Never Again!

It's always a happy day when I see that a new Ben Elton book has come out.  The latest, "Two Brothers" was no exception. In a year when the Borders Agency has stopped people in the street and at train stations because they looked as if they might be illegal immigrants, the Home Office has toured its own special hate campaign around on huge posters and the police have abused the powers given them by search warrants to harass, rob and humiliate an elderly Romani activist and his wife and others, it told such an instructive story.

We find ourselves in 1920s Berlin, and as the story unfolds, we see how the gathering horror that was Nazi Germany and its holocaust begins to take shape. The hounding and persecution of Jews begins with hate speech, progresses through spiteful and petty indignities and rises to a crescendo of agonisingly brutal bullying. Ben Elton writes with such immediacy and detail that the reader cannot doubt that he has meticulously researched his story.

By the end of the novel, we don't need to be told that many children like the two brothers of the title did not survive the Nazi era. The holocaust hangs over the scene all too tangibly.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Two-Brothers-Ben-Elton/dp/0552775312/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380231967&sr=1-1&keywords=ben+elton+two+brothers

I put this book down more determined than ever to say, at every opportunity, "This must not happen here!" But I also felt a dreadful sense of foreboding, because it seemed to me that we are already in the beginning stages of a process that is heading in the same direction.  I wonder how many of us will mark Holocaust Memorial Day on 27th January next year, and stand up to say, "Never Again"?

It has always seemed to me that the English believe it couldn't happen here.  I have always known it could. We may point to the successful assimilation of Jews into British life, but dig a little deeper, whether into history or into current affairs, and you will quickly see that murderous prejudice targets other, more vulnerable groups as well. The holocaust engulfed several groups of people who can all too easily become targets for random acts of violence as well as hate campaigns.  People with learning disabilities, for example, were used to test the efficiency of the Zyklon-B gas eventually used in the gas chambers. Homosexuals were also targeted, and so were Roma and Sinti Gypsies, who died in unknown numbers, possibly as many as half a million, in a forgotten and hidden genocide.

I say "hidden," because many of the state-sponsored murders were carried out without leaving written records. Men, women and children were simply rounded up, taken into the forests, made to dig graves, and then shot and buried. But state records do exist for some 200 Roma and Sinti children who were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The Buchenwald Railway project exists to preserve and honour their memory. http://www.dw.de/buchenwald-memorial-gives-names-to-sinti-and-roma-victims/a-16965403.  The German web site, "gedenksteine buchenwaldbahn" lets you enter any of the names you see on the memorial stones, and to find a brief biography of the child named. Most horribly, this story consists of bare details gleaned from official Nazi records, which have no humanity about them at all.  If you don't read German, you can just click on a tab to get an English translation. http://gedenksteine-buchenwaldbahn.de/630/

"Why do we want to remember these horrible things?" says a colleague of mine, who resists any remembrance of the holocaust. It's because we need to remind ourselves to say, "Never again!" loud and clear in our own time and our own country - before it's too late.