A tribute and a denunciation

Bob Wilsker was perhaps the warmest-hearted individual I’ve met. I remember sitting in the back of his car and seeing his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Surrounded by laugh lines, they sparkled with the friendliness that marked him and which said that he saw no strangers, only people he wanted to get to know.

And yet that warmth was in horrifying contrast to the coldness he had experienced as a young adult. A Jew, he had lived in Vienna for over a year under Nazi rule, between Hitler’s occupation of Austria in 1938 and Bob’s escape to Britain in 1939. One sister escaped with him. His other siblings, his parents, his extended family all disappeared with the vast majority of his community into the slaughterhouse of the Holocaust.

A man almost incapable of bitterness, I heard him make only one truly harsh judgement: of the British officials who would walk down the queue of Jews outside the British consulate in Vienna, offering help for payment. Or, in other words, selling entry visas.

Jews waiting for visas in Vienna
A matter of genuine life and death

Those who never received such visas, like most of Bob’s family, were under sentence of death. And the sentence would be carried out within a couple of years. It has always struck me as one of the most shameful features of British history that our country took so few when so many were in such peril.

The car drive on which I was so struck by Bob’s eyes was to attend a session in a criminal court, where we tried, merely by our presence, to support a young man charged with public order offences for having demonstrated rather too vigorously against Britain’s nuclear weapon policies. Bob was very much a man of the centre-Left, opposed to all forms of racism, to militarisation, to political repression. He was, naturally, a Labour supporter.

Were he still alive today, I think he might have been a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. But he would equally have been demanding that Corbyn move in a great deal more decisive way, and far more rapidly, to extirpate, once and for all, any trace of antisemitism in the Labour Party.

But I think another issue would have shocked him still further. I think he would have found the behaviour of Israel increasingly unbearable. The use of live ammunition against civilian protestors, which led to the death of sixteen Palestinians and the wounding of dozens more would, I’m sure have sickened him.

As would have the sight of Israel preparing to deport political refugees. Many, above all from Eritrea and Sudan, have managed to make it to Israel. Large numbers have been sent to live in south Tel Aviv, much to the unhappiness of the local, Israeli population. Now it looks as though the government may start deporting these unwelcome migrants.

Warm-hearted Bob only showed resentment when he talked about the closed doors that Britain put up to people in peril for their lives. He hated it that some individuals took advantage of that state of affairs to enrich themselves. Above all, he could never accept that it was reasonable to let so many die because we were simply uncomfortable to take them in.

The discomfort was, of course, an expression of what we call xenophobia: dislike of the proximity of those are in some sense different from us.

Those people were Jews. And now the Jewish state is showing the same lack of compassion and fellow-feeling to those who find themselves, today, in the position of the Jews in the 30s. If Britain’s behaviour then was shameful, so is Israel’s today.

I’ll raise a glass to Bob tonight. A remarkable man, a precious friend it was a privilege to know, and a model of decency and openness to others. It makes me more determined than ever to deounce two great evils: antisemitism wherever it appears and its parent xenophobia, whoever is practising it – even if that is a state set up by the survivors of the most vicious and systematic antisemitism the world has seen.