The address delivered by Mr Frank Bright
at the Suffolk County Council Holocaust Day Memorial Exhibition
on Friday, 26 January 2007

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,

There are very few survivors of what has become known as "The Holocaust", the largest and most systematic campaign of racial genocide and I am one of those few.  It was an attempt to exploit modern industrial technology to kill every Jewish man, woman and child in Europe, simply for being Jews.  In Hebrew it is called "The Shoah" which means "The catastrophe, the destruction".

I was asked to make a contribution to this exhibition and I have chosen my class photo.  Most of the children, and many of them are still smiling, as children do when they have their picture taken.  Two years later most of them were dead, murdered.

When talking about the Holocaust it is easy, and sometimes it is appropriate, to veer off in many direction at once because the subject is so vast and has so many facets, so many were ill-treated, robbed and starved, turned into slaves and worked until they were unable to be of any use to the German system of exploitation to be then shot, gassed or clubbed to death, others arrived at their destination only to be shot on arrival, like my best friend Kurt Herschmann and his mother, refugees in Prague from Germany.  Others were kept in the railway cattle trucks for so long without water and not being able to move, so tightly packed they were, that they were dead on arrival.  My classmate Alfred Popper, his father William, his mother Hilda and his brother Karel whose journey to a notorious extermination camp called Trostinetz took six days are examples of such gratuitous bestiality.  Imagine being six days and nights in a cattle truck, not being able to move and without food and water.  Those who were not dead on arrival, and there can't have been many, were murdered in specially constructed gas vans where the exhaust pipe was connected to the inside of the van.  Others had wait for six months in a "Family Camp" in Auschwitz before being gassed.  Very few were hidden by good people at enormous risk to themselves and we must honour their courage.  Others, who were either hidden or went "underground" were betrayed by less good people for the bounty of a bottle of vodka or a few worthless marks.

They also experimented on living people and particularly on twins to prove something or other about their racial theories.  Older people had no chance at all, they simply died of starvation.  Because they were not capable of heavy work they were given rations calculated to kill.  To the Germans an elderly Jew was a "useless mouth", as was a mother with a young child.  In his autobiography a brother of a fellow prisoner in Friedland, my last camp, describes how he saw on arrival at Auschwitz babies heads being smashed against the railway wagon from which it and its mother had just emerged and how a blind man was kicked in the head until he was dead.

They were indeed a cruel and barbaric bunch and the world would have sunk into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science if they had won the war which they had deliberately started.  The aim of the British government under Mr.Churchill, the only government of decent people left in Europe after the Fall of France and the conquest of the rest of Europe by that grisly gang of Germans who shot British prisoners and bombed British cities and coined the verb "zu koventrieren", to Coventry, to reduce all British towns and cities to rubble, was to wage war against this monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime and to achieve victory, for without victory there was no survival for anybody human.

Before I start to talk about my fellow pupils I would like to make it clear, absolutely clear, and I know what I am talking about, having been born in Berlin, that what they did they did with cold-blooded intention and fervour.  One didn't have to look far to see and feel the viciousness with which the citizens of that city, and without doubt of all other cities, particularly Dresden, set upon their Jewish fellow Berliners from the very day Hitler had become Chancellor by democratic means after they had voted for him and his programme of rearmament and the removal of Jews from all aspects of civic life, removing them from their jobs to give to members of the party and to take all of their property to finance the preparations for war and for the subjugation of inferior races, by which they meant everybody else.  Berliners and the good burghers of the rest of the country had voted for that and had given the Nazi Party a majority in the German Parliament and they had done quite voluntarily.  Whatever compulsion may have been exerted later, on that occasion, which set the scene for the destruction of Europe and of vast areas of Russia and the extermination of the Jews, resulting in the death of a staggering 47 million people, including military losses, their votes were cast voluntarily and intentionally, or to use a legal jargon, with malice aforethought.  They couldn't wait to get into uniforms and the speed of rearmament, producing the latest and most advanced weaponry which, until the heroic Battle of Britain, had overwhelmed everybody else, in the very short space of five years and starting from scratch, could not have been carried out without unbounded enthusiasm, with everybody, absolutely everybody, putting their shoulders to the wheel and making full use of their undoubted talents and skills.

It is sometimes suggested by the Germans of the post-war era, including the young of to-day, that the Nazis were a foreign tribe who settled in Germany in 1933 and disappeared in 1945 and then for the good Germans to emerge from the woods and everybody lived happily ever after and that these good German did not know about, had no inkling, of the atrocities committed by the Nazis.  We must not forget that the Nazis were Germans, it is an interchangeable term.  Hitler did not have many supporters left by May 1945, when the game was up, but he did have plenty in 1940 when their cohorts stamped their jackboots on the whole of Europe, except on this island, when might was right and the end justified the means and continued to do so until the very end.  All of them agreed that they were indeed superior, had they not been victorious under his leadership, Hitler was right.  Not until 2 February 1943, when von Paulus capitulated at Stalingrad, did any doubts creep in.  But they kept on killing the innocent for another 27 long months.  Even during their retreats cattle trucks were always made available by the German railways to carry Jews to their death and the civilian, so called, railway employees who made up the time-tables, always managed for such trucks and for the locomotives to get to their destination on time.  In 1955 a German- Jewish refugee in Britain who had risen to the rank of officer in the Royal Air Force, one Ernest David, remarked that he did not have the impression that those Germans he spoke to regretted the Nazi era.  They regretted having lost the war.

The photo of my class, class IIB of the Jewish school in Prague, was taken towards the end of May 1942.  The Germans then closed that school and all other Jewish schools in German-occupied Europe, in June of 1942.  To them it was completely logical that to teach children who they were going to kill during the next two years was a waste of time.  It was better to set them to work and that is what they did.

The photo was one of many family photos which were hidden by Czech friends and returned to me after the war.  When I came to England in June of 1946 I could only take one piece of luggage, a trunk into which I packed as much as I could carry.  I grabbed just a few of these photos and intended to collect the rest once I had settled down and had somewhere to keep them safely.  The coming down of the Iron Curtain and the squalid anti-Semitism of the Czech Communist Party, no better than their Nazi predecessors and using similar means, made that impossible.  I had become a Westerner and anybody in contact with me was tainted and in danger.  I had to agree to have them destroyed.

There is an institution in Jerusalem which collects data of those who perished.  In 1977 they asked survivors to fill in forms, called Pages of Testimony, for all of those whom they could remember.  I did so and also sent the photo as being of potential interest to them.  I had no copy made.  Frankly, I couldn't bear to look at it.  I thought that I was the only survivor, and very nearly I am, and I knew of the agonies that had laid in wait for them.  It was depressing, to say the least.  Also, another facet of the Holocaust, nobody was really interested in Jewish grief at that time.  It was not until Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List", a rather optimistic version, there were precious few Schindlers around, that interest in the subject began to increase and by now there is a vast amount of literature around and freely available on the internet.  All you have to do is to click onto Google and enter "Dachau" the first concentration camp built by the Nazis as soon as they had taken over, or "Dora-Mittelbau" where 12,000 slaves laboured in the bomb-proof bowels of the Harz mountains to produce the V1 and the V2 rockets, and all is revealed within seconds.

Yad Vashem had glued the class photo to the form I had filled for the teacher who perished, and they would have damaged it trying to remove it.  So they scanned it and sent it on a floppy disk.  I now had to find a means of identifying the children in addition to the few whose names I remembered myself.

I knew that the Prague Jewish Museum publishes a newsletter.  I sent them a copy of the photo and asked for a search notice to be printed in the hope that a reader would recognise at least one of the children.  Life being full of coincidences somebody did.  An artist whose work was being exhibited in the museum gallery recognised two girls, although she herself had not attended that class.  One was a friend from those days of sixty years ago, Marta Klein, by then living in Jerusalem, and the other one was a cousin, Hana Ginz, living in Prague.  Through this artist, living in Israel but born in Prague, whose brother had been murdered, I was able to contact these two former classmates and together they came up with 28 names.  I now had to write to archives in Prague and Israel to try to find out details, such as dates of birth, last addresses, the dates when they were deported from Prague to the ghetto of Theresienstadt and the dates when they were sent on to the East, their final destination and fate.  It took some time and I was also looking for other friends.  All I had to go on was the name, that their last address was a Prague one and that they were born between the end of 1927 and the beginning of 1929.  It was quite a job for the archivists and some archives are more complete than others and some archivists reply sooner than others, I am not the only one calling on their services and most work as volunteers and are of my age, in fact they too are survivors, at least those in Prague and Israel.  The International Tracing Service in Germany, part of the International Red Cross, is utterly useless.  In the end they managed it and, converting children into mere statistics, and adding those who had been deported and killed before the photo was taken, though we didn't know that at the time, like my friend Kurt Diamant and his mother, refugees from Vienna, I can now say with almost complete certainty that of the 28 children where we can put names to faces 19 were murdered and 9 survived, including myself.  I can also say that it is likely that the 23 not yet identified were also murdered.  It is the shortage of survivors which makes tracing so difficult and some only remember the names of their best friends and I know their names already.

Whichever way you look at it, and considering that it is just one class in one Jewish school, that there were several classes, and that we had either morning or afternoon sessions to make maximum use of classrooms, and that younger children had far less chance of survival, if any, because they were not considered fit for work by Dr. Mengele, the angel of death, on arrival at Auschwitz, then you arrive at a very large number of children whose life was snuffed out by a brutal method and who also suffered before they were gassed.  At a rough guess that a family was made up on average of two parents, two children and two grandparents, an exaggeration in my case, I had no sibling and all of my grandparents had died before I was born, and that a total of six million Jews were killed then you arrive at 2 million children.  However proficient, efficient and industrialised the German killing machine was, it needed and it got an army of willing executioners.  If you ever meet a German now who feels very sorry for him or herself and claims that they too were victims, namely of the bombing by the Allies, having first introduced the system themselves and then started to whine when they got paid in their own coin and haven't stopped since, you can tell them that.

If you look at the picture the first thing you will notice that the children are wearing a star.  The star was yellow, it is six-sided and is more visible on the picture on light clothing.  Inside the star is printed the word "Jude", Jew, in letters which try to imitate Hebrew printed script.  You had to wear it when out of doors.  If you notice a boy or girl without a star then that is because he had one on his or her jacket.  It made one conspicuous, obvious, it was humiliating, which was what it was intended to be and anybody could beat you up, and in Germany and Austria the Hitlerjugend did just that and they were the next generation.  Jews had no civic rights, the police would not act, no lawyer would defend you and the word of a Jew in court counted for nothing.  It also made it impossible to avoid other restrictions such as being prohibited from using public transport, public telephones, using certain streets, being allowed to shop only during an hour in the afternoon when there was nothing left on the shelves which was off the ration such as vegetables when in season.  Jews could only use one post office in the whole of Prague, banks could only be visited during the first hour after opening.  Going to a hairdresser was prohibited as was for a hairdresser to visit you.  Jews were prohibited from attending any public performance, be it a football match or a concert even if you could afford it, which you couldn't because parents were excluded from all economic life and had been turned into paupers.  They could not practice a profession, a trade, own a shop.  There was a curfew.

Jews did not get clothing coupons.  Children, although undernourished, were excluded from the distribution of fruit, nuts, fish and meat, and got less of everything else, nevertheless insisted on growing, even if at a reduced rate.  Therefore skirts and

trousers became shorter, shirts, blouses, jackets and coats tighter.  You could well ask why didn't parents of tall children offer them to other parents, even if they were cast-offs or worn, anything was better than nothing.  The answer is that the Germans made every Jewish householder sign a declaration that he would not dispose of their own property.  Likewise every member of a Jewish household had to fill in a 16-page form listing every conceivable item of their property, from shirts, shoes, shawls, trousers, jackets, smoking jackets, pyjamas, nightshirts, trousers, coats, hats to bed linen, pillows, beds, tables, chairs, pots and pans, knives, forks, spoons, lampshades, carpets, pictures, mirrors, chests of drawers.  Nothing was omitted.  Once filled and returned people were afraid to give anything away in case somebody came round and checked against the lust you had signed.  That's what terror does to you.  It also meant that the Germans felt themselves to be fully entitled to every little bit of Jewish property and indeed, the day after a family had left their house, flat or room and had gone to the assembly point to be deported to the ghetto, a horse-drawn van would pull up and empty the house, flat or room of everything.  This ill-gotten loot was taken to a central depot and sorted and then sent to various warehouses, carpets to one, pictures to another, clothing to a third, books to a fourth, etc.  When it came to looting and disposing of other people's property were, as in everything else, very efficient.  They even boasted that they had taken more books from Jewish homes then there were in the whole of Prague University’s library.  They also took the last bit of coal and firewood.

Returning to the subject of clothing, there were two other aspects which made life even more difficult.  Jews had had to hand in, even before they were deported, many individual items.  One of them was sewing machines and that made alterations more difficult.  The other one was the star already mentioned.  Only a few were issued to each person.  It had to be firmly fixed to the outer garment.  They were made of extremely poor fraying material which was not all that colour fast.  The summers are very hot and humid in Prague.  One would change shorts and blouses often.  Getting very little soap was, of course, yet another problem.  Every time you did the laundry, and laundering was done by hand, no machines then, the star had to be taken off and then put back on again.  The star would have disintegrated in next to no time.  People had to think of ways of removing it and attaching it without damaging it.  One way was to mount it on cardboard and to sew one half of a press-stud to the end of each of the six corners and the other half of the press-stud on every, shirt and blouse.  Jackets and coats had a permanent star except if it was needed somewhere else.  That in itself was an enormous task and the question remained whether the system of press-studs complied with the instruction that the star was to be firmly attached.  This one item alone was therefore not just a matter of humiliation and identifying Jews among the populace, it was also a matter of real practical difficulties.

The Germans in Bohemia and Moravia also confiscated, even before they had deported their owners, bicycles (3,503), typewriters (2,036), cameras, other optical instruments such as microscopes, ski gear, woollens, furs (34, 543 pieces), musical instruments (462 pianos, 24,212 portable instruments), gramophones and radios, in other words everything useful to them in waging war or enriching themselves.  They removed all of the medical equipment from surgeries (from 828 surgeries) That they also confiscated people's bank accounts, savings, life insurance policies, shares and everything of gold, silver and pearls goes without saying.  They were, and possibly still are, a greedy lot.  Possibly a German family is still using our table and chairs, have our pictures hanging on their walls.  With the utmost consideration for etiquette they permitted married couples to keep their wedding ring.  But not for long.  These.  were removed from their fingers, and this time without any consideration of physical injury, before they entered the gas chamber.  Any gold teeth were removed from the corpses and made quite a contribution to Germany's means to pay the Swiss and Swedes for war materials, both countries being aware of the provenance of the bullion.  There was no other source.  Presumably that was done on the principle that if you ask no silly questions you get no silly answers.

Having to hand in bicycles AND not being permitted on public transport meant that you had to walk everywhere and in all weathers and it can be very cold and very slushy there once the snow starts to melt.  Having had to hand in musical instruments and radios and not being permitted to attend any public performance meant that their lives were without music whatsoever.  Naturally one never went or could have gone, on holiday.  With accounts frozen there was no money and you were not allowed on a train.  Refugees from Germany and Austria had arrived penniless anyway.

Every story is different.  Not only were those to die in the majority but they were sent to different killing fields of which there was a great number, Auschwitz was only one of them though it is best known, but those who survived did so by pure chance.  The rule was that you were killed by one means or another, hence the staggering figure of six million victims of the German-instigated Holocaust.  Those who survived were the exception and did so by a fluke.

Taking the ghetto of Terezín near Prague as an example, and it was by no means the worst, but it is the only I know personally, I spent 15 months there.  Your chance of surviving a transport to the East between January 1942 and January 1943, and there were 32 transports of between 1,000 and 2,000 people on each, carrying 47,870 men, women and children during that one year, the chances of survival for an adult was one half of one percent.  Not very much.  For a child and its mother it was zero.  In other words it was 99.5% certain that you would be killed.  Even if Dr. Mengele in the case of Auschwitz, on weighing you up for half a second and judging you fit for heavy work, then you still had a good chance of not making it.  Take Kurt Huppert.  He is No.50 on the numbered photo and stands in the last top row on the extreme right next to Harry Osers who survived.  Kurt still smiles, poor devil, he was a jolly fellow.  I am still waiting for his last address from a slow archive and he is not yet on all of my lists.  But I do know that he obviously was a fellow pupil, that he was sent to the ghetto on 6 March 1943, a month before us, and that he was sent to Auschwitz on the very same transport on 12 October 1944 as were my mother and I.  And like me he found favour in the eyes of Dr. Mengele and survived the first selection on arrival.  But then our ways parted.  Most of those who had thus overcome the first hurdle were sent to a slave labour camp.  These were sub-camps of the 18 major concentration camps which, in turn, operated no fewer than 981 sub-camps.  Those who were sent to a slave labour camp which later happened to be in the way of the Russian advance were driven into Germany on death marches, so called because death along the way was a very likely outcome, at least a hundred thousand died that way as did 10% of British POWs.  I happened to be sent to a slave labour camp which was not in the way of the Russian advance, they bypassed us on their way to Berlin.  Our camp therefore remained put.  Otherwise I would not be here to-day.  Kurt was sent to another camp, which was in the way of the Russian advance, he was put on a death march and got as far as the major concentration camp of Dachau where he died on 3 January 1945.

Those like me, who were sent to Friedland, a sub-camp of the major concentration camp of Gross-Rosen in Silesia to make aluminium propellers, had been selected by the manager of the factory who had come in person into the midst of Auschwitz to select his cheap labour.  For any German to say that he or she didn't know what was going on is just arrant nonsense.  I stood near the door of our hut through which he had entered.  May be that why he chose me.  May be Kurt Huppert stood further back and in the dark and wasn't noticed, not pointed at by the manager in his raincoat with the round party emblem in his lapel, and was therefore sent somewhere else.  It may have been this small coincidence which sealed his fate.  In the case of Marta Klein it was because she hid in the tent known to contain typhus cases and she did so because her mother was there.  That saved her.

You are looking at a class of children around thirteen years of age and you know that 19 of those I have been able to identify after 58 years with the help of two other survivors were murdered and nine others survived though those 9 were scarred by their experience and, in many cases the loss of their nearest and dearest.  Take Toman Brod, with whom I have only just got in touch, his father, mother and brother had been killed, he was completely on his own and, like me, he did not have a home to return to, he had no secondary education, he had no trade and our health wasn't that good either.  Or take Marta Klein.  She and her mother survived but her father and brother did not.  Her mother, having hung onto life with the hope, and hope is a strong incentive, that she would see her son and her husband again, tried to commit suicide, she had now nothing to live for.  Therefore, to complete the picture I have recently started to trace the parents of these children.  These children did have parents and siblings, what happened to them? Because my search is far from complete I can only tell you about those I did find.  Thus in the case of Hanuš Pick (No.1 on the photo), his mother and brother were killed too, I have not found details of his father.  Zdenĕk Vohryzek (No.  2 on the photo), his father, mother and sister were killed with him.  No.6 is Helga Pollack and her parents were killed with her.  Hana Jung, (No.8 on the photo) went to her death with her mother and younger sisters, I have found no trace yet of her father.  In fact fathers are more difficult to trace but it can be assumed that they were killed.  Alfred Popper (No.12 on the photo) and his father, mother and brother had a particularly dreadful end.  They were the family I mentioned at the beginning, whose journey to their execution took six days in a sealed cattle truck without food and water.  Felix Schulhof (No.13 on the photo) was murdered together with his father, mother and sister, as was Hanuš Glaser (No.  15 on the photo).  My teacher George Glanzberg had a father, mother and two brothers.  All of them were killed.  The Germans tried, and one can say succeeded in nearly all cases, to commit the perfect crime, all of the family members were wiped out, there were no witnesses left to testify against them.

But there is more to it.  There were two transports which left the ghetto on the same day.  Transports "Dl" and "Dm" were made up of 5,007 men, women and children of whom only 38 adults survived, mainly because they were medical staff needed somewhere else, or 4,969 were killed.  Dr. Gottfried R.  Bloch describes that scene in his book "Unfree Associations, a psychoanalyst recollects the Holocaust", Red Hen Press, Los Angeles 1999, and worth reading.  They were not killed outright on arrival.  They were subjected to a particularly terrible and cruel torture.  They were put into what became known as "family camps".  Men and women with children were confined in separate huts but could see one another during part of the day.  Conditions were meant to break you physically and mentally, and they did.  They were kept there for six months.  Day and night they could see the flames of the crematoria belching smoke and polluting the air with the smell of burning human flesh reducing thousands and thousands of human bodies to ash.  All the time those in the family camp kept wondering when it was to be their turn.  Their turn came on the night of the 8th to 9th of March 1944, six months after their arrival.  I have found so far that five of my classmates and their parents and siblings, a total of 18 people, perished under such conditions.

The Special Operations Executive, the SOE, sent two agents from London to Prague to assassinate Heydrich, a very high-ranking SS officer and so-called Reichs Protektor.  They did.  The reprisals exacted by the Germans were terrible.  All of the male inhabitants of the Czech village of Lidice were put against a wall and shot, the women and children were either shot or sent to concentration camps.  Many other Czechs were executed too but so were Jews.  2,000 were sent to their death from the ghetto and one thousand from Prague, among them my friend Kurt Herschmann and his mother, (No.28 on the numbered photo).

The time has come to consider whether these children, and their parents and brothers and sisters, could have been saved by allowing them to escape from German clutches.  The answers are rather uncomfortable.  What the Germans, and later the Austrians, intended to do had been rather obvious, it had been their election manifesto and the first violent boycott of Jewish shops had taken place on the 1st of April 1933, or just two months after they had been elected.  Foreign correspondents could report, visitors could see the anti-Semitic posters and smashed windows of Jewish shops as well as the notices stuck to the brass plates of Jewish doctors and lawyers not to do business with them.  Jewish teachers and officials had already been dismissed from their jobs and Aryans had taken their place.  Germany didn't hide these things; neither did they hide their rapid rearmament, which was taking place on a colossal scale.  One way would have been to stop Germany rearming before that ran out of control.  Nobody did.  The League of Nations was as useless at preventing the catastrophe which was to engulf the whole of Europe, courtesy of Germany, as the United Nations is to-day.  Allied politicians and professors of law were quoting international law then as they do now, you must not interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states.  In other words, turn the other cheek If Hitler and his many adherents want to beat up Jews, kill them in concentration camps, loot their property, kick them out of their jobs, stop them from earning a living, then that is their business, nothing to do with us.  But there was another way to help.  What about offering those desperately trying to leave Germany, and later Austria, asylum? That didn't happen either.

Those trying every avenue to leave faced doors not only shut but locked.  Australia, which had a "Whites only" immigration policy, said they had no racial problem and didn't want to import one.  Canada was even more direct.  Their Minister of Immigration said that one Jewish immigrant was one too many.  The Boers of South Africa were pro-German and therefore did not welcome Jews.  South American republics demanded baptism certificates which was an easy way of keeping Jews out and made it easy for whole regiments of the SS to find a welcome there after the war.  Those who had escaped to places later occupied by Germany, such as France, Belgium and Holland were killed after these countries were overrun.  The French in unoccupied France rounded up Jews even before the Germans had asked them to.  I am sorry to say that the occupied Channel Islands put every difficulty in the way of escape for the few Jews there who were, literally, handed over to the Germans and killed.  Some of the islanders were decorated after the war but I am not quite sure for what, it was not exactly for offering resistance.

On an island at the entrance to New York Harbour stands the Statue of Liberty.  At its base are engraved the words by Emma Lazarus: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breather free." They should have added: "Except when these huddled masses are Jews".  The difficulties put in the way of desperate people were enormous; most could not comply, which was really the object.  A quota system of so many allowed in annually made no concession to the urgency.  One of the tenants in our block of small flats in Prague, one Gottfried Bloch, a final year medical student who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, applied for a visa at the American Embassy in Prague in 1938.  He received one 18 years later.  That was the measure of it.  You also needed a guarantor to make quite sure that you did not become a burden on the ratepayer, not likely, as everybody was keen to start life afresh.  On the other hand if you did not have a relative already settled in the USA then you were not likely to find a guarantor.

Since we are in Britain, what did Britain do? Britain had once upon a time had an open door policy but the Aliens Act of 1909 put a stop to that.  Even when, after the war, distant relatives of mine asked the Home Office for a visa and Belsen was common knowledge, the Home Office demanded a deposit of Ł500, an enormous sum in those days, the visa was valid for only for six months and I was not permitted to do any work, paid or unpaid for these first six months.  Having already wasted six years of my life that was rather frustrating and served no useful or humanitarian purpose.  The Ukrainian regiments of the notorious Waffen SS, who had been camp guards, and had been invited to come to Britain so as not to fall into the hands of the Russians, had had no such restrictions placed on them.

Britain had taken in nearly 10,000 children before the war as long as sponsors were found and as long as these sponsors paid the Home Office Ł50 per child, also a considerable sum of money in 1938.  These special visas did not extend to their parents and older siblings and the result were nearly 10,000 instant orphans.  If you were a known scientist, or were Albert Einstein or Sigmund Freud then a university, and there were then very few universities, would offer you a place and the Home Office would relent, but not everybody was a famous scientist or an Albert Einstein.  There was also pressure from trade unions who didn't like immigrants and there were professional institutions which objected.  Thus the Home Office was quite willing to offer 500 visas to doctors of which Britain was short and where the possible war would require native doctors to be called up, as indeed they were.  The British Medical Association objected and got the number down to 50, doing the country no favour.

I now come to Palestine.  That can be described in one sentence: Under Arab pressure the British government closed that escape hatch too and all those who could have been saved there, including the children you see on the photo, went up the chimneys of Auschwitz.  Politics is a dirty business.  The Holocaust is a vast subject.  It is not enough to spare a few minutes once a year thinking about its victims.  It is not enough to repeat the mantra: "Never Again".  It behoves us to look at the role the Allies played too.  For instance the decision to bomb the I.G.Farben factory in Auschwitz, with the decision not to destroy the gas chambers right next door at the same time when by then the function of Auschwitz as an extermination camp was well known.

There are a few oddballs who deny that the Holocaust, which means the murder of many millions, the gas chambers, the looting, slave labour, death marches, ever happened.  Unfortunately for all those affected by it, it did happen.  It would have been nice if it had not happened.  Then I would not be standing here, as a witness, talking about it and the many children on the photo would have had the chance to grow old as I have grown old.  They were denied that right to live by that grisly gang of German willing executioners who knew no mercy in their ambition to rid the world of what they considered to be racially inferior sub-human beings.