Progress of a rebel freed from gaol

The young man who was released from Dartmoor Prison at the end of the First World War, and who would later be my grandfather, had been a radical even before he went in. It was what led him to the pacifism for which he was gaoled. And he emerged, after a year or two in the company of such men as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, even more radical than he went in.

Radical Nat on the right. On a postcard from
'yours rebelliously Henry B Offell'

A radical though not quite a Communist. My grandmother, Yetta, had joined the Party and had become quite an activist. My grandfather, Nat or Norman, did attend some meetings though he never joined. One of the meetings he went to was chaired by Yetta. She was an attractive young woman and he decided he wanted to get to know her better.

She had, however, emerged from the aftermath of the war a woman saddened well beyond her eighteen years. She’d been engaged to a young man who managed to survive the entire war, only to come home and succumbing to the terrible flu epidemic that followed. So,  when Nat approached her, Yetta was still recovering from a devastating loss. 

Did that make her more or less open to his advances? Perhaps a little of both. They were engaged relatively soon, but the road to marriage was a stormy one. She told me that on one evening they had such a row in a street on the way home that she tore off her engagement ring and threw it on the pavement at his feet, before storming off.

He, instead of following her at once, got down on his hands and knees and searched for the ring. It was a good ring and he wanted her to accept it. He could settle the argument later.

They were married in 1921. On 8 September, just one week before Yetta turned 21. A week later and she wouldn’t have needed her parents’ consent, but she insisted on getting it, though they were more than a little reluctant: Nat was from a far poorer background than hers, daughter as she was of a skilled craftsman, a shoemaker specialising in orthopaedic shoes for injured or otherwise deformed feet.

Yetta and Nat at their wedding in 1921

He’d picked up the profession in which he’d started before the war, lithography, and had reached a level of expertise such that his company asked him to go into sales and represent them to clients rather than simply do the lithographs himself. It meant that he was able at last to emerge from the backbreaking poverty in which he’d spent his childhood. He still got off his bus from and to home a stop early to save a penny on the fare, but he was soon earning enough to be able to clear the mortgage on a house within four years, something that’s practically unthinkable in England today. He moved his family into a modest house in the new outer London district of Hampstead Garden Suburb, where many Jews entering a middle-class existence were moving.

A Jewish boss of mine once said that to make a man a Conservative, you had to give him something to conserve. Rebellious Nat may once have been, but as the years rolled by, he found himself in ever greater sympathy with the British Establishment. Besides, when it came to the Second World War, he felt that the nature of an enemy led by Hitler meant that a Jew had to abandon pacifism and do what he could to overthrow that violently anti-Semitic regime.

He was too old for combat, but he could volunteer for the Air Raid Protection service, which he enthusiastically did. He knew what Air Raids meant, if only as a result of attempting to travel in to his office in the City of London one day, only to be turned back four stops before his on the Underground. The city had taken a pasting the night before and most of the buildings had been burned out, his company’s included. There was no way through to it.

So, at the end of the Second World War, unlike the First, Nat was far closer in sympathy to the mainstream of British society. And the process continued, notably after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. My grandparents were never practising Jews (a more religious uncle refused to visit them because they’d allowed bacon into their house), but their sympathies were with the Jews of Israel nonetheless. The result was a continued drift away from the radical Left to which they had both belonged at one time.

A good grandfather with his grandsons in the fifties
Just a bit more staid...

‘I’ve given up reading The Guardian,’ Yetta once told me to explain why she was taking the Conservative Daily Telegraph, ‘because the Guardian keeps writing pieces so critical of Israel.’

I haven’t the hard data to support my view, but it feels to me that this has been a trend in the Jewish community. Radical in the 1920s, strongly pro-Labour in the fifties and sixties, its centre of gravity is with the Tories today – perhaps their more liberal wing, but Tory nonetheless.

I’m not sure where they would stand on the scandal over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party today. I imagine it would only have been the last straw for them. Among those of us who remain linked with the Jewish community, however tenuously, only a minority stay loyal to Labour.

For my part, I wish we could recapture the time when Jews like my grandparents could be counted on to support the Left. But I regret still more that many Jews no longer feel comfortable in the Labour Party. I’d like to see the first problem solved, but I believe something will have died in Labour’s soul if it can’t solve the second.

Bride of Belsen

It takes a lot to survive a concentration camp, so to survive three is practically miraculous. All the more so if you live through a death march as well. If, finally, you turn that experience into a life-enhancing event, rather than a crushing blow, then you’re a remarkable person indeed.

That was the case of Gena Turgel who died earlier this month.

Gena Turgel meets the Queen at Buckingham Palace
on 28 May 2015

She was born Gena Goldfinger, on 1 February, in Krakow. That’s a wonderful, vibrant, exciting Polish city even today. Back then, it was little different, though in those days some of that vibrancy was doubtless supplied by the city’s large and active Jewish community – then some 60,000 strong but down to 500 today.

When the Nazis occupied the city, Gena’s family was forced to give up its textile business and move into the newly designated ghetto. One of her brothers was shot there and another escaped, but no one heard from him again. From the ghetto, the survivors in the family were moved to Plaszow labour camp, made famous – or infamous – by the film Schindler’s List.

Her sister and brother-in-law were caught by the Nazis trying to smuggle food into the camp and executed by them.

From there, Gena was marched in 1944 to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but instead of being gassed was sent on a death march to the camp at Buchenwald. She survived that too, and was finally moved to Bergen-Belsen.

There she nursed Anne Frank through the typhus that killed her.

Appalling experiences that no human should suffer, especially when they are completely unnecessary and merely inflicted by other humans. That is, humans who have lost their humanity.

Fortunately, she didn’t lose hers. Among the first allied soldiers who liberated Bergen-Belsen was a young Jewish sergeant in the British Army, Norman Turgel. I assume he was really a Nathan, like my grandfather, who was also often called Norman by his gentile friends (or non-friends). Norman met Gena in the Infirmary. He apparently found her attractive enough to want to invite her to dinner.

The dinner was in a British Officers’ mess. The tables were covered with crisp white linen, shining cutlery and vases of flowers. For someone who had spent over five years in concentration camps, the sight was difficult to take in. But Norman had an explanation ready. 

‘This is your engagement party,’ he told her.

As Gena would tell the story, he had decided on first meeting her that they would marry. As indeed they did, within six months, and, by special permission, inside the Bergen-Belsen camp. That won her the title she kept ever after: the Bride of Belsen. She even had a silk wedding dress, made from a British army parachute.

Norman and Gena Turgel
He in battledress, she in the parachute-silk wedding dress

She spent the rest of her life working constantly to spread awareness of the Holocaust, its causes and its victims.

She died on 7 June this year, at the age of 95. Having lived a long life marked by early and terrible suffering. But which she turned to great value.

My thanks to the BBC, via my wife, who heard it on the radio. At a time when we have an Italian Interior Minister prepared to leave people to drown in the Med rather than let them land, and a US President who sees nothing wrong in forcibly separating children from parents and keeping them in cages, we badly need to be reminded of humans who kept their humanity.

It’s a wonderful relief.

The parachute-silk wedding dress
Preserved in the Imperial War Museum, London

Labour anti-Semitic crisis? What crisis?

My mother being Jewish makes me, naturally, Jewish. God-fearing or not. In Israel or in the diaspora.

It’s a law nearly as inescapable as the law of gravity.

That meant I was, from childhood, regularly exposed to Jewish humour. Broadly, there are two great categories of jokes about Jews. On the one hand, there are those told by anti-Semites which target the supposed meanness and deviousness of Jews, and are desperately unfunny because they are so heavily marked by hatred. I shan’t be repeating any of them.

On the other hand, there are the jokes told by Jews about themselves. They highlight supposed characteristics of the Jew in a stereotype to which, I’m sure, no Jew really corresponds, but they are often brilliantly witty precisely because they are marked above all by wryness and a certain love.

For instance, a woman meets a young mother pushing a double buggy.

“Oh, what a lovely baby,” she says.

“Which one?” asks the mother, “the lawyer or the doctor?”

But one of my favourites concerns a mother with her son on a Tel Aviv bus. She keeps talking to her son in Yiddish even though the son always replies in Hebrew. Eventually, one of the other passengers turns to the mother and points out:

“Madam, your son is a citizen of the state of Israel. Our official language is Hebrew. You should be encouraging him to speak it.”

“Yes,” she replies, “but I don’t want him to forget he’s Jewish.”

I like that joke because of a profound truth at its core. There is a particular kind of Jewishness characterised, above all, by European Jewry with its Yiddish-speaking roots. That community reacted to persecution by loathing all persecution. It voted massively left of centre, it proclaimed a doctrine of tolerance, it was in the best and deepest sense of the word, liberal.

It would not have dreamed of believing that a Palestinian, as a Palestinian, was entitled to fewer rights than anyone else. It would have laughed to scorn the idea that such a Palestinian might be persecuted by a Jew. “We, the perpetual victims of racism, to be perpetrators of racism ourselves?” 

Sadly, that is a set of attitudes that seems out of vogue in Israel. The nation that speaks Hebrew is far less imbued with those values, which I cherish, than the nation that spoke Yiddish once was. It makes Israel far less the home of certain kinds of Jews than it might have been.

But not all Jews find their home in Israel anyway. The Jewish Agency apparently believes that something like 5.3m Jews, just 100,000 fewer than in Israel, live in the US. It used to be said that many American Jewish families would of course eventually settle in Israel, showing solidarity with their brethren there – but only once the sons were past military age.

There was also a story in the community about a suggestion that American Jews might be given their own soveriegn state within US territory, but it had to be turned down when no one could be found to agree to serve as Ambassador to Israel.

Right now, the papers are proclaiming that the British Labour Party is suffering a crisis of anti-Semitism. Jim Callaghan, Labour Prime Minister in the 1970s, once famously said of some economic difficulties the country was suffering, “crisis? What crisis?” He was made to pay for the words by a self-righteous press that found he wasn’t taking them seriously enough.

I’m inclined, today, to say “anti-Semitism crisis? What crisis?”

Naz Shah in the House of Commons:
the MP now suspended from the Labour Party

Naz Shah was elected Labour MP for Bradford West in 2015, wresting the seat back from a particularly unsavoury individual, George Galloway who took the traditionally Labour seat three years earlier. She has now been suspended from the Labour Party for supposed anti-Semitism. Among other things, it seems that in 2014 she posted a tweet suggesting that the whole population of Israel could be moved to the US, and the problem in the region would be sorted.

It may not have been particularly funny. But was it any worse than the joke, from inside the Jewish community, about no US Jew wanting to serve as Ambassador to Israel? Or anything like as deadly as some of the barbs that have been thrown our way down the ages?

Why aren’t we able simply to grin, shrug our shoulders and walk away from it?

We are in the closing stages of a US Primary Election campaign which is likely to see Donald Trump win the Republican nomination. This man has said that he would be prepared, as President, to exclude all Muslims from entering the US for a period.

It strikes me that this kind of Islamophobia, which extends far beyond Trump, is much more pernicious than the occasional outbursts of anti-Semitism that we see. And when it comes to offensive remarks, it is far more brutal than her weak joke.

We Jews of the diaspora used to represent some pretty admirable values, which we’ve rather lost recently – most British Jews today vote Tory. But it feels to me that we’re also in danger of losing our sense of perspective. And worse still, the sense of humour which we retained even through the Holocaust.

Now that would be a truly lamentable loss.

Could the Jews have shot their way out of the Holocaust? Or, Ben Carson and self-caricature in politics.

When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, Tom Lehrer announced that he would give up singing satirical songs. In a world in which that could happen, he felt there was no longer any place for satire.

Well, it’s curious to discover that things could decline still further from that low point. The US is once again providing us with a wonderful new political spectacle.

The front runner for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party – that’s the party of Abraham Lincoln, mind – is a man who prides himself on having dragged himself up by the bootstraps from colossal wealth to even more colossal wealth. Donald Trump is one of those characters who like to throw the abusive comments out there, and then apologise for any offence they may have caused, but in such a way as to suggest that their targets (in Trump’s case, principally women) are themselves at fault for lack of a sense of humour.

Behind him, in second place for the nomination, is Ben Carson. It’s a commonplace to describe something as not being brain surgery, as a way of saying that there’s nothing more complex or requiring more intelligence. Carson gives the lie to that facile notion. He’s a neurosurgeon but seems to show that either you can operate on brains without having huge capacity in your own, or having used up so much of your brain for the surgery, you have too little left for politics.

Ben Carson: proof that even if you operate on brains,
you don't necessarily make great use of your own

I suppose the clue was provided by Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted about Carson “what about a real black president who can properly address the racial divide?” Ah, yes. Carson is a real black, unlike the present occupant of the White House.

Murdoch has since said he was sorry for the tweet, proving that Trump isn’t the only exponent of the late, empty apology. 

In any case, if Murdoch likes Carson, that’s probably enough to make his candidacy deeply suspect. Carson has helped us out, anyway, and put the question beyond all doubt. First of all, we had his comment that no Muslim should run for President because Islam is inconsistent with the US Constitution. The US Constitution was written by men such as Madison and Jefferson for whom few principles mattered as much as completely equal rights between religions. Perhaps Carson hadn’t found the time to work much on the Constitution, between reading the medical journals.

No comment went so far, however, in proving the nature of the man than his crass comment, that had there not been gun control in Germany, the Jews might have been able to prevent the Holocaust happening. This is linked to the strange reasoning that the huge numbers of guns available in the US keeps people safe, against all the evidence (for example in 45 school shootings this year alone) that they put huge numbers at serious risk.

Even without that illogic, the Carson comment is based on extraordinary ignorance. There was resistance by Jews during the Holocaust, even armed resistance, most notably in the Warsaw Ghetto. And how did that work out? Inevitably, civilians – even with guns – were no match for a trained army with heavy weapons. Had the Russians intervened to support them, they might have won, but the Red Army stood still and waited while the Wehrmacht polished off the Jewish resistance. The mere possession of guns is far from enough.

Still. One wouldn’t expect Carson to know that. He belongs to the Tom Lehrer school of politicians or institutions that satirise themselves. Except that in his case, he’s more of a caricature than a satire.

Countdown to War: the Postscript – what did World War One achieve?

What struck me most as I was preparing the Countdown to War series was how little ordinary people, of the time, must have known about the impending catastrophe.

I based myself on two newspapers: for weekdays the Manchester Guardian, now simply the Guardian; for Sundays the Observer, now the Guardian’s sister paper, though then entirely independent and with a distinct stance: much less friendly towards the Liberals, to say nothing of Labour, much friendlier towards the Conservatives, and, as war approached, as firmly convinced that Britain had to join in on the Russian and French side as the Manchester Guardian was convinced the country should stay out.

For quite a time, those papers gave little indication of what was coming. For a week or so after the assassination in Sarajevo of the Austrian Grand Duke on 28 June 1914, there was much talk about it – but mostly as a tragedy in itself and a sign of the terrible chaos in that part of the world. Between the 6th of July and the 21st, there was little mention of any consequences, which is one of the reasons I was able to spend so much time talking about other matters: the descent towards civil war in Ireland, suffragette agitation vote (and the cruelty of the authorities towards those they arrested, including force feeding), trouble in Mexico, trouble in the Balkans, but well to the south of Sarajevo: Turks massacring Greeks or being massacred by them.

Even from the 21st, when it first emerged that Austria-Hungary was going to present a Diplomatic Note to the Serbs demanding action over the assassination, it was only gradually apparent where events were heading: the increasingly bitter tone of exchanges between Vienna and Belgrade, then war, and only in the last few days, the mobilisation of Russia followed by that of Germany, and finally German military action against both Russia and France.

Clearly, those in political power had a much clearer idea of what was happening. They knew of the pressure that Germany was putting on Austria-Hungary to push its quarrel with Serbia towards war: Germany felt that it needed a war to change the balance of power in Europe, to loosen the stanglehold it felt Russia and France had over it, and to emerge as the leading power of the Continent, which it believed was its rightful place.

Even in government, though, I’m sure the realisation of the extent of the calamity to which they were heading only slowly became apparent. Both at the top and the bottom of society, Britain and the other powers sleepwalked into war. And I hope that came through from the series.

A catastrophic war

Slowly, then, and as though unconscious, Britain drifted with much of Europe into a war of unprecedented ferocity. 

What did the war achieve? And, in particular, what did Britain’s involvement achieve?

Germany had clearly gambled on Britain remaining neutral. With Britain on the sidelines, Germany might be able to knock out France quickly, as had happened in the previous war of 1870-71. That would leave it free to take on Russia, much the larger power, but with forces that were no match for the Germans. The war might have lasted a short time and ended in German victory.

Germany would have emerged as the dominant power on the Continent.

British involvement made that dream impossible. As a result, Germany was defeated and forced to accept humiliating and punitive conditions. That made the Second World War almost inevitable, as none of the conflicts that had pushed Germany into war in the first place had been resolved. In 1945, after defeating Germany for the second time, the Allies, this time dominated by the United States, insisted on a different kind of settlement. Instead of having to pay reparations to the victors, Germany received huge volumes of aid from them. Germany rebuilt, and structures grew up in Europe which far from denying German aspirations, gave them the opportunity to achieve them by peaceful means.

Leading to Germany emerging as the dominant power on the Continent.

Had Britain stayed out, that dominance would have been achieved more quickly. It might, indeed, have been a great deal harsher, enforced by military might. But – a hundred years on? Might the authoritarian aspects of German rule not have softened? Might the defeated nations not have risen again and obtained autonomy within some kind of European grouping of the nations? A kind of European Union?

What that different history would have done is avoid the millions of deaths of the two world wars. A quick defeat of Russia might have avoided the Russian revolution. We might never have seen a Nazi regime take power. We might have seen no Holocaust. And if the foundation of the state of Israel was a response by Western powers to the failure of Europe to accommodate its Jews, there might have been no Israel and the Middle East might have looked profoundly different today.

However, that isn’t what happened. Speculating about what might have been, playing with counterfactuals, is fun but ultimately fruitless. You know the story of the traveller in Ireland asking the way to Dublin and being told, “oh, if I was going to Dublin, I wouldn’t start from here.” We are where we are, we got here the way we got here, and we have to find a way forward from where we really are, not where we’d like to be.

Still. It does leave me wondering whether the Manchester Guardian might not have been right. Getting involved in that catastrophic war was perhaps one of the most disastrous decisions Britain ever took.

Remember that, during all the celebrations of victories and defeats in the next four years.

Anschluss: Nazi crushing of a victim or willing meeting of accomplices?

75 years ago today German troops marched across the border into Austria, and were greeted with delirious joy by a large proportion of the population there.

A German soldier during the Anschluss
Note the air of devastation on the faces of the Austrian civilian population

This was the 1938 Anschluss or union of Austria with the Nazi Third Reich. Someone who wasn’t cheering was a late friend of mine, Bob, who had the misfortune of belonging to the Vienna Jewish community. Within months, he and his friends and relatives were out of work. They spent their days on their doorsteps, chatting and wondering how they were going to keep body and soul together.

‘I’m always amused about the talk today about household debts. We had no debts. You have to be rich to have debts. If you have no money, nobody will lend you any.’

Like a great many Viennese Jews, his family would queue daily at various embassies asking for visas that would get them out. He told me about the sheer arrogance of the staff at the British Consulate, who would treat them contemptuously, knocking papers out of their hands if the staff felt they hadn’t been completed correctly, and giving priority to those who had the money to bribe them.

Eventually, Bob and one of his sisters got out to Britain. They were the only members of his family to survive the war: the others were all Holocaust victims.

It took years to screw up the courage to go back to Vienna, and when he did he wasn’t impressed: ‘you can still cut the anti-Semitism with a knife’, he told me.

Eventually, he took the plunge and travelled to Germany itself, the heart of the darkness that had blighted his life. He went to Bonn.

‘I couldn’t believe it. What a great country!’

He tried to get back every year.

So – what was the difference between the two countries?

Some years ago I read David Art’s The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria which traced the way each country had addressed it Nazi past. It took a while for Germany to decide it had to face up to what had happened, but since the 60s they have made sustained efforts to analyse and understand. One of the best Holocaust films I’ve seen was a German TV reconstruction of the Wannsee conference, where the third Reich formallyl adopted the final solution, the extermination of the Jews. Reconstructed from minutes and eye-witness accounts, it lasted exactly 100 minutes, just as the conference did: an hour and two-thirds to decide to exterminate 12 million people (yes, they only achieve 50% success).

When a neo-Nazi movement, the Republikaner, emerged in Germany in the 80s and 90s, all the mainstream parties unanimously combatted them: the right made no attempt to work with them or adopt their programme; the left wing made no attempt to exploit the possible splits in the right-wing vote. The result? The Republikaner got nowhere and an electorate which realised they were never going to deliver stopped voting for them.

Austria maintained the fiction that, far from being a willing accomplice of Nazi Germany, it had been its first victim. This comfortable illusion prevented their having to face up to any moral dilemmas. As a result, their neo-Nazis, the Austrian Freedom Party, became a major force, rising to the point where it became the junior party in a governing coalition.

At root, the problem was that Austria preferred to concentrate on the military invasion that took place in the Anschluss, which made Austrians victims, rather than the warmth of the welcome they gave the German forces, which would have made them accomplices.

So on the anniversary of the Anschluss of 1938, there’s a moral for us all: if we want to deal with the contamination that bigotry and intolerance represent, we have to face up to it, and isolate it and prevent its getting anywhere near power.

Whether it’s the Tea Party in the States, UKIP in Britain or the Front National in France, that’s a lesson that all of us who are committed to democracy need to learn and actively apply.

On this anniversary of that grim event, I’ll raise a glass this evening to the memory of Bob. I know he would have agreed fervently with the need to learn that lesson.