OPINION: A barmitzvah, two survivors and the unbreakable chain of memory
As personal recall fades, physical memorials will become ever more important
Alex Brummer is a Jewish News columnist and the City Editor, Daily Mail
At my grandson Benjamin’s bar mitzvah recently, there was an unexpected guest. My 97-year-old Aunt Sussie, my father’s youngest sister and a survivor of the horrors of Auschwitz and Belsen, was brought to Shul by her carer and daughter. She and my first cousin Sheindy, also a survivor, who I had visited earlier the same week, not only displayed a fighting spirit but also provide living testimony to the barbarism of the Shoah.
The barmitzvah also reminded me of the golden chain of Judaism. When Benjamin read from the Torah at Western Marble Arch synagogue and put on his tefillin for the first time on the Thursday before his official bar mitzvah it brought many memories flooding back. Some three decades earlier my late father Michael (z’’l), a refugee from 1930s war torn Europe, had stood at the same Bimah as my son Gabriel chanted.
He too had a biblical scale story. As a young Zionist trained naval officer he was turned back from pre-Israel Palestine by the British. He eventually found refuge in Britain, has been a witness to events which one fears are fading into history. The movie industry does its best, to keep memories of tribulations alive with titles such as The Brutalist and Zone of Interest. But maintaining the lambent flame of memory becomes ever harder.
As personal recall fades physical memorials will become ever more important. London has a brilliant exhibit on events leading to the Shoah, how it happened and its aftermath (largely due to the donations of sanctioned oligarch Roman Abramovich) at the Imperial War Museum. It has a superb documentary repository at the Weiner Library. And for those, with an exploratory bent, there is a simple granite memorial of two boulders in a bed of gravel, to the six million in a quiet glade in Hyde Park.
But the UK still lacks a fitting and profound central London monument of the kind to be found in Berlin, Washington DC and other capital. Some 80-years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Britain and visitors of country are still deprived of a constant and ever-present reminder of ‘never again’ for future generations.
Britain’s planning laws, currently being bulldozed by Keir Starmer’s government, provide part of the answer. Deeper forces also have been at work. Indeed, the failure to deliver – until now – was the subject of a lengthy essay: ‘Why it is so hard to build a Holocaust Memorial in London?’ in the New Yorker magazine in January of this year.
Finally, after a decade of intransigence, disputation and sheer bloody-mindedness the House of Lords will get to grips, in detail, with the Holocaust Memorial Bill. Passage was never going to be easy. Each time I have written in favour of the memorial, as designed by architects Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad (creators of the National Museum of African History in Washington-) there has been a torrent of criticism.
One acquaintance in my local Jewish community took to a WhatsApp site for members to describe my advocacy of the proposed memorial as ‘Chillul Hashem’: a desecration of God’s name. Baroness (Ruth) Deech, a known opponent, wrote me a lengthy email saying how I should realise it would be much better to spend the funds on sustaining Holocaust education.
In my view it is not one or the other. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (of which I am a former trustee) already does a terrific job in that regard. Another Jewish peer Lord Carlyle argues that the memorial in Victoria Palace Gardens is an invitation to anti-Semitic daubing and demonstrations.
The veteran author and journalist Tom Bower suggests that the latest incarnation of the project is inadequate because of its diminished underground displays and failure to properly commemorate subsequent genocides. Another group of dissidents opposes it on aesthetic grounds arguing that the striking structure, of a series of rugged metal sails, is in the wrong place and plain ugly.
Be that as it may there is no shortage of Shoah study facilities in the UK from Nottingham to the Imperial War Museum. The industrial scale loss of Jewish lives and the sacrifice of the British people to the defeat of Nazi wickedness deserves remembrance in the heart of London.
My courageous, survivor relatives will not be with us for ever. The memory of their hardship and my grandparents who were burned in the ovens of Auschwitz, in their prime, deserves commemoration.
- Alex Brummer is City Editor of the Daily Mail
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