The motto from the holocaust is ‘lest we forget’. Because it mustn’t ever be forgotten. Having said that, it was a long time ago and we like to think that such a thing could never happen again. Even if Corbyn did get into power (heaven forbid) you like to think that persecution of the Jews would remain at its more sneaky, pesky, insidious but manageable levels. Probably like the comfortable, contented and affluent German Jews felt before 1936.

So perhaps it’s because I was born in 1956 to parents who’d lived through the war and its aftermath when the holocaust finally became revealed in all its horrendous destruction, I never do forget.

I read ‘Exodus’, a sanitised and easy story that alludes to the event rather than exposes it. I read other books. Saw movies. Heard the tales. Visited the memorials around the world.

I’ve read lots. From the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the Hollywoodised ultimate ‘what if’, almost revenge tale, to the recent Tattooist of Auschwitz. German stories. French stories, Czech stories, autobiographies and all manner in between. I’ve seen Life is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni’s autobiographical account of his camp, I’ve seen Schindler’s List. I’ve seen the most brutal movie ever which is filmed in the first person and that person works in the ovens in a death camp. (Not all camps were death camps, even though hundreds of thousands died in the non-death camps too, the ones that probably rated higher on Tripadvisor). I read my dad’s mate’s personal account of his time in Auschwitz, something all survivors were encouraged to do to try and ‘exorcise the demons’, speak the unspeakable.

I know about the holocaust. About the gas chambers, about the ovens, the chimneys, the starvation, the beatings, the random killings, the constant life/death choices every day, I know about the dehumanisation of an entire people. Doesn’t mean I’m inured to it, just that the actual physical side of it has become very familiar and though always sickening and saddening, I get that bit.

But what I obviously never really ‘got’ was how hard it was for survivors to actually survive the liberation. To cope with survival when so many, in most cases all the rest of your family, didn’t survive. And the struggle affected their loved ones, massively, and into future generations.

And I’m reading a book now called ‘The Choice’ about just that. An Auschwitz survivor (from Hungary. Most survivors are Hungarian because their Jews weren’t sent to the camps until 1944, ‘just’ one year before liberation) who became a psychologist so she could help traumatised people but found the most difficult person to help was herself. She lived in part-denial, never spoke of her time there, tried to ‘protect’ everyone around her. Whilst actually damaging her close, personal relationships.

Her then 10 year-old daughter comes to her parents holding a book with a photo of the liberated at Auschwitz. The filthy, skeletal, almost dead in their ragged stripes. The mother rushes from the room and throws up. Her husband tells the daughter ‘your mother was there’.

Reading that in the bath the other night I suddenly started sobbing. Not, ‘tears in my eyes’ as I do in rom-coms, adverts involving puppies, goal celebrations, happy times. No, this was actual sobbing. The bath was going to overflow. An outpouring of… what? Empathy? Understanding? Realisation? I don’t know, haven’t worked it out. But it was powerful.

And that was the night that we learned of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. With the neo-Nazi dickhead shouting ‘death to all Jews’.

And people wonder why we’re paranoid.

Happy, healthy, free Wednesday

A xxxx