The Other Schindlers (35 page)
Read The Other Schindlers Online
Authors: Agnes Grunwald-Spier
Yosef ‘Tommy’ Lapid (1931–2008), a fellow survivor of the Budapest Ghetto – whom I met briefly in the Knesset in 2004 when he was still Minister of Justice
– has also spoken about Darfur. On Yom Hashoah
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, 22 April 2007, ‘Tommy’ Lapid spoke about the relationship between Darfur and the Holocaust. He asked why there was no world outcry over the genocide being perpetrated in Darfur, Sudan:
Humanity has seen genocide since time immemorial. After the Holocaust, too: we’ve been witness to the genocide in Biafra, in Cambodia, in Rwanda. We have to raise an outcry against the genocide now being perpetrated in Darfur, Sudan. Meanwhile, the world sits with its arms folded, sending a few sacks of flour – not so much to feed the hungry as to salve its consciences.
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Oona King, who combines two ethnicities, wrote about the impact of the Rwandan genocide on the war in the neighbouring Congo, and on the family of one woman, Monique. After the genocide had been under way for
forty-eight
hours, 36-year-old Monique was told by a friend that she would be killed. Monique listened and fled. Her 12-year-old niece Geraldine was raped that night and as a result of contracting Aids took years to die. Monique lost twenty-seven members of her close family in 1994. Additionally, her grandfather had been
murdered
in 1963, her aunt was raped and murdered in 1973 and her father was attacked and interrogated in 1990, which caused him to die of a heart attack. ‘Monique’s family provides a gruesome snapshot of 30 years of cyclical bloodshed that paved the way for genocide.’ Oona listened to Monique’s story and wrote: ‘No matter how incomprehensible the scale of catastrophe, Monique reminds me that individuals make a difference. It was an individual that saved her.’
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James and Stephen Smith, who came from a Methodist family, created the Holocaust Centre in the midst of rural Nottinghamshire in 1995, after being overwhelmed by what they learnt about the Holocaust on a visit to Yad Vashem in 1991. Whilst they planned the project to commemorate the Holocaust and explain it to non-Jews, the tragedy of Rwanda unravelled. They did not initially see the connection between Rwanda and what they were doing:
It was only towards the end of the genocide that we realised we had missed something huge in our lifetime. Our criticism that the world did know and did nothing to help, now applied to us.
Meanwhile in Srebrenica, a massacre was happening right on our doorstep, right on the cusp of our opening. We had the embarrassment of opening a centre which was meant to be a warning from history while genocide was again under way in Europe.
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The Smiths’ work on the Holocaust led to them being invited to help create the Kigali Rwandan memorial, which was opened in 2004, and the creation of the
Aegis Trust, which is intended to prevent further genocides and confront
extremism
. The Smiths’ work on the Holocaust led directly to their work in all the new disaster areas.
This leads us back to consider the wise words of Rabbi Hugo Gryn:
Those who survive a tragedy such as the Holocaust cannot keep silent, but must do everything in their power to testify to the fact that life is the gift of God, and that it is sacred. I recreated a family. I have devoted my energy to the building up of my people. I also became and remain a kind of ethical nuisance. Wherever there is oppression or hunger or brutalization, regardless of colour or creed, I consider it is morally my territory and their cause is my cause. Bigots, racists and fanatics are my personal enemies and I intend to do battle with them until they become civilized, decent people, if needs be for the rest of my life.
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We all know that even in normal everyday life we have to make moral choices. Sometimes people feel overwhelmed by the problem and their own
insignificance
– if no one does anything nothing will change.
Many of us were impressed by Londoners’ response to the dreadful
bombings
in July 2005, by the revival of what Tennessee Williams called ‘the kindness of strangers’. But just later that month we were reading about the murder of Richard Whelan. Do people now remember how or why he died? He was the young man of 28 who, on 29 July 2005, was attacked and stabbed by a man who had been tossing chips at people, including Whelan’s girlfriend, on top of a No 43 bus in north London. After the attack, no one on that bus seemed prepared to help his girlfriend or the bleeding and mortally wounded young man who
collapsed
on the bus. Only one young woman came forward to help and she phoned 999. When she asked other passengers for help they refused and melted away into the streets. She wrote about the experience in the Guardian under the pseudonym Tara McCartney, and described how people disappeared off the bus and refused even to give their clothes to cover Whelan. There was no danger, the assailant had long left. ‘I heard a girl say, as he was being taken away in the ambulance, that she hadn’t wanted to give him any of her clothes. I said, “What, in case they got messy?” Her face said yes.’ There had been a man who Tara thought got on the bus just to have a look. He was wearing a proper jacket. She asked him if she could have the jacket to put over him. He just said no. Tara could not save Whelan but she did her best for him and comforted him in his final moments. She did what was right. Why did the others fade away? There were no Nazis threatening them.
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Only recently we were shocked to read about the tragic deaths of Fiona Pilkington and her disabled daughter Frankie. Their lives had been made so
miserable
by the taunting behaviour of local youths that one night, in October 2007, the vulnerable single mother, who not only suffered from depression but also had borderline learning problems herself, put her severely disabled 18-year-old daughter Francesca, with a mental age of 4, into the car. She gave her the family’s pet rabbit to hold for reassurance. She drove to the A47, poured petrol over the car and set fire to it. Later that night their severely burnt bodies were discovered. How can such a woman be driven to such desperate measures in England in 2007? The inquest in September 2009 found that Fiona had contacted the police thirty-three times in the seven years she was being victimised. Nothing was done to help her and her daughter with the appalling behaviour of the bullying youths, some of whom were as young as 10.
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The phrase attributed to Edmund Burke has become a cliché: ‘It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.’ But less well known is another Burke quotation: ‘When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.’
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The good have to act – they cannot be indifferent to evil. It may involve putting your head over the parapet and you may get shot at.
We have to fight the negativity of indifference – the Nazis were able to succeed with the Holocaust because most people were indifferent to the fate of the Jews and the others. In the same way, most of the people on the bus were indifferent to Richard Whelan’s plight.
When we consider Elie Wiesel’s views about perpetrators and indifference, as discussed on page
160
, we may think of man-made humanitarian crises such as those of Darfur or the Congo as we hear these words. We watch the catastrophes on our plasma television screens as we eat our sushi or Thai supper. We may
contribute
a few pounds for Children in Need, Live Aid, the Tsunami … whatever – between mouthfuls. It is not difficult if you have a healthy bank account. We don’t really inconvenience ourselves and we don’t risk much – we don’t risk anything at all – certainly not our own safety.
We remember the story of the Good Samaritan in the Bible. Those who went to school in the 1950s, like me, know all about Sir Philip Sidney and his courageous words, ‘Thy necessity is greater than mine’. We may not remember the
circumstances
– that he was mortally wounded in 1586 at the battlefield of Zutphen, but yet passed his water bottle to a fellow dying soldier over 400 years ago. None of us now know where Zutphen was and what the battle was about, but we remember Philip Sidney because of his act of generosity and moral courage.
Roughly eighty years later, in September 1665 – close to my home in Sheffield, in the village of Eyam – the tailor George Viccars received a parcel of cloth he
had ordered from London. Unbeknown to him it had been infected with the Plague in London, and within a few days the tailor was dead. The Plague spread through the village speedily killing many people. Villagers panicked and wanted to flee to Sheffield. But they listened to their young rector, William Mompesson, and the villagers courageously sealed themselves off from the rest of the world for about twelve months, keeping the Plague within the village boundaries and preventing its spread outside. Out of a population of 350, 257 died, including the rector’s young wife. Their moral and physical courage is still commemorated today almost 350 years later.
How do we make these moral decisions? A fellow Hungarian Holocaust
survivor
, Eugene Heimler, wrote about a local journalist (previously right-wing) who made up his mind to print posters with the slogan ‘National Socialism is Death’ whilst shaving. He quite literally had a conversation with himself:
He stood in front of the mirror, he said, and suddenly saw his face in a way in which he had never seen it before. He said it was the face of a traitor. The face asked him, ‘What are you going to do about this? What are you going to do about the injustice that is on its way?’ By the time he had finished shaving he was ready with the answer. When everyone had gone home that night he used his own paper’s presses to print the posters and then went out and put them up himself.
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We all have to look at ourselves in the mirror – we speak of ‘not being able to face ourselves’. Heimler commented: ‘there is something symbolic in this episode: a man’s seeing his face in the mirror and the reflection’s speaking to him from the glass.’ Presumably perpetrators don’t have this problem – we know of them returning home, as loving husbands and indulgent fathers, after a day of
persecution
and cruelty. The Holocaust taught an extraordinary lesson:
It suddenly transpired that the most horrifying evil in human memory did not result from the dissipation of order, but from an impeccable, faultless and unchallengeable rule of order. It was not the work of an obstreperous and uncontrollable mob, but of men in uniforms, obedient and disciplined, following the rules and meticulous about the spirit and letter of their briefing. It became known very soon that these men, whenever they took their uniforms off, were in no way evil. They behaved very much like all of us. They had wives they loved, children they cosseted, friends they helped and comforted in case of distress. It seemed unbelievable that once in uniform the same people shot, gassed or presided over the shooting and gassing of thousands of other people, including women who were someone’s beloved wives, and babies who were someone’s cosseted children.
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Following the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Yale University psychologist devised a series of experiments which bear his name. Stanley Milgram considered Eichmann’s defence to be that he was simply following orders when he ordered the deaths of so many Jews. In his 1974 book
Obedience to Authority
, Milgram asked: ‘Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?’ His famous experiments demonstrated a very disturbing relationship between power and authority. Milgram felt the Holocaust and his experiments demonstrated ‘often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act’.
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Whilst these controversial experiments were being considered, America was rocked by the story of the thirty-eight bystanders to the murder of 28-year-old Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964. The case fascinated social psychologists who attempted to explain the bystanders’ behaviour, who allegedly were aware of the attack but failed to respond or contact the police.
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Two in particular, Bibb Latané and John Darley, conducted further experiments into what became known as the ‘bystander effect’. They demonstrated that the greater the numbers of people present, the less likely people are to help in an emergency.
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This is a field of considerable research for psychologists, such as Charles Garfield at San Francisco University, who says: ‘The bystander is a modern archetype, from the Holocaust to the genocide in Rwanda to the current environmental crisis. Why do some people respond to these crises while others don’t?’ Kristen Monroe, a political scientist, has defined the term ‘John Donne’s People’ based on his writings,
Devotions XVII
:
No man is an island, Intire of itself; every man is a peece of the Continent, A part of the Maine … Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Her language is very specialised, but she concludes that the rescuers and heroes she interviewed had a clear view of their shared humanity which led to instinctive altruism. She quotes Otto, a German-Czech rescuer: ‘I never made a moral
decision
to rescue Jews. I just got mad. I felt I had to do it. I came across many things that demanded my compassion.’ She concluded: ‘What does explain the actions of all our selfless individuals is a common perception of themselves as individuals strongly linked to others through a shared humanity.’ This attitude is so integral to their make up that they have no choice in how they react. ‘They are John Donne’s people. All life concerns them. Any death diminishes them. Because they are part of mankind.’
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