| Sir Philip Bailhache, Bailiff of Jersey, speech, Holocaust Memorial Day 27th January 2009But what of Auschwitz, which attracts increasing numbers of visitors, although pilgrimage would perhaps not be the apt word? Why do people go there? I suppose there are many reasons, but the best reason is that there is no other place on earth where the enormity of man's capacity for evil is so chillingly revealed. Auschwitz is why we are here, for this is the anniversary of the day in 1945 when the Russian army liberated the camp and the appalling truth of Hitler's genocide became known. Holocaust deniers, including the odd bishop, should in my view be compelled to go there.
The liberation of the camp was described by Eva Schloss, who has visited Jersey several times, in her book Eva's Story; it is a compelling and haunting tale. She was sent to Auschwitz from Amsterdam with her family in May 1944 when she was 14; they had been in hiding but had been betrayed. She and her mother were separated from her brother and her father, neither of whom survived. She describes how, shortly before the liberation of the camp, her mother was taken with another Jewish woman Loretta by a Kappo from their work block to another block where a consignment of women were about to be taken to the gas chambers. Her mother takes up the story.
"When we emerged from the barrack I was struck by the brilliance of the full moon. It shone down out of a vast empty sky and bathed our pale flesh in a pure white light. The beauty of the night was in stark contrast to the ugly scene ahead of me. I was in a line moving silently and without protest towards a female SS officer who sat at a small table with a list in front of her. As each woman stepped up to the table the SS officer checked the number of her tattoo against the list. Behind her, the lorries waited to take us to the gas chambers. First, however, it was necessary to check that the cargo was correct. In the allocation of death, as in all things, the Germans were very precise.
Resigned to their fate, the line of women moved with dignity towards the lorries until suddenly one prisoner called out feebly, Frau Obersturmführerin, I am the daughter of a German officer who fell in the First World War. The officer shrugged. I am only 16, pleaded another girl, ... please let me live. But there was no emotion on the face of the officer who continued to check her lists. This is really the end for me, I thought. ... In front of me was Loretta and as she came to the table she said boldly, Frau Obersturmführerin we two do not belong here. They have taken us from another block. Is that so?, the officer looked up. What are your numbers ? A/6893. And I am A/5271, I said. Indeed ? The pencil was moving down the paper. I felt sick with fear as numbers were checked. The officer frowned and turned on the Kappo. Have these two women been brought here separately ? She was furious at the contravention of orders. I had to make up my numbers, the Kappo whined. I had to have a full consignment. The SS officer sprang up and hit her so violently that she fell grovelling to the ground. ...As the lorry drove off, we were taken to another barrack. During the night the crematorium burned for many hours and flames shot from the chimneys into the clear dark sky."
The cards of fate deal death to some and life to others. By a melancholy quirk the liberation of Auschwitz may indirectly have caused the death of one of the Jersey people whose memory we are shortly to honour outside. The SS experts driven from Auschwitz moved west. Unmoved by the prospect of imminent defeat, they continued with messianic fervour the work of extermination which Himmler had ordered. At Ravensbrück, where 25,000 female prisoners were being held, a makeshift gas chamber 29 feet by 15 feet was constructed next to the crematorium. It was possible to squeeze in 150 women at a time. In that gas chamber, we learn from Paul Sanders' book The Ultimate Sacrifice, Louisa Gould, weak and ill from starvation, whose only crime had been to shelter an escaped slave worker, met her end in February 1945.
When I was honoured by being asked to give the first address on Holocaust Memorial Day years ago I said that the purpose of the ceremony was twofold. First, it was to ensure that the message was passed on and that the evil of the Holocaust was never forgotten. And secondly, it was to draw lessons from the past, and to promote ideals of tolerance and understanding which are the hallmarks of a civilized society. I believe that those purposes are important and perennial. Never before, certainly in Europe, has a racist creed so corrupted the heart of great nations with such devastating results. We must not forget. The HMD Committee has done great things, but as an Island can we do more ? There is some teaching of the Holocaust in schools and two Jersey students will be visiting Auschwitz under the aegis of the Holocaust Education Trust in April. Hopefully funds may be found to increase that number next year. If a picture is worth ten thousand words, a visit to Auschwitz is probably worth ten thousand fading photographs.
What lessons can we draw ? A couple of years ago Senator Cohen, the Connétable and I were in Bad Wurzach at the invitation of the mayor watching the Blutfest, a procession of horses and riders from towns and villages from every corner of southern Germany. It was an extraordinary and magnificent spectacle of riders young and old, of horses of every size and description, all immaculately dressed, polished and presented. It was the volk of Nazi mythology. They appeared proud, decent, upstanding people, just like us. Yet their parents and grandparents allowed the evil plant of racialism to grow in their midst and eventually to suffocate them. They looked the other way, drew their curtains, closed their hearts to normal emotions, and pulled down the shutters of the mind. Eventually, too many of them came to embrace, at least in part, the poisonous antisemitism and racist myths that cascaded down incessantly from their leaders. And of course they were afraid. All leaders, but especially political leaders, have a duty to take care about the language they use in talking about minority groups. Any nation subjected to a stream of hate- filled propaganda will eventually turn upon the object of the hatred, as happened not only in Germany in the 1930s but in Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere more recently.
In Jersey we were fortunate. Bailiff Coutanche and the Superior Council were not quislings. Amongst other things they refused to register the relevant German order so that here, I think uniquely in German occupied territory, Jews were not made to wear the hated yellow star. And when things got more difficult, there were some heroes who hid and protected Jewish people and of course slave workers too. It is a pity that a recently published interview in the local paper should have given, in ignorance I am sure, such a misleading account of the treatment of the Jews during the Occupation.
We cannot teach people to be heroes. But we can teach children to understand how the bullying and hatred or disdain of minorities, and discrimination against people who are different in some way, are the first steps on the road to Auschwitz. Stand up to hatred is the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day this year. If we can teach young people to challenge any racist talk or attitudes, and to show respect for others, irrespective of race, gender orientation or religion, we will all have learned the lesson of Auschwitz. Personal responsibility is the key, and we can then hope with reason that as a community we will never be faced with impossible moral dilemmas.
My wife and I saw a film last week called The Reader. It was a good film and I shall not spoil it for those who might want to watch it. But in one memorable court-room scene the SS guard who is on trial for war crimes is challenged as to how in the death camp at Auschwitz she could select, time after time, 10 women and children for transport to the gas chambers. "I had to do it. It was my job," she tells the judge – "what would you have done ?" There is no reply from the judge. It is a good question. What would we have done ? |
