Mick Hartley

Howard Jacobson at the JC on remembering Auschwitz:

I don’t expect everybody to agree that the only real subject of art since 1945 has been the genocide – I mean the actual genocide of the Jews, not the politically manufactured genocides of which Jews are now routinely accused – and the only testing philosophical question, “How did that ever happen?” But if we thought we’d had enough – and I often told myself I had – the return of Jew-hate to the streets and campuses of Western cities is a harsh reminder that we need to restart the conversation. Not from wherever it was we left off, but from the beginning. That repeated mantra – “never again” – appears a fatuous hope in the face of the widespread callous ignorance as to what it was the first time round.

It has been said often enough that Holocaust denial takes many forms, from the brute mathematics of those who jotted down the dimensions of Auschwitz to prove that it was no bigger than Butlin’s, and probably more fun, to historians who claim to have found evidence that Jews had done it to themselves to justify invading Palestine. Of all forms of denialism, the worst minimises the slaughter by arguing that Jews were always just Nazis in waiting anyway, thereby forfeiting in advance the world’s pity, first by showing none themselves, and then by claiming what we might call “Shoah exemption”.

I have yet to meet a Jew in real life – as opposed to on a panel or at a literary festival – who believes that what was done to his grandparents in Bergen-Belsen gives him the right to murder children in Gaza, but this passes as psychology in some quarters, especially where Jews of a certain over-educated sort get together and squirm whenever Jews without degrees and from the wrong side of the tracks make a dog’s dinner of defending Israel. […]

One way or another, the lesson of the last 15 months is that the greatest calamity to have befallen a people – to have befallen the Jews, anyway – remains unknown or disbelieved, no matter how often we recount it or how many schlock Holocaust novels people read. The Chartered Accountant of Auschwitz might while away a tedious hour, but it hasn’t brought knowledge or enlightenment.

The true story cannot be told often enough – not only as history of terrible events we are duty bound to commemorate, but as an honest reckoning with the aftermath. And we Jews have to stop being apologetic about repeating it.