the complicity of the French authorities in assisting the arrest and deportation (and, ultimately, murder) of French Jews following the fall of France. Of the complicity of Channel Islanders in the implementation of Nazi racial laws there was no mention. When British forces evacuated the Channel Islands in 1940, three Jewish women (Therese Steiner, Auguste Spitz, and Marianne Grünfeld) were excluded from the operation simply because they held Polish or German but not British nationality. In April 1942, they were deported to France and died in Auschwitz.
Much was made, last week, of the need not to forget. In this ambition I entirely concur. By all means let us remember. But for God's sake let us remember the whole story.
