A few words on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Fellow northerner Harrison Kaufman has just reminded me that it's Holocaust Remembrance Day, so I'd like to share a (pulitzer prize winning) book about this subject that has greatly my views on certain in life.

I'm part Bangladeshi, rather than Jewish, but what I read here at the age of 11 hit me like concrete no less. I was attending a school where I looked a bit different compared to the 750 WASP children (well there were the kids of a local African vicar, and two Chinese twins, but that was it). They would notice our background alot more in Summer, and every time my late mother picked us up, and the words coming out of people's mouths, was at times ugly, and as likely to be from the prom queen as the local thug type.

So the idea that men, women, children, friends, families, nurses, local shopkeepers, a whole nation could take part in, and willingly turn a blind eye to something so beyond evil, really had us watching our back. Because if they come after someone else today, why not us tomorrow. In fact from what I heard, my mothers own father was made to stay under house arrest whilst a genocide took place in his country. I'd watch how they dug up the graves at Srebrenica, how the National Front stated on their website that they wanted my aunt's and uncles gone, so any time someone utters even a slightly racist remark or joke, it bothers us for at least a week. Those about Jewish people set us on high alert. I can't often look at that person the same way again.

My English gradfather was an RAF war vet who had a very tough time in the Sahara, so our family has always been rather anti Nazi. Despite that for a long time I saw them and their supporters as the comical fools often portrayed in Warner Brothers cartoons. Yet for a short while even I thought as a teen that was because "people in the 30s and 40s were thick and that stuff "would never happen these days.".

If anything tossed that idea firmly out of the window; it's what I've seen over the last 4 years. Many people feel safe saying the kinds of things I couldn't dare picture them saying prior to that. Much of it with just enough "Plausible deniability" to avoid paying a price, but enough to signal what their true feelings are. Often these are the same people who complained about what they were not allowed to say.

The things I've heard being said about Jewish people though since 2016 has at times made my jaw crash to the pavement. Really? After where we've been already? The next person to tell me about the rich string pulling cabal can do one and pretend we never met. The holocaust did not start in a vacum, it had been building for years, centuries, its flames stoked by nonsense like this. Years ago these jokers aimed their hate at Dreyfus, and since then they've always managed to find someone else.

The German, Austrian, and other European anti semites of the 30s and 40s, who took part in this wave of evil, were not thick, mad, or hysterical. They were normal folk like you and I who allowed their own virus of lies to spread amongst their real world social networks, until most lose sight of how sick with they have become.

Lies don't work on how close to the truth they seem, but how many times they get repeated. Unless we are willing to call out, challenge, and take the platform away from those who spout them, then many more will get infected. It's like listening to an terrible partner who hates your mate. At first you tell them to leave it out, but over time their words chip away at your brain, and fill the cracks with doubt. soon you're starting to find things in the words that seems kind of true, and before you know it the mate that looked after you has been shown the door, and you're in grip of something bad with little way out. Just in this case we replace mate with "common sense".

If that sounds like anyone you know; have them read this book, so they have no doubt where it can all lead. It's the holocaust memoirs of an Auschwitz survivor shared via the underground comic style of his only son. All the races are drawn in the style of an animal, and had they not been, it really would have been too tough for most people to finish. The survivor reminded me alot of my grandfather, in the sense that he never quite left the desert, throwing nothing away, keeping years old packets of Angel Delight, and slicing up washing up liquid bottles to use as his toothbrush holders. In my high school it had a blue sticker, which meant it was for GCSE level pupils only.

If there was any justice, they'd give it free to every student on their first day. Maybe it would inoculate them to the hate that has infected so many of their parents.