Ten years ago almost to the day – Friday, January 28, 2005, to be exact – I wrote a piece in this column about a television programme that solved a problem I’d been wrestling with for, at that time, about 25 years.
Grandchild of the Holocaust told the story of the return to Auschwitz of survivor Renee Salt, her son and young grandson, then only just into his teens. Renee, who as a teenager herself lost her parents and sister in the terrible Nazi extermination campaign, had married a British soldier, Charles Salt, after the war. He too had direct experience of the Holocaust at first hand – he was with the allied troops at the liberation of Belsen.
But her own descendants knew little of her story until they travelled back in time and place to the site of some of the worst atrocities in human history. My problem, if it could be called that in the face of such human suffering, remarkable resilience and humbling courage, stemmed from whether a decision I made when offered the chance to visit the scene of one of these camps – Dachau, near Munich – while on a student break in the late 1970s, should be to do it or not.
In the end – and after a huge amount of soul-searching – I decided against it, feeling at the time that making such a visit as part of what was a light-hearted summer holiday, would be neither right nor respectful. A fellow backpacker, an Australian girl of Czech Jewish parentage whose mother and father had survived incarceration in a concentration camp in Eastern Europe, did go but somehow I felt she had the right to do so whereas my visit would somehow have smacked of gawping at the unrelated suffering of others, a form of voyeurism of the worst sort.
But it bothered me and continued to bother me over all the years since. Had I made the right decision? I just didn’t know.
Grandchild of the Holocaust both answered my question and changed my mind.
I quote from that previous piece of mine from a decade ago.
“As she and her family were leaving the camp, Renee Salt spotted a tour bus driving in through the gates and setting down a large party of visitors, old, young and middle-aged.
“To say it looked incongruous was putting it mildly and the three stood and watched with open perplexity for a moment, Renee murmuring something about finding the sight very strange.
“Then her son Martin said: ‘But it’s better that they come than that they don’t come.’
“And she nodded and said: ‘Yes’.”
That’s all. There it was. So simple. Better that they come than that they don’t come.
If she is still alive, Renee Salt will be a very old lady by this time but those words have stayed with me ever since.
Watching this week’s hugely moving commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz only served to underline for me that quiet assertion.
I thought how right it was and how important it is to continue to speak those few simple words to the wider world.
After all, if you know how and why these things happen, if you know what terrible crimes were committed and the lasting effects of those awful events on individuals, families, nations and generations to come, if you hear these stories with your own ears and see something of their foul fallout with your own eyes, you might just also have within you the strongest weapon against the re-creation of such horrors ever, ever again.
If the last 10 years since my question was answered have taught me anything at all, it’s that it is now more vital than it ever was to share knowledge and experience, to pass on direct testimony, to bear witness, even at a distance of time, age, location and life experience, to create true fellow feeling with our fellow man.
We live in an era when our way of life and living again seems to be endangered, when we are experiencing what might look like new forces that menace our freedoms and future but that still, somehow, perpetuate threaten to perpetrate old, old evils.
What better time to learn from the past, for the sake of those now in peril and those who come after?
I was wrong all those years ago – with the best of intentions and with a real struggle of mind, intellect and gut feeling. But wrong. Renee Salt and her son were right.
Now I know better. Better that they come than that they don’t come.
Better that they know than that they don’t know. Better that they see than that they don’t see.
Better that they feel awkward, uncomfortable and uncertain than that they forget.