The Spanish fighters who changed my views

After four years of Nazi occupation, Paris was finally liberated by Allied armies on 24 August 1944. Units of the mythic French force, the ‘Deuxième DB’, the Second Armoured Division, led the way into the city. They had raced there to support the population that had risen against the occupying forces.

In the evening, the first half tracks pulled into the square outside the Paris town hall. As in all such units, the vehicles had all been given names by their crews, names that were painted on their sides:

Gudalajara

Brunete

Ebro

Santander

Teruel

If you’re thinking “those don’t sound like French names”, you’d be right. They were great battles of the Spanish Civil War. And the language the crews were talking was Spanish.

These were the men of the ‘Nueve’ (‘nine’ in Spanish), the ninth company of the Deuxième DB, almost exclusively Spanish. Their commander, the French Captain Raymond Dronne, wrote of them later:

The Spaniards fought remarkably. Commanding them is a delicate matter but they have enormous courage and experience of combat.

That ‘delicate’ is a glorious piece of French understatement. It chimes with what Dronne was told when he was first given command:

Everyone’s afraid of them. They’re good soldiers. They won’t give you any problems.

The halftrack Guernica of the Nueve in Paris in 1944

Moving to a new country certainly gives you a new perspective on many things you thought you knew.

For instance, I’ve had to rethink some of the most elementary facts I felt I knew about the Second World War. I’ve long accepted that it didn’t start on 1 September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland, as is generally taught in schools. The first shots were fired on 19 September 1931, when Imperial Japanese forces invaded the Chinese territory of Manchuria.

OK, you might think, but that was the Pacific Theatre. In the European theatre, the war started in September 1939, surely? Well, that too is an idea I’ve had to revise, under the gentle guidance of Marisa, a friend we’ve met out here in Spain, who’s frighteningly well-informed on history.

My view was always that the Spanish Civil War, which started in July 1936, was a sort of preamble to the World War. In reality, however, with the Soviet Union supporting the Spanish Republic, while Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backed the military uprising that brought Franco to power, it offered a first opportunity for three of the major powers of the coming World War to test each other’s strengths and weaknesses and, indeed, to expose some of their forces to combat.

That feels more like the first Act of the wider war rather than merely a preamble to it.

In any case, it wasn’t just the Germans and Italians, or to a smaller extent the Russians, who emerged from the Spanish Civil War with trained and battle-hardened veterans ready for the next stage of the conflict. There was also quite a lot of the Spanish Republican army. The Republic itself had been defeated and overthrown, but many of the soldiers survived.

Large numbers joined the flood of over 450,000 refugees fleeing across the Pyrenees into France. They rightly feared the retaliation that Franco’s victorious regime would exact from them if they were caught. The regime proved they were right by what it did to those it did in fact catch.

In France conditions were, however, not particularly better. They were held in what the French called “internment camps”, but the Spanish, especially the ones who were there, unequivocally referred to as “concentration camps”. Lack of food, poor sanitation and inadequate housing led to huge numbers of deaths. This was 1939, after all, when France and Britain still hoped that their policy of appeasing Hitler might avoid war. That desire, combined with the xenophobia and right-wing beliefs of a significant current amongst Frenchmen, conspired to ensure the refugees were shockingly badly treated.

Offered the option of returning home, about 100,000 chose to go, mostly women and children. Few of the combatants, understandably, took up that offer, however. Some paraded in front of French officers hoping to be taken into the army, but the generals, who were to be humiliatingly defeated the following year, decided they didn’t need these experienced troops whose political loyalties they weren’t sure of (they were generally left wing, some extremely).

Some 10,000, however, were recruited into the Foreign Legion. And, once war with Germany broke out, others were taken into ‘Foreign Labour Companies’ who were set to work on the Maginot line, the great string of bunkers and fortresses along the border with Germany. Life there was certainly preferable to the camps, though in the end it worked out little better. After defeating France, the Nazi authorities captured many of the Spanish workers. Refusing to treat them as prisoners of war, and working with the Franco government’s agreement, they transferred them to concentration camps. Over 7000 were sent to the Mauthausen camp and fewer than 2500 were released at the end of the war.

Chillingly, some of the survivors later said that their experience in the French camps helped them to prepare for the Nazi ones.

Those who were able to avoid capture, joined the resistance. And among those who had taken part in the fighting, many decided to carry on the battle. One Spaniard in the Foreign Legion, Manuel Fernandez, described his feelings on the defeat of France to a 2017 television documentary:

“It was the greatest disappointment of my life. There were moments when I cried like a child. I’d fled Spain and here I was going to fall into the hands of the Germans.”

One answer was to join General de Gaulle who was setting up Free French forces in London. Of his initial 2000 men, 300 were Spanish.

Alternatively, those who were in the Foreign Legion could cross the Mediterranean with their units. In North Africa, however, they were under the orders of the government in Vichy, a puppet regime of the Nazis, set up after the defeat of France. There they were left to wonder how they’d managed to escape Franco, only to find themselves in a military unit whose orders were dictated by a government collaborating with Franco’s most powerful ally, Hitler.

It would take over two years. Though then things would change dramatically.

But more of that in another post. Just click here...

Great way to binge through the lockdown

Unorthodox. Shira Haas in Berlin’s Wannsee lake

Even at the best of times, Danielle and I enjoy binging on TV series.

Obviously, it helps if they’re good. Or at least that we like them. But I have to admit that there have been occasions when, watching episode four of the third season of a series, one of us will turn to the other and point out:

“This really isn’t very good, is it?”

“No,” replies the other, “I can’t relate to any of the characters and I don’t care what happens to them next.”

Quite a discovery after 28 episodes.

This isn’t the best of times. During a Coronavirus lockdown, binge watching isn’t just an indulgence (OK, OK, if you prefer, an over-indulgence), it’s also an excellent way of spending evenings when you’re obliged to stay in.

For the moment, we’re still being fairly discriminating. If the lockdown goes on long enough, we may well be forced, as we start season 3 of something mediocre, to say, “well, we may not relate to any of the characters or care what happens next but, hey, there’s nothing else on that we haven’t already seen”. But recently, we’ve seen some pretty great things.

Billions was gripping, even if at times I couldn’t bear any of the characters. That, actually, was something the writers pulled off pretty cleverly, making one character or another off-putting for a while, and then making him or her sympathetic again. A smart trick if you can make it work. Which they did.

Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis in Billions
A near-deadly rivalry. Except when it isn’t

For those who don’t know the series, it’s about a successful hedge fund manager (Damian Lewis) whose activities sail close to the illegal, if not right over the edge into the downright criminal, as claimed by a US attorney (Paul Giamatti) intent on bringing him down.

Just like our sympathies for the characters, the show’s writers keep changing the direction of the two men’s antipathies. Now they’re intent on destroying each other, then they turn their animosity onto someone else. Around them, in a first-class cast, stand some extraordinary characters, including an outstanding non-binary figure (“my pronouns are 'they, theirs, and them’”) played by a non-binary actor, Asia Kate Dillon. Just as good is Maggie Siff as the psychiatrist and wife of the US Attorney. All in all, it’s pretty enthralling.

Equally worth seeing is For All Mankind. This is an alternative-reality story, where the space race between the US and the Soviet Union goes on far longer, and extends far further, than actually happened. Again, there are plenty of excellent performances, as well as plenty of fine shots of rockets taking off or of explorers working on the moon, alongside plenty of tense sequences, mostly in space but sometimes also in the homes of the astronauts and other NASA staff we follow.

It’s gripping with its tension, and all the more watchable for the sense of plausibility it manages to create.

Working on the Moon, in For All Mankind

Far better than anything else, however, is Unorthdox. Based in part on Debora Feldman’s autobiography Unorthodox, the Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots, it’s a four-episode mini-series, about a young woman, Esty, brilliantly played by Israeli actor Shira Haas, from an ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn.

The central concern is whether she’ll be able to get away.

This is the first Netlfix series filmed predominantly in Yiddish, the language spoken by that community rather than Hebrew. Haas had to come over a month early to Berlin, where the series was filmed, to learn the language.

The series shows both the community, with its everyday existence and its rituals back in Brooklyn, in the form of flashbacks to Esty’s life there, spliced into scenes of the life she is now working to build for herself in Berlin. The flashbacks include her marriage and, in some poignant but intensely comic moments, the difficulties she has consummating it, difficulties considerably worsened by the fact that her husband tells his mother everything, and she insists on tutoring Esty on how to steel herself to have sex.

Sex is key because her fundamental obligation is to produce children. To her too, this is a sacred duty. “We’re rebuilding the six million lost,” she declares, “Jews killed in the Holocaust.” But that doesn’t make sex with the husband she married by arrangement any less painful.

Esty (Shira Haas) at the Wannsee, still dressed as a Hasid (left)
and as she begins to forge a new life for herself

In a key scene from the first episode, a group of student friends she has just made takes Esty down to the beautiful Berlin lake, the Wannsee. It’s a place where people go to walk or relax or swim. But in 1942, it was the venue for the Wannsee Conference which took the decision to wipe out the Jewish population of Europe.

When Esty first sees the lake, she’s left speechless. But then Robert, one of the students, says:

“It’s nice, right? But you see that villa? The conference where the Nazis decided to kill the Jews in the concentration camps took place in 1942. In that villa.”

She looks at the villa.

“And you swim in this lake?” she replies.

He laughs. “The lake is just a lake,” he says.

Esty water into the water, still wearing her skirt and one of her two long-sleeved shirts. She takes off the wig that orthodox Jewish women wear after marriage. Under the wig, her head is practically shaved. She drops the wig in the water.

That gesture reminds me of a Jewish friend of ours who told us of a moment when her children were playing with others in a local park. Another Jewish woman came over to remonstrate with her for letting them play with non-Jewish kids.

Infuriated, she went straight over to a bridge across a stream at the edge of the park and threw her wig in it. She never wore one again.

Throwing a wig into water speaks to me powerfully about bids for freedom.

Haas says that the story is “about the right to have your voice”. It certainly is. Indeed, if you watch it to the end, you’ll discover why that’s a particularly apt summing up.

Unorthodox is an excellent way of spending an evening. A great break from the lockdown. You might even manage to spread it to two, though we went through all four episodes in just one sitting.

It was that compelling.

Failure: nothing to fear in it. As long as you don’t deny it

When I was a teenager, I read some books about playing chess, in the mistaken hope that I had it in me to learn to be a good player. Only one lesson from that time sticks in my mind: the advice never to play out a losing game. If your position is hopeless, the book told me, concede and start a new game, since that will give you more useful practice.

I never got any good at chess but the lesson stayed with me forever: if you’re getting nowhere at what you’re doing, stop and try something else. That way you’ll have learned something from a failure and, far from being a blow, it will have become a precious lesson.

Probably one of the most frequently quoted sayings about failure comes from the American basketball star, Michael Jordan.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost 300 games.
26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot, and missed.
I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.

My view is that there are two principles in what Michael Jordan’s saying: the first is the same as mine with chess, that there are lessons to be given by failure, maybe indeed lessons that can only be learned from failure; the second, that fear of failure makes success impossible – if you’re not prepared to run the risk of failure, you can never win.

What is essential, though, is to be prepared to recognise your failure. Otherwise, there’s no chance of learning from it.

I played the piano for thirty years. At the end of that time, I realised that my two sons were taking three weeks to learn to play pieces more competently than I had in three decades. It finally came home to me that my talents, such as they were, lay in a different direction – and I embarked on that direction.

These are issues of burning importance in Britain today.

Theresa May once pulled a parliamentary vote on the deal she had negotiated with the EU to cover Britain’s departure, because she feared she would lose. How justified her fear was became clear when she finally did put it to the vote, and lost by the biggest majority ever inflicted on a government in a British parliament.

Even then, though, she didn’t recognise that she’d got nowhere and submitted the same deal to parliament again. This time she lost by a majority not quite as huge as the first time, but still a crushing one.

She seems completely fixated on her deal. Nothing will deter her from it. Indeed, she’s talking about submitting it for a third vote, not apparently prepared to admit that doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result is the definition of insanity. I sometimes think of May as a visionary, if that term can be used for a tunnel-visionary: someone who simply can’t see out of the sides of the extremely narrow blinkers she’s wearing.

She clearly hasn’t the self-awareness to recognise her own failure. But others in her Conservative Party clearly have. It’s up to them to remove her from office as quickly as possible before she does much more damage.

Still, it’s not the Conservative Party that’s my concern. I’ve never voted Conservative in my life and have no intention of changing my mind now. A much more serious worry to me is what’s happening in the Labour Party.

The dismal faces of British politics
Their failure would matter less if their followers recognised it and acted on it

In Jeremy Corbyn, we have a man whose whole life has been about mobilising mass movements to achieve political ends. And, boy, does he have the opportunity to do that now. The petition to revoke article 50 – to cancel Brexit – has now attracted more signatures than any previous petition on Parliament’s site. A million turned out in London for the latest anti-Brexit march, but as usual Jeremy wasn’t there. Indeed, as usual on these marches, one of the chants was “Jeremy Corbyn, where are you?”

Even his deputy, Tom Watson, who apparently can recognise a mass movement when he sees one, was there and showing he could both walk the walk and talk the talk. Among other intelligent suggestions, he offered Labour backing for May’s plan on condition it was made subject to a new referendum with Remain as an option. Jeremy, meanwhile, was canvassing for local elections in Morecambe Bay, about as far from the march as he could get without leaving England.

It’s true, as Corbyn recently said, that problems such as poverty and climate change are more urgent than Brexit. What he doesn’t seem to recognise is that both of those problems will be made worse by Brexit. And, most important of all, Brexit is the question that faces any British politician now. 

Clement Attlee, who had the task of rebuilding the Labour Party as leader in the 1930s would, I’m sure, far rather have been dealing with creating a National Health Service or nationalising some key industries (as he did in the government he led after 1945), but right then, the key issue was the rise of Hitlerite Germany and how Britain would address it.

Attlee rose magnificently to the challenge.

Corbyn, faced with his challenge, ran away to Morecambe Bay.

Like May, he’ll never recognise his failures. But it’s time that Labour members did. And drew the glaringly obvious conclusion that Corbyn just isn’t up to the job.

Never play out a losing game. Call a halt and make the necessary changes. The most necessary of all? Part company with both Corbyn and Corbynism.

And time’s short, so do it fast.

A night of shattered glass

Eighty years ago, Nazi Germany took a fateful step towards the ‘final solution’ to the so-called ‘Jewish question’. Mobs of stormtroopers and civilians launched a night of violence against Jewish property and citizens. It was the turning point when legal harassment of Jews gave way to naked violence.

The pogrom was a response to the murder in Paris of a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath. Ironically, he was a non-Nazi who was under investigation by the authorities for disloyalty. He was shot on 7 November 1938 by a Jewish refugee of Polish roots, Herschel Grynszpan, whose family had been expelled from Germany to Poland. Vom Rath died on 9 November.

Coincidentally, 9 November 1938 was being celebrated in Nazi circles, including by Hitler himself, as the 15th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch on 8-9 November 1923. That was Hitler’s first attempt to seize power and led to a shamefully weak response: he was briefly jailed before being released to take up again his drive for power which succeeded ten years later. A sad indictment of the failure of authorities to take appropriate action against right-wing insurgents, and an object lesson of what the consequences can be.

When the news of Vom Rath’s death reached the party, Hitler left without giving his planned speech. His propaganda chief Goebbels gave it for him, and then announced that if demonstrations broke out, they would not be hampered. That was an instruction to turn for revenge against the Jewish community.

A gutted Jewish shop int he aftermath of Kristallnacht

During the night of 9-10 November 1938, some 7500 Jewish businesses had their shopfronts destroyed. The shards of glass on the pavements gave the attack its name, ‘Kristallnacht’, crystal night. Jewish homes were looted, more than 7000 businesses were attacked and in many cases destroyed, and 1400 synagogues suffered the same fate. The number of immediate Jewish deaths may not have been exceptionally high – perhaps a few hundred including those who died in the following days – but 30,000 were arrested and dumped in concentration camps.

Police stood by and watched but didn’t intervene to stop the violence. Firemen attended but only prevented flames extending to neighbouring buildings when Jewish premises were set on fire.

A synagogue burns

A lot of property was destroyed, which infuriated another leading Nazi, Hermann Göring. In his view, that property should have been seized. He decided it was time to bring anti-Jewish action under more disciplined control. At a meeting with Nazi leaders on 12 November, he announced that he had ‘received a letter written on the Führer’s orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another...’ To make clear that he really meant one way rather than any other, he demanded that the appropriate agencies ‘take all measures for the elimination of the Jew from the German economy’.

From the elimination of Jews from the economy, the Nazi regime slipped almost inevitably towards the elimination of Jews altogether. The decision was taken in the end at the Wannsee conference in January 1942, and in consequence the final solution – in other words, extermination – went into effect.

The notion of a ‘Jewish Question’ strikes me as a strange one. The only question that ought to be asked about Jews is to antisemites: ‘what’s your problem with Jews?’ Similar questions could be asked of other groups: ‘what’s your problem with gays?’ or ‘what’s your problem with Muslims?’

In other words, the problem isn’t with the people targeted but with the people doing the targeting. And, sadly, there are far more of them around than there should be after the experience of the Second World War.

Despite my own Jewish roots, I’ve experienced no overt antisemitism. Until a year or two ago, I argued that antisemitism, certainly in Europe or the Americas, had shrunk until it was limited to a tiny number of fringe groups.. Islamophobia or homophobia struck me as far more widespread and far more acute.

Today, I’m changing that view. We’ve had scandals about antisemitism in various organisations – including, sadly, my own party – and a failure to take action against it. Not acting on time is dangerous, as the case of Hitler after the Beer Hall putsch showed. The sores are festering, the disease is spreading. Nothing has made that clearer than the murder of eleven Jews in a gun attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Islamophobia and homophobia remain bigger problems. But maybe we can learn to oppose both of those and antisemitism as well. And what better time could there be for revitalising our commitment to the cause than the anniversary of Kristallnacht?

At the source of the movement

It’s easy to miss important things if you don’t take care.

This week, I nearly left Leipzig without visiting the Saint Nicholas church. When I first went past, it wasn’t open, and I decided that it probably wasn’t worth trying again later. But, in the end, my wandering around the city centre brought me back near the church, so I popped in after all.

The St Nikolai Church in Leipzig

I’m glad I did. Not just because the church has a lovely interior, which it does: the building is far older but the inside is eighteenth-century, like a more elaborate version of London’s Saint Martin in the Fields – soaring but beautifully understated elegance. But even more attractive was the role the church played in the ‘peaceful revolution’ of 1989.

The former nation of East Germany referred to itself as the ‘German Democratic Republic’ or GDR. It viewed itself as democratic because its leaders simply knew they were doing the right thing by the people. It didn’t matter that most of the people didn’t agree. Naturally, if you’re doing the right thing, there’s no need to tolerate any dissent, because opposition must, by definition, be wrong. Sadly, that’s an attitude that seems increasingly common in the West too these days.

After four decades of this rule, the people of the GDR were sick to death of the lack of opportunity their tiny country offered them, coupled with the near impossibility of ever leaving it, surrounded as it was by prison-like fences. The paradoxes bloomed. A friend I met when I visited East Germany in 1982, told me he’d suffered the wrath of the authorities for having Western magazines in his possession. His penalty was to interrupt his university of studies for a year and work as a carpenter instead – in a regime that trumpeted the nobility of manual labour, actually having to do some was regarded as a punishment. More serious offences could lead to far worse consequences: an illegal attempt to leave could even cost you your life.

Strangely, however, the one institution the state never fully brought to heel was the Church. That led to frustrated Leipzig citizens attending services every Monday in the Saint Nicholas Church, to take part in ‘peace prayers’. Week after week growing numbers attended, eventually spilling into the streets. As the Church itself admits, the vast majority of the people clamouring to get in to the services weren’t Christians. They were just thirsting for the right to express a democratic disagreement with the self-styled democrats who ruled them.

And they did it without violence: the Monday meetings truly were peace prayers.

Christian Führer speaking to one of the Monday meetings
A movement without a leader that brought down an autocratic regime

Eventually, the movement grew so large that it took the streets. During my visit, a taxi driver reminded me of the time that the ring road around the city was blocked by crowds 100,000 strong. And in other cities, people followed the example Leipzig had set, increasing the pressure on the leaders until, eventually, they could take it no more. When the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that he would not deploy Soviet troops to put down the popular movement, the Party’s press secretary went on TV to announce that, after 28 years as a blood-soaked tool of authoritarianism, the Berlin Wall would finally open.

Asked when this would happen, the spokesman checked his notes, realised he hadn’t been briefed on a date, and answered, ‘well, now, I suppose’.

From both sides, thousands descended on the checkpoints demanding that the guards open the gates. They checked out the spokesman’s words themselves and, having confirmed he’d really spoken them, they lifted the barriers and the crowds surged through. Some climbed on to the wall, an act that would have been met with gunfire just hours earlier, and with sledgehammers, or pickaxes, or even just chisels, began to chip away at a hated symbol of oppression.

And I might have missed a visit to the place where this all started…

The wall has now been down for longer than it was up. Saxony, the German province of which Leipzig is the biggest city, had been celebrated down the centuries as a centre of elegance and beauty. It is again today. I was enchanted by the arcades and covered passaged linking streets in the centre, the soaring spires and older buildings alongside glorious new structures – I fell at once for the University building – where everything fits despite the contrasts of period and style.

The new University building
Leipzigers have kept their sense of style

I had to smile when I saw the ubiquitous trams. It reminded me of another East German friend, this time in the city of Erfurt, where the trams were of Czech design and too big for the streets. They were damaging the historic buildings by just rumbling past.

‘They’re Dubček’s revenge,’ he told me, referring to shameful moment when East German troops had joined Soviet forces in invading what was then Czechoslovakia to overthrow the liberal, reforming government that Alexander Dubček had formed.

It was also he who told me about the East German rulers' attempts to win hearts and minds in the population. The kids, he said, were bombarded with propaganda from the day they started school. And it worked, he reckoned, right up to the day that they got their first taste of Western chocolate. Suddenly, the contrast of life in East and West swung dangerously to favour the West.

Rather less amusing was his account of his own life. It was one of those things that I should have realised but hadn’t: people like him had been born into a democracy and then, like all of Germany, seen it strangled by Nazi totalitarianism. However, unlike the West, the citizens of the East had seen no return to democracy after the war but four more decades of authoritarian rule. Nothing like as awful as the Nazis, but no democracy all the same. A depressing fate.

Memorial to the Bamberger family whose confectionery business had stood
on this Leipzig street corner, until it fell to the antisemitic Kristallnacht attacks
A reminder that things were even worse before the GDR

Still, at least those days are behind the East Germans now. It struck me how much things have changed as I travelled to Leipzig. Back in 1982, I would have had to apply for specific police authorisation to go there. Today, I just needed a ticket. And had I wanted to invite someone from Leipzig to come back to the West with me, he too would only have had to pay his fare.

Not everything’s better, though. On top of the reputation for elegance, and then for defying power in the name of freedom, Saxony is now building a new reputation as the centre of the far right in Germany – outside Leipzig, it’s true, remains attached to its liberalism. But in the countryside intolerance and xenophobia have grown, as among Trump circles in the States or Brexit supporters in Britain.

It may be time to get those peace prayers going again in the St Nicholas Church.

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.

Is Labour really anti-Semitic?

There was a time when to be a British Jew was virtually tantamount to being a Labour Party supporter.

That was the case of the Jewish side of my family. My mother was an active Labourite, working as a secretary to a Labour MP during the Second World War, and true to that loyalty right up to her death at 94 two weeks ago.

Like her, I’ve never voted for any other party, and remain a member to this day.

That makes it sad to see that a breach has opened up between Jews and the Labour Party today. A personal sadness for myself. But also ultimately for the Labour Party itself.

The current conflict focuses on Labour’s refusal to adopt in its entirety the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA). Or rather, not to accept all the accompanying examples.

Three Jewish papers express their anger at Labour's stance

As it happens, the IHRA’s text is weakly drafted and open to multiple interpretations. Take this suggested example of anti-Semitism:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.

The Labour leadership objects to it because they see it as limiting the freedom to criticise the state of Israel. However, I see no basis for saying it prevents anyone saying that when the Israeli government reduces the rights of its Arab citizens. Nor does it prevent anyone arguing that by doing so, the Israeli government and many citizens are displaying racist attitudes. As they are.

Indeed, it does not even prevent anyone arguing, as I do, that setting up the state of Israel was an error. It has always struck me as way for Americans and Europeans to salve their consciences over Europe’s failure to learn to iive with its Jews. In effect, we said ‘we can’t learn to live with you, so go away and set up your own country, even at the cost of the people living there today.’

Today, though, it’s far too late. The state of Israel exists and is home to about 6.5m Jews. That’s a reality with which anyone trying to argue about Middle East politics simply has to come to terms.

What is it about that example that annoys the Labour leadership? What argument do they feel it limits their right to express? Do they want to protect the freedom to argue that the Jewish population of Israel has no right to self-determination?

Let’s see where that argument would lead in practice. If that population has no right to self-determination, Israel has no right to exist. If it has no right to exist, then it’s legitimate to use force to bring it to an end. And what would happen to the Jews in the region? We would be backing a policy of ethnic cleansing of Jews.

Is that a position anyone in Labour really wants to take? I can’t imagine a more clearly anti-Semitic stance.

It makes no difference that Israel, while asserting the Jewish right to self-determination denies it to the Palestinians. The bad behaviour of the Israeli government does not justify Labour backing the use of violence against Israel’s citizens.

Another IHRA example of anti-Semitism to which Labour leaders object reads:

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Again, what right are they trying to uphold? Comparisons with the Nazis are the most facile and futile of arguments. Unless a government has deliberately set out to exterminate an entire race, the comparison is false. Injustice, collective punishments or excessive force against civilians are shameful crimes that Israel has committed, but so have the US and Britain. Perhaps a parallel with them would make more sense than a comparison with the Nazis.

In any case, why would Labour pay a high political price just to allow some of its members to make so lazy and intellectually weak a case?

Because the price is high. Had Labour simply adopted the full IHRA definition and examples, it would have won itself some credit with the Jewish community. It would have undermined the opponents who are now making mileage from the accusations of anti-Semitism. Instead, they have handed their enemies a weapon they could hardly have hoped for in their wildest dreams.

There is, however, another explanation. I’m afraid things turn a bit ugly at this point.

It could be argued that this is all about too little. There are only around a quarter of a million Jews in Britain. Labour could win every single Jewish vote and fail to win an election, or it could lose every single one and still get in.

Besides, though I don’t have statistical evidence for it, my persona experience suggests that British Jews have moved to the right since my mother was young. Like many immigrant communities, they started out on the left while they were poor and oppressed. But as they became prosperous and assimilated, many drifted rightwards.

So maybe there aren’t many votes for Labour to win among the Jewish. How much do they matter to figures in the leadership who suspect them anyway, because of their sympathy for Israel?

The people who matter much more are those traditional Labour voters who, out of xenophobia and delusion that Brexit would benefit them, went over to the far right. That’s why we have the paradox of figures on the left sharing a platform with the hardest nationalists, notably veteran left winger Kate Hoey posing for photo opportunities with Nigel Farage, then leader of the crypto-fascist United Kingdom Independence Party.

After all, there are several million of those voters.

The calculus is easy to follow. On the other hand, many of us in Labour would like to see it being a little more principled than that.

A party that cosies up to the hard right but can’t will make no concessions to show some respect for Jews? That’s not the party my mother and her friends backed in the forties.

How I wish we could get that party back.

Pleasure, and a timely lesson, from the Hamburgers

There are more bridges in Hamburg than there are in the whole of Venice and Amsterdam. Taken together.

How do I know that? I was told by a taxi driver. And the word of a taxi driver is not to be doubted, is it? Like the word of a US President. So I haven’t checked. I have to admit, though, that if I haven’t looked, it’s partly just because I wouldn’t want to find out that it wasn’t true.

The Elbe in Hamburg

In any case, it’s highly plausible. The city has water everywhere. It’s a great port, after all, at the mouth of the river Elbe, and with many channels of its tributary, the Alster, flowing through parts of the city centre. Water, hills and parks make a city, in my view, and Hamburg has the first and last of these.

Water, water, everywhere

Many of the waterways are lined with old warehouses, a reminder that the city was once one of the chief centres of a great trading association of northern Europe, the Hanseatic League. Most German cities like to have their car number plates identified by a single letter – B for Berlin or F for Frankfurt, for instance – because a short abbreviation indicates a great city. Hamburg insists on two – HH for Hansestadt Hamburg, recalling its long commercial traditions.

Hamburg warehouses. And more water, of course.

‘England is a nation of shopkeepers,’ Napoleon once said. I realised just what he meant, and just why he said it, when I was recently reading some material on Britain in the eighteenth-century. In the Napoleonic wars, Britain tried for as long as possible to avoid getting involved in fighting on land in Europe, preferring to limit its military commitments to the sea (trade needed the sealanes kept open, after all). Instead, it offered subsidies to its allies to do the actual fighting. It could offer those subsidies because it was a powerful trading nation, though as I argued here recently, even Britain suffered as embargoes and counter-embargoes were imposed.

Hamburg, like Britain, prospered by trade. A message Brexiters and Trumpistas would do well to remember. Erecting barriers makes nations poorer. Knocking them down makes them richer – all of them: this isn’t a zero-sum game, both sides gain from trade. And war damages them.

Alongside parks and waterways, spires help a city too. My eye was caught by a tall church tower as I was walking between meetings, but I couldn’t get to it just then – I was in the city for work, after all. However, later, having seen a colleague off at the station, I found that my route back to the hotel took me close to it. “I could take a look,” I thought.

The ruined church of St Nikolai in Hamburg

It turned out to be the tower of the St Nikolai church. Only the tower and the chancel survive. The main part of the nave was destroyed in 1943 when the Allies bombed the city, in the aptly – and vengefully – named ‘Operation Gomorrah’. The Royal Air Force bombed at night, the US Air Force by day; the RAF carpeted the city indiscriminately, the USAF targeted military works (such as a submarine factory); a fire storm engulfed the city, leaving a number of dead that has never been precisely determined, some of the corpses having been completely incinerated in the flames.

Picasso evoked the terror of the Nazi bombing of Guernica

The museum in the crypt of the ruined church makes it clear that the chief blame for the horror belongs to Hitler and Nazism, that none of this would have happened had they not set Germany on a vain road to world power, and that the Nazis indeed had pioneered the use of mass bombing of civilians before the Allies did: the museum mentions Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Warsaw, Coventry and, indeed, London, all bombed long before 1943.

That’s generous of the German historians.

However, it hardly lessens the guilt of the Allied strategists. The exhibition quotes Air Chief Marshall Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris saying ‘There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win the war. My reply to that is that it has never been tried… and we shall see.’

Let’s be clear: the bombing of civilian targets has only one aim. In World War 2, the Allies called it ‘breaking the morale of the population’. Today we call such attempts by a single and simple word: terrorism. The destruction of Hamburg by fire was absolutely clearly an act of state terrorism, something we would do well to remember whenever we throw up our hands in horror at state terrorism practised by our enemies today.

Hamburg ablaze during Operation Gomorrah

St Nikolai has been left ruined, like the Memorial Church in Berlin or Coventry Cathedral in England. There is a quiet, stately mournfulness about these monuments to those moments when we get things wrong and build walls instead of bridges. 

Salutary in this city of so many bridges and which has suffered so much.

Are you listening, Trumpistas and Brexiters?

I suppose it would have been appropriate to have had a hamburger
among the Hamburgers. But I resisted the temptation

Ethnic oppression: it doesn't have to be like that

It’s a pity that, as Hegel pointed out, the only thing we learn from history is that no one learns anything from history.

If we did, there’d be an invaluable lesson some 75 years old to be learned from Denmark. A lesson that badly needs to be learned again today. A lesson that would save a lot of people, particularly Muslims, a lot of pain, and a lot of other people, especially non-Muslims, a lot of shame.

Denmark was occupied by Nazi German forces in 1940. But the occupation began to fall apart long before the Second World War ended. As Hannah Arendt explains in Eichmann in Berlin, ‘when the Germans approached [the Danes] rather cautiously about introducing the yellow badge [to be worn by all Jews, as in other Nazi controlled areas], they were simply told that the King would be the first to wear it…’.

The Danes hadn’t been especially kind to foreign Jews, many of them German, who sought refuge in their country. As elsewhere, the refugees weren’t granted work permits; they were tolerated but not necessarily helped. But when Nazi Germany began to ask for the German Jews to be deported to the Reich, the response was extraordinary. The Nazis had declared those Jews stateless, so ‘the Danes… explained to the German officials that because the stateless refugees were no longer German citizens, the Germans could not claim them without Danish assent. This was one of the few cases in which statelessness turned out to be an asset, although it was of course not the statelessness per se that saved the Jews but, on the contrary, the fact that the Danish government had decided to protect them’.

What was particularly strange was what happened in 1943. This was when the Nazis decided that the time had come to clear Denmark entirely of Jews, as they were attempting to clear country after county in their power. ‘What [Himmler, chief of the SS] did not reckon with was that – quite apart from Danish resistance – the German officials who had been living in the country for years were no longer the same’.

It was as though the spirit of resistance had rubbed off on the occupiers. ‘Not only did General von Hannecken, the military commander, refuse to put troops at the disposal of the Reich plenipotentiary, Dr Werner Best; the special S.S. units (Einsatzkommandos) employed in Denmark very frequently objected to “the measures they were ordered to carry out by the central agencies” – according to Best’s testimony at Nuremberg [the war crime trials after the fighting ended].’

Even Best became deeply unreliable, from the Nazi point of view. When police arrived from Germany to start rounding up the Jews for deportation, ‘Best told them that they were not permitted to break into apartments, because the Danish police might then interfere… Hence they could seize only those Jews who voluntarily opened their doors. They found exactly 477 people, out of a total of more than 7,800, at home and willing to let them in.”

Even these Jews were transferred to Theresienstadt, the concentration camp for privileged Jews where they received better treatment than most because the Danish government kept making a ‘fuss’ about them. Many of these Jews were elderly, so the fact that 48 of them died is probably not a particularly high proportion.

The fatal date for deportation was 1 October, but a few days earlier, the leaders of the Jewish community were told of the whole plan, probably on Best’s own orders. The community went into hiding, ‘which was very easy in Denmark, because… “all sections of the Danish people, from the King down to simple citizens,” stood ready to receive them.’

Danish Jews being taken to safety in Sweden

Sweden too, just 15 miles away, was prepared to take in the Jews and offer them asylum, ‘and this was done with the help of the Danish fishing fleet. The cost of transportation for people without means – about a hundred dollars per person – was paid largely by wealthy Danish citizens…’ About 50% of the costs were paid by the Jewish community, the other 50% out of contributions from non-Jews.

About half the Jewish population got safely to Sweden. The other half remained in hiding in Denmark and survived the war. Some 99% of Danish Jews made it.

What the Danes showed was an extraordinary – literally, it was strikingly out of the ordinary – willingness to resist injustice. By doing so, peacefully and without violence, they seem to have undermined the will even of some of their oppressors. What might have happened if Hitler hadn’t had his forces tied up fighting his losing war is hard to say: he might well have crushed the resistance. Even so, what matters is that the Danish government and people worked together to resist a terrible evil and, helped by circumstances, they succeeded.

Others outside Denmark also resisted. Bulgaria, for example, or many in France and Italy. But elsewhere the Nazis often found willing or even enthusiastic accomplices.

I wish  the same spirit of resistance was flourishing in Britain today, where Islamophobia seems to be still growing, and parties even feel the need to compromise with it, for electoral reasons. I wish we could find it in France where harsh Islamophobic laws have been adopted. I wish we could find it in some of Europe’s new ‘democracies’ in the centre and east of the continent, where brutally anti-immigrant forces seem to be in control, notably in Hungary. I wish it was burning as strongly even in Denmark and Sweden were xenophobic parties wield far more influence than is healthy.

Whenever we hear someone denouncing immigrants, such as refugees from Libya or Syria or other Middle Eastern and African countries, let’s remember the case of Denmark in World War 2. Let’s remember how shameful the collaborators in many countries seem today. Let’s recall how admirable the resisting Danes.

Then maybe we’ll find the will to resist the xenophobes of our times and stand, as the Danes then did, shoulder to shoulder with the vulnerable and the persecuted.

Still, if we did that, we’d be in danger of learning a lesson from history.