Speech to the 75th reunion of the Kindertransport
June 23rd, 2013
London
I feel a deep sense of privilege and responsibility in being asked to speak to you today. The stories of the kinder, and the story of the kindertransport, speak through time to universal questions of humanity, solidarity and compassion. But they also speak to a specifically British response to the particular traumas of European Jewry 75 years ago. Politicians and citizens; Jews, Christians, Quakers and atheists; North and South; cosmopolitan Britain and rural Britain; all, or almost all, came together in common cause to forge life-saving links across boundaries of nationality and religion. Like many of you here, I have very personal reasons to be aware of this.
My father and grandfather found their own way here in 1940 from Belgium. They were helped by many people along the way. And then they did what refugees and immigrants have done down the ages: they put something back. My grandfather spent the war clearing out bombed buildings. My dad studied and then joined the Royal Navy. Fortunately my grandmother and aunt, left behind in Belgium, were sheltered by a Catholic farming family. My mother was not so lucky as to escape Poland before 1940. She spent the war in hiding before coming here with Rabbi Shonfeld in 1946, where she was looked after by British families before going to university and making her own career and family.
These stories were the background music to my childhood. After all, I was born only twenty years after the Holocaust. Now I am part of a transitional generation, born early enough to have met survivors, kinder and non kinder, but part of a generation destined to outlive them, and required in years to come to take up their story and its lessons without the benefit of their living testimony.
The Holocaust was the memory of our parents but it is history taught to our children. As time moves on, and the number of kinder declines, the responsibility of remembrance grows heavier still on this generation and those not yet born. That is one reason that events like this, and related efforts by the Holocaust Education Trust, the Anne Frank Trust and others, are so important.
Today we pay personal tribute to the parents, to the children and to those who gave them refuge. “He who saves one single life it is as if he has saved an entire world”. Those who were part of kindertransport saved 10 000 single lives – and saved ten thousand worlds, reaching across continents to forge a common bond between strangers.
I have met the kinder over the years. I learned that somehow the kinder found a greater strength in part because they gave one another strength. Having many of them lost all their families – they became one another’s family and lifted one another.
But what was so special is that the kinder did not just survive. One would have almost understood had they turned away from life itself. But they didn’t. They chose life. They built communities. They made a collective affirmation of life, the kind that lives on in us today. They won Nobel Prizes. They looked towards the future. And partly because of their faith in life itself they married, had children, grandchildren, even great grandchildren, and refused to let evil have the final word. Hundreds and thousands of worlds saved by single acts of kindness a generation ago.
Today I think of so many right across this country, whose whole lives during the darkest years the world has ever known, were a way of enhancing the lives of others. Those rescuers believed that in each child there burned a moral flame that if nurtured could defeat the darkness in our nature. Many of those children who survived and those who saved them, have spent the years since telling their stories, educating Jews and non-Jews about the dangers of intolerance and the need to respect the dignity of difference. In doing so they make a great affirmation of life.
They inspire us still, to fight anti-Semitism whenever it rears its ugly head anywhere in the world, to fight against ignorance and intolerance, to tackle poverty and injustice, and to educate our children, not just about the history and lessons of the Shoah, but about the acts of compassion which brought light to the darkness.
One moment of real pride as Foreign Secretary was to commission and unveil the plaque in the Foreign Office to the diplomats who broke all the rules and helped Europe’s Jews. I never understood the resistance to Sir Sigmund Sternberg’s idea, but now the plaque will sit in the Old India Office as a reminder of what duty and responsibility is really about.
I wish I could say that the children of the 21st century will be spared the horrors of the 20th. But cast your eyes to the Middle East, to the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Afghanistan, and the story is not of solidarity but of sectarianism and slaughter. Although there are thankfully fewer wars than ever before, there are more people fleeing conflict and disaster. The figure is scarcely believable: one new refugee every 4 seconds, 45 million in the last year. And this provides a clue to the personal transition I am now making.
There is one pretence under which I am here falsely. The programme bills me as a Member of Parliament, but that is no longer the case. As many of you will know, I have agreed to take up a new job, starting in September in New York, as President of the International Rescue Committee, a global charity helping the victims of civil conflict and natural disaster around the world. In a small way, I feel I am repaying a personal debt to those who helped my parents.
The role of the IRC’s 12000 staff is to provide emergency relief and longer term help to millions of people afflicted by conflict and disaster. In over 40 countries torn apart by war, we provide life-saving help. In so doing, we call on the qualities of compassion and mutuality that helped the kinder 75 years ago.
The Wiener Library, whose work we also recognise here today, has the slogan: “If we do not save our history it will perish”.
History and memory. Two different words, so closely related that in Hebrew, I am told, since I am not a speaker, they are the same: zachor.
What is the difference between history and memory? Consider the elegant words of Chief Rabbi, Professor Lord Sacks, in The Chief Rabbi’s Haggadah: “History is his story – an event that happened sometime else to someone else. Memory is my story – something that happened to me and is a part of who I am. History is information. Memory, by contrast is part of identity.”
As the chain of memory is broken by the passing of time and generations, so history and its lessons becomes more important. And the biggest lesson of the kindertransport is that when we are asked “whose responsibility is it to save a life”, the answer must be “ours”.
When I asked the Catholic farmer in Belgium why he put himself in danger to save my aunt and grandmother, his answer was simple: “one must”. I heard the same spirit this week in the story of a janitor on the East Coast of the US who is one of the IRC’s most regular donors, giving $10-12 000 a year, probably one quarter of his salary, to help us save lives around the world.
That is the spirit of the kinder and those who helped them. It is the spirit we honour today. And it is the spirit we promise to keep alive tomorrow.
June 23rd, 2013
London
I feel a deep sense of privilege and responsibility in being asked to speak to you today. The stories of the kinder, and the story of the kindertransport, speak through time to universal questions of humanity, solidarity and compassion. But they also speak to a specifically British response to the particular traumas of European Jewry 75 years ago. Politicians and citizens; Jews, Christians, Quakers and atheists; North and South; cosmopolitan Britain and rural Britain; all, or almost all, came together in common cause to forge life-saving links across boundaries of nationality and religion. Like many of you here, I have very personal reasons to be aware of this.
My father and grandfather found their own way here in 1940 from Belgium. They were helped by many people along the way. And then they did what refugees and immigrants have done down the ages: they put something back. My grandfather spent the war clearing out bombed buildings. My dad studied and then joined the Royal Navy. Fortunately my grandmother and aunt, left behind in Belgium, were sheltered by a Catholic farming family. My mother was not so lucky as to escape Poland before 1940. She spent the war in hiding before coming here with Rabbi Shonfeld in 1946, where she was looked after by British families before going to university and making her own career and family.
These stories were the background music to my childhood. After all, I was born only twenty years after the Holocaust. Now I am part of a transitional generation, born early enough to have met survivors, kinder and non kinder, but part of a generation destined to outlive them, and required in years to come to take up their story and its lessons without the benefit of their living testimony.
The Holocaust was the memory of our parents but it is history taught to our children. As time moves on, and the number of kinder declines, the responsibility of remembrance grows heavier still on this generation and those not yet born. That is one reason that events like this, and related efforts by the Holocaust Education Trust, the Anne Frank Trust and others, are so important.
Today we pay personal tribute to the parents, to the children and to those who gave them refuge. “He who saves one single life it is as if he has saved an entire world”. Those who were part of kindertransport saved 10 000 single lives – and saved ten thousand worlds, reaching across continents to forge a common bond between strangers.
I have met the kinder over the years. I learned that somehow the kinder found a greater strength in part because they gave one another strength. Having many of them lost all their families – they became one another’s family and lifted one another.
But what was so special is that the kinder did not just survive. One would have almost understood had they turned away from life itself. But they didn’t. They chose life. They built communities. They made a collective affirmation of life, the kind that lives on in us today. They won Nobel Prizes. They looked towards the future. And partly because of their faith in life itself they married, had children, grandchildren, even great grandchildren, and refused to let evil have the final word. Hundreds and thousands of worlds saved by single acts of kindness a generation ago.
Today I think of so many right across this country, whose whole lives during the darkest years the world has ever known, were a way of enhancing the lives of others. Those rescuers believed that in each child there burned a moral flame that if nurtured could defeat the darkness in our nature. Many of those children who survived and those who saved them, have spent the years since telling their stories, educating Jews and non-Jews about the dangers of intolerance and the need to respect the dignity of difference. In doing so they make a great affirmation of life.
They inspire us still, to fight anti-Semitism whenever it rears its ugly head anywhere in the world, to fight against ignorance and intolerance, to tackle poverty and injustice, and to educate our children, not just about the history and lessons of the Shoah, but about the acts of compassion which brought light to the darkness.
One moment of real pride as Foreign Secretary was to commission and unveil the plaque in the Foreign Office to the diplomats who broke all the rules and helped Europe’s Jews. I never understood the resistance to Sir Sigmund Sternberg’s idea, but now the plaque will sit in the Old India Office as a reminder of what duty and responsibility is really about.
I wish I could say that the children of the 21st century will be spared the horrors of the 20th. But cast your eyes to the Middle East, to the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Afghanistan, and the story is not of solidarity but of sectarianism and slaughter. Although there are thankfully fewer wars than ever before, there are more people fleeing conflict and disaster. The figure is scarcely believable: one new refugee every 4 seconds, 45 million in the last year. And this provides a clue to the personal transition I am now making.
There is one pretence under which I am here falsely. The programme bills me as a Member of Parliament, but that is no longer the case. As many of you will know, I have agreed to take up a new job, starting in September in New York, as President of the International Rescue Committee, a global charity helping the victims of civil conflict and natural disaster around the world. In a small way, I feel I am repaying a personal debt to those who helped my parents.
The role of the IRC’s 12000 staff is to provide emergency relief and longer term help to millions of people afflicted by conflict and disaster. In over 40 countries torn apart by war, we provide life-saving help. In so doing, we call on the qualities of compassion and mutuality that helped the kinder 75 years ago.
The Wiener Library, whose work we also recognise here today, has the slogan: “If we do not save our history it will perish”.
History and memory. Two different words, so closely related that in Hebrew, I am told, since I am not a speaker, they are the same: zachor.
What is the difference between history and memory? Consider the elegant words of Chief Rabbi, Professor Lord Sacks, in The Chief Rabbi’s Haggadah: “History is his story – an event that happened sometime else to someone else. Memory is my story – something that happened to me and is a part of who I am. History is information. Memory, by contrast is part of identity.”
As the chain of memory is broken by the passing of time and generations, so history and its lessons becomes more important. And the biggest lesson of the kindertransport is that when we are asked “whose responsibility is it to save a life”, the answer must be “ours”.
When I asked the Catholic farmer in Belgium why he put himself in danger to save my aunt and grandmother, his answer was simple: “one must”. I heard the same spirit this week in the story of a janitor on the East Coast of the US who is one of the IRC’s most regular donors, giving $10-12 000 a year, probably one quarter of his salary, to help us save lives around the world.
That is the spirit of the kinder and those who helped them. It is the spirit we honour today. And it is the spirit we promise to keep alive tomorrow.
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