Sitting among those survivors will be Ivor Perl, a gracious man just shy of his 93 birthday. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Makó, southern Hungary – not far from where some of my own maternal family were also deported – Perl was 12 years old when he arrived in Auschwitz. He escaped immediate selection for murder in the camps’ gas chambers, alongside his mother and siblings, by pretending to be 16 and capable of work. Emma Barnett wrote for this newspaper yesterday about interviewing Perl for the Today programme.
I am not writing, in this instance, about deniable incidents – over which reasonable people can sometimes disagree – where legitimate criticism of Israel’s appalling government seems to some of us to blur with ancient anti-Jewish stereotypes. I am writing about attacks on Jewish children, for the crime of being visibly Jewish. Over the past year, children travelling to Jewish schools have been attacked with broken glass bottles, beaten up in tube stations and harassed as their school buses are pelted with stones.
Holocaust survivors take part in the ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland (Photo: Anadolu)Jews are afraid again. The Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Jewish threats and provides the necessary security that you experience if you visit any Jewish building or event in the UK, reported 1,978 antisemitic incidents across their threat radar from January – June 2024. Ten years ago, there were only 310 such incidents in the same period. In other words, the number of antisemitic threats in this country has in a decade increased by a factor of more than six. Throughout that time, and for the twenty years previously, every British child has been dutifully taught in Key Stage 3 to deplore the Holocaust.
In part, this failure is down to British schools’ obtuse insistence on presenting the Holocaust, the apex in reality of centuries of anti-Jewish racism in Europe, as a historical moment boundaried by the Second World War between Britain, with her Allies, and Germans. Millennials like myself, whose lessons were shaped by the Holocaust education trends of the 1990s, were taught that antisemitism was a German phenomenon. Privately, those of us with roots in Eastern Europe knew that Nazi forces were abetted by local antisemites in every central or Eastern European nation they reached.
One admirable museum exhibition, launched this week in London, seeks to combat this Holocaust myth-making. The National Holocaust Museum is based in Nottinghamshire, close to a reminder of England’s own anti-Jewish past. The first blood-libels, false accusations that Jewish rituals require the murder of Christian children, took place nearby in Norwich and Lincoln.
Polish President Andrzej Duda walks through the camp area during the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Photo: Agencja Wyborcza.pl/Grzegorz Celejewski via Reuters)To Marc Cave, director of the National Holocaust Museum, this history of persecution doesn’t make the Jews perennial victims. Each panel at this tiny, circular exhibit is intersected by a beautiful object which reflects Jewish communities at their most flourishing, even in communities, such as the Baghdad of 1941, which would ultimately expel them. One panel tells the story of the Farhud of 1941 – the term is “violent dispossession” in Arabic – in which pro-Nazi Arabs destroyed 900 houses in Jewish neighbourhoods.
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Read MoreAs Cave points out, the rhetoric of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood is only the latest iteration of a long line of “false prophets”: those who justify their anti-Jewish violence with a utopian vision of a world rid of one race of a people. To frame Jews as the “flaw in the universe”, they must be considered parasitical, without a homeland, and hungry for blood themselves.
The liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau does not belong in a parade of anniversaries celebrating British successes against a wicked German enemy. When we remember the Holocaust, we must understand ourselves as remembering two millennia of anti-Jewish violence across Europe and the Middle East. Only when we understand the full history of anti-Jewish prejudice can we begin to define it.
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