Abstract
This chapter highlights the tension between political engagement with Holocaust commemoration and responses to the current refugee crisis. Through an examination of historical sources, Alana Vincent makes the case that in spite of the rhetoric of “Never Again!” deployed in connection to the Holocaust, responses to the reality of refugees have changed very little since the 1930s.
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Notes
- 1.
A complete list of member countries may be found at https://holocaustremembrance.com/member-countries (accessed 01/2017).
- 2.
While there are of course marked differences between these three nations, geographical proximity, shared history, and commonality of language means that certain cultural trends and political discourses tend to circulate between them. The present Canadian government (under Justin Trudeau) is currently making use of a more hospitable attitude toward immigration in general, and refugees in particular, to mark itself out as distinct both from its southern neighbor and the Harper government which it has succeeded. However, in the 1930s it was the nation most strongly committed to curbing immigration —statements which in the USA were the purview of right-wing radio personalities such as Father Charles Coughlin were, in Canada, circulated on internal memoranda of government policy . For this reason, a considerable amount of the historical material reviewed in this chapter is taken from Canada, while my present-day comparisons are from the UK and USA.
- 3.
Unlike Holocaust Memorial Day, which takes place according to the Gregorian calendar, Yom haShoah is observed according to the Jewish calendar; it falls on 27 Nisan, which is generally in April or early May.
- 4.
See Alana Vincent, Making Memory: Jewish and Christian Explorations in Monument, Narrative and Liturgy (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013) for a much lengthier discussion of the constitutive function of war commemoration for national identity . Please note that that discussion is based in the commemorative apparatus of the British Commonwealth, dating from the First World War; the notion of war as sacrifice described above is by no means unique, or even original, to Israeli civic religion.
- 5.
The number 17 is taken from the list maintained by Kate Vigurs “Six Million Memorials ~ Landscapes of Memory,” at http://www.6millionmemorials.co.uk/ (accessed 02/2017). Vigurs’ criteria for inclusion are rather broader than my own would be, as she counts sites such as the Wiener Library and exhibits at the Jewish Museum (London), Imperial War Museum, and Imperial War Museum North, all of which play important roles in preserving public memory without being public memorials per se; the National Memorial Arboretum, which includes trees dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg and Anne Frank among many other , non-Holocaust related arboreal dedications; and several memorials situated in synagogues and churches , which are oriented toward the congregations they are located in rather than the general public . My own count of truly public memorials on Vigurs’ list is seven, which includes three memorials to specific individuals (Anne Frank, Raoul Wallenberg, and Freddie Gilroy), and a further two memorials to the Jewish populations of particular areas (Jersey, and Lidice, a village in the Czech Republic which is commemorated with two plaques located in Hackney, for reasons which Vigurs confesses herself unable to determine). The remaining two memorials—the Holocaust Memorial Garden in Hyde Park and the Kindertransport: The Arrival Memorial at Liverpool Street Station—will be discussed below.
- 6.
Inscription at the site.
- 7.
The visitor count for Hyde Park is reported by Michael Hitchcock, Tony Curson, and Paola Parravicini, “Visitors to the Royal Parks: Results of Steady State Count (August 2007–July 2008),” International Institute for Culture, Tourism and Development (London Metropolitan University, 2008) at https://www.royalparks.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/41815/report-august-2008-1.pdf (accessed 02/2017). These numbers might be slightly low, as they do not take into account attendance at the Winter Wonderland event which has run annually since 2007 and which itself attracts upwards of two million visitors each year, as reported in Katie Deighton, “Winter Wonderland Visitors Rise to More than 2.5 million,” Event Magazine, January 5, 2015, at http://www.eventmagazine.co.uk/winter-wonderland-visitors-rise-25-million/destinations/article/1327827 (accessed 02/2017). However, one might safely assume that visitors to the Winter Wonderland are particularly unlikely to be attracted to a Holocaust memorial, even if its design were not quite so modest. While more recent figures for Liverpool Street Station are available, in order to provide a more meaningful comparison, the visitor count for that site is taken from Georgios Georgiou and Brian Ball, “Station Usage 2006/07,” DeltaRail, May 1, 2008, at http://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/4598/station-usage-report-2006-07.pdf (accessed 02/2017).
- 8.
See Ari Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich 1933–1939 (London: Routledge, 1994), 182.
- 9.
See Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933–1948 (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1982), 26–32.
- 10.
See Sherman, Island Refuge, 48, 124–126, 131.
- 11.
“Unaccompanied children” in the 1930s and 1940s were, much as they are today, legal minors, largely adolescents, rather than toddlers and primary school children. Abella and Troper, None is Too Many, 237, recount the difficulties in finding families to accept older children: “In Toronto, for instance, first efforts to get foster homes or adoptive parents for the children were rewarded by a rush of enthusiasm. Many families offered to take orphaned children—all requested children less than seven years of age.” The misapprehension over what constitutes a “child” refugee has continued, and added some fuel to anti-refugee fervor in the UK , as the Daily Mail spent a considerable amount of column space observing that “migrants arriving into Britain over the last two days appear to look older than the 14 to 17 years the Government claims they are.” John Stevens and Emma Glanfield, “‘Adults are pretending to be children’: Now even aid workers admit ‘Calais kids’ are LYING about their age as vulnerable nine-year-old African boy is refused UK entry in ‘shambolic’ selection process,” Mail Online, October 18, 2016, at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3847114/Adults-pretending-children-aid-workers-admit-Calais-kids-LYING-age-vulnerable-nine-year-old-refused-UK-entry-shambolic-selection-process.html (accessed 02/2017).
- 12.
Norman Bentwich, They Found Refuge: An Account of British Jewry’s Work for Victims of Nazi Oppression (London: Cresset Press, 1956), 71.
- 13.
It should be noted, however, that the reluctance to accept refugees was merely an extension of a long-held suspicion of Jewish—and particularly Ashkenazi—immigration , as detailed in Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Anti-Semitism in British Society During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). See also Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Tony Kushner, The Battle of Britishness: Migrant Journeys 1680 to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).
- 14.
A good summary of the literature in this vein can be found in Gavreil D. Rosenfeld, “The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 13/1 (1999), 28–61, but see especially Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978); Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996).
- 15.
Quoted in Abella and Troper, None is Too Many, 27.
- 16.
See ibid., 38–66. Abella and Troper do not, however, make explicit the connection between an immigration policy favoring agricultural workers and therefore premised upon Western expansion (which is to say colonialism) and anti-Semitism as two intertwined and mutually supporting manifestations of structural racism.
- 17.
Quoted in David Brody, “American Jewry, the Refugees and Immigration Restriction (1932–1942),” in America, American Jews and the Holocaust: American Jewish History, ed. Jeffrey S. Gurock (London: Routledge, 1998), 181–210, here 198.
- 18.
Bernard Waserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988), 9.
- 19.
Quoted in Matthew Holehouse, “Six in Ten Migrants not Entitled to Asylum, says EU Chief,” The Telegraph, January 26, 2016, at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/12123684/Six-in-ten-migrants-not-entitled-to-asylum-says-EU-chief.html (accessed 02/2017). See also Peter Cluskey, “Most Fleeing to Europe are ‘Not Refugees’, EU Official Says,” Irish Times, January 26, 2016, at http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/most-fleeing-to-europe-are-not-refugees-eu-official-says-1.2511133 (accessed 02/2017).
- 20.
See Nikolaj Nielsen, “Timmermans Blunders on Migrant Figures,” EU Observer, January 28, 2016, at https://euobserver.com/migration/132048 (accessed 02/2017).
- 21.
For The Daily Mail, Sue Reid ran the headline “The tragic but brutal truth: They are not REAL refugees! Despite drowning tragedy thousands of economic migrants are still trying to reach Europe,” The Daily Mail, May 28, 2016, at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3613603/The-tragic-brutal-truth-not-REAL-refugees-Despite-drowning-tragedy-thousands-economic-migrants-trying-reach-Europe.html (accessed 02/2017). The Express carried the theme of economic migrants into October, reporting on Czech president Milos Zeman’s demand that economic migrants be immediately deported. See Nick Gutteridge, “‘SEND THEM BACK!’ Fuming Czech leader orders Brussels to DEPORT economic migrants ,” The Sunday Express, October 2, 2016, at http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/716819/refugee-crisis-Czech-president-Zeman-Brussels-deport-economic-migrants (accessed 02/2017).
- 22.
Quoted in Ajay Nair, “‘They’re ECONOMIC MIGRANTS’: Nigel Farage slates misuse of term ‘refugee’,” The Daily Express, February 13, 2017, at http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/766598/nigel-farage-fox-news-claims-refugees-economic-migrants (accessed 02/2017).
- 23.
George E. Sullivan, “America’s Insidious Foes: Surveying Some Subversive Snares and Propaganda,” Social Justice, December 5, 1938, 9–12, here 10.
- 24.
Social Justice was relatively short-lived in its circulation, but it filled much the same ideological niche as Breitbart News does today.
- 25.
George E. Sullivan, “America’s Insidious Foes,” 10.
- 26.
Quoted in Ajay Nair, “‘They’re ECONOMIC MIGRANTS’: Nigel Farage slates misuse of term ‘refugee’,” The Daily Express, February 13, 2017, at http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/766598/nigel-farage-fox-news-claims-refugees-economic-migrants (accessed 02/2017).
- 27.
The history of the idea of Jewish Bolshevism is too complex to detail here; it has been derided as an anti-Semitic myth, but at the same time—like all good stereotypes —a myth which coincides with just enough factual detail to imbue it with an aura of factuality; an interested reader is advised to start with André W. M. Gerrits, The Myth of Jewish Communism: A Historical Interpretation (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009). It is certainly true that the majority of influential Jewish intellectuals in the twentieth century have been left-wing; for discussion of this phenomenon, see Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology, ed. Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); and Jewish Thought, Utopia, and Revolution, ed. Elena Namli, Jayne Svenungsson, and Alana M. Vincent (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014).
- 28.
See Winston Churchill, “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920, 5.
- 29.
William D. Pelley, The 45 Questions Most Frequently Asked About Jews: With the Answers (Asheville, NC: Pelley Publishers, 1939), 45.
- 30.
A term which featured heavily in the UK media , especially around the time of the EU referendum campaign; see The Daily Express, “These sharia courts have no place in our country.” Editorial, March 11, 2016, at http://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/651624/Sharia-courts-UK-ban-Archbishop-Canterbury-Justin-Welby-migration-breast-cancer (accessed 02/2017).
- 31.
Indeed, as I have been writing this paragraph I note that US Vice President Mike Pence has posted to Twitter: “Moving and emotional tour of Dachau today. We can never forget atrocities against Jews and others in the Holocaust.” See Mike Pence, “Moving and Emotional Tour of Dachau Today. We Can Never Forget Atrocities Against Jews and Others in the Holocaust,” at https://twitter.com/VP/status/833334018313744386 (accessed 02/2017). That this statement comes shortly after his government has attempted to bar citizens of a number of Muslim-majority countries from entry into the USA, including canceling refugee resettlement visas and green cards, as well as having sharply increased immigration raids and deportations, rather underlines my point about the selectiveness of compassion prompted by Holocaust memory.
- 32.
The question of awareness, and imagination, of war, aided by advances in photo-journalism over the course of the twentieth century, is of course the theme of Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
- 33.
Too long to reproduce here, Edeet Ravel provides a particularly elegant demonstration of this problem of numbers in Ten Thousand Lovers: A Novel (San Francisco: Harper Perennial, 2003), 278–281.
- 34.
Figure taken from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) briefing, William Spindler, “Mediterranean Sea: 100 People Reported Dead Yesterday, Bringing Year Total to 5,000,” at http://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/briefing/2016/12/585ce804105/mediterranean-sea-100-people-reported-dead-yesterday-bringing-year-total.html (accessed 02/2017).
- 35.
Quoted in Abella and Troper, None is Too Many, 187.
- 36.
See the analysis in Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Plume, 1993).
- 37.
See Elaine Scarry’s analysis of the role of metaphor in facilitating killing by introducing distance in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 27–59.
- 38.
In addition to Arendt, see Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
- 39.
I speak here of a generic “we,” comprising the undifferentiated mass of the transnational Anglo-Western body politic; there are different nuances of memorial fantasy operative in communities where a greater identification with the victims is to be expected. Laura Levitt, American Jewish Loss After the Holocaust (New York: New York University Press, 2007), is an excellent study of this under-examined phenomenon.
- 40.
While recent revisions to the A-level curriculum have seen Goldhagen’s work becoming less dominant, the first group of students educated under the new curriculum have yet to enter University, and so Goldhagen’s influence on public understanding of the Holocaust remains significant. Jewish religious responses to the Holocaust are also covered by the Judaism paper for Religious Studies A-levels, but relatively few students undertake that paper, and so History is the main vector of Holocaust education in schools.
- 41.
See Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown & Co., 1996).
- 42.
See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
- 43.
See Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” in Responsibility and Judgement (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 17–48.
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Vincent, A.M. (2018). None Is Still Too Many: Holocaust Commemoration and Historical Anesthetization. In: Schmiedel, U., Smith, G. (eds) Religion in the European Refugee Crisis. Religion and Global Migrations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67961-7_10
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