We should build a memorial to those we failed

Some of the best people I know have worked incredibly hard in pursuit of a noble project. They have raised money, laboured over blueprints, argued in committees, taken on vested interests, put in the long and thankless hours, all to help overcome the terrible amnesia that a loss of a generation entails. The result of all that toil — the proposed Westminster Holocaust memorial — went before an independent planning inquiry this week. Perhaps one should sit this one out. Who wants to cause their friends pain? Or to give comfort to some of those whose opposition to the project is either purely selfish or might even be something worse? David Cameron supports it, Sir Keir Starmer supports it, politicians of good faith support it.

Maybe. But every time I look at the plans for the Memorial, where it is to be sited, how it is to look, what it is supposed to do, my heart sinks. In a much-loved, peaceful green space next to Houses of Parliament, most of what is now grass will be occupied or dwarfed by what looks like the yellowed skeleton of a whale. Far from drawing me in, and taking me to the space underneath, it repels me. It shouts at me. It tells me to go away.

Were this Berlin, or Vienna, or even Warsaw such an aggressive act of reclamation would feel justified. The 20,000 square metres of grey stone slabs near the Brandenburg Gate are a physical reminder of the impossible scale of the murder planned by the men who inhabited neighbouring offices. Walk a few more yards and you’re at the site of Tiergartenstrasse 4, where the domestic euthanasia programme originated, and where the people who would later run the extermination camps were trained.

In towns and cities across what was occupied Europe stolpersteine and plaques testify to the intimate links between real people and the paces from which they were disappeared. In Budapest, along the Danube they have placed metal shoes, to mark the place where Jews were shot and thrown into the river by local Nazis. These then are to be understood as works of atonement as much as commemoration. “We did this”, they say, “or, at least, our grandparents did. Let us not be like them.”

But what do we in Britain have to atone for, when it comes to the Holocaust? What lessons do we have to learn? After persecuting them for 200 years, England expelled the Jews in 1290. As with slavery we have been inclined to see subsequent history mostly as a vindication of our liberality and commitment to freedom. The greatest of national sins — the Amritsar massacre, the Kenyan prison camps or the Bengal famine — took place somewhere far-off.

A typical example is the lovely statue of young Jewish refugees at Liverpool Street station. It commemorates the 10,000 children brought over in the Kindertransport, escaping a Holocaust that had not yet begun but whose logic was well underway. Good for us in taking them, good for them in coming, is the message. Let’s maybe do it again.

But as Rosie Whitehouse — whose new book about Jews being prevented in getting to Palestine, The People on The Beach, is published this month — has written about that statue: “Maybe it is time to erect an empty plinth alongside it and encourage our schoolchildren to ask their teachers, ‘Why did their parents not come with them?’”

In Bernard Wasserstein’s book about European Jewry on the cusp of the war, On The Eve, he recalls how the letters of those parents are “poignant sometimes almost unbearably moving documents” representing for the recipients “sometimes the only physical reminders of their families”.

What are the lessons of the Holocaust and indeed of other genocides for the people of modern Britain? What is the purpose of this remembering? I think a new memorial needs to do the following things: it needs to connect emotionally; it needs to tell the observer that both the victim and the perpetrator could have been you; it needs to say please never again and impart the determination that we never go back; it needs to honour the victims whose lives were so wantonly destroyed; it needs to say that this is what irrational hatred does. From first sight it needs to plant a seed in the individual mind of anyone encountering it. So they can go from why? how? To ah, I see.

In Britain, and especially in London at the heart of imperial government, this could be a memorial — or series of memorials, Antony Gormley style — to the Rejected Jew, to the human being we shut out, the person we failed to save or made excuses for not noticing. Something that speaks to you from the first moment you see it.

David Aaronovitch is a columnist for The Times