Claire and I watched a chilling programme, last night, on BBC2 called “How the Holocaust Began”. James Bulgin, who created the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum, presented it. As with the holocaust itself, the programme gradually ratchets up the level of horror. The first shock is that their neighbours rounded up the Jews and drove them to their places of slaughter. Their neighbours then took their lands and property.
By the end of 1941 the german army had shot one million Jewish men, women, and children. German soldiers were shooting people at a rate of 1,700 per hour. The slaughter was giving the German soldiers mental health issues. Murdering human beings, up close and personal, was giving them nausea, nervous tension, eczema, and other symptoms. The Nazi’s feared a “burdening of the soul”. Therefore they needed a method of slaughter that would be more efficient. They sought a method that could be scaled up, secret, and “civilized”. The Nazi leadership tasked SS Major Herbert Lange with finding it. Lange conducted experiments and came up with the gas chambers.
Was Hitler the only man who could orchestrate such genocide? Can only Germans commit such crimes? Of course not. I urge you to read Called to Account, my own study of an earlier pogrom. Yes, I set it in Germany, but anti-semitism isn’t purely a german disease. I am reading Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. Their version of The Merchant of Venice shocked me, because their Shylock is nothing but an evil jew. Portia’s speech at the trial is reported in some detail, but Shylock’s “If you prick us do we not bleed” speech is omitted in its entirety. How can anyone omit that speech from the story? In my opinion only if you’re anti-Semitic yourself.
The film of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society excited my interest in the book. I can’t help wondering why the Lamb’s book features. Perhaps, given the setting on Guernsey in the aftermath of World War 2, it’s a coded message to remind us that the English can be anti-Semitic too?