Holocaust Memorial Day 2008
Each year, on 27 January, Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) aims to remember the horrors of the Nazis’ ‘final solution’, to educate and to ‘prompt action’ in the UK. The date marks the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
HMD has a special resonance for many who come from, or whose forebears come from, the East End of London. For by the time the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, large parts of the East End were Jewish colonies, with Yiddish the lingua franca. By the early 1940s, when the Nazis began deporting millions of people to the death camps, many more Jews had sought sanctuary in London. But whether Jewish or not, HMD has much to teach all of us. It’s often said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat its evils. Just as important, we should all remember that we can all be victims of those evils.
Jewish London goes back far further of course, to the time of William the Conqueror - the invading king arrived in his new capital with his ‘personal’ Jews from Rouen. Jews were successively encouraged and discouraged from settling in London down the centuries. By turns courted and persecuted. The First Charter of Protection to Jews in England was enacted in the twelth century. Then, during the 13th century there were a host of expulsions from English towns, beginning with Leicester in 1231, and the community was exiled from England by Edward I in 1290. Under Cromwell in 1656 Jews were readmitted, and began living and trading in London. In that year the first of the new synagogues was established and the first cemetery acquired, in Mile End. The first Jewish MP was Lionel Rothschild, in 1858; and Disraeli was made Prime Minister in 1868.
But the Jewish East End really started between 1881 and the outbreak of the First World War. Persecution and economic hardahip saw two million Jews leave Eastern Europe. Most were heading for America, but around 150,000 settled in England, mostly around the docks of the East End. Many who planned to journey to the US probably never got any further. In 1889, Charles Booth noted that ‘The newcomers have gradually replaced the English population in whole districts, Hanbury Street, Fashion Street, Pelham Street, and many streets and lanes and alleys have fallen before them; they have introduced new trades as well as new habits and they live and crowd together.’ GR Sims described Whitechapel in 1904 as ‘a fragment of Poland torn off from central Europe and dropped haphazard into the heart of Britain’.
By 1910, there were 125,000 Jews in an area of less than two square miles around Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Lurid headlines about ‘foreign invasions’ and ‘alien hoards’ showed that, relatively liberal though Britain was, the Jews weren’t unreservedly welcomed.
But if the pogroms of 19th century Eastern Europe had been a horror for the Jews, they paled before the ruthless efficiency of the Nazis’ ‘final solution’. The aim was nothing less than the extinction of an entire race. In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe was more than nine million. By the end of World War II, almost two in three Jews in Europe had been murdered in the Holocaust. And not just Jews were murdered of course. Poles and Slavs, Roma, the disabled and mentally ill, homosexuals, communists, Freemasions, Jehovah’s Witnesses, intellectuals - anyone who deviated from the Nazis’ warped ideas of purity might become a victim.
HMD is marked this year by a number of events taking place in Tower Hamlets, organised by the ever energetic Jewish East End Celebration Society (JEECS).
On 27 January, there will be a free walk entitled ‘The Holocaust, Second World War and Jewish East End’ led by East End expert, and registered Corporation of London walking guide, Clive Bettington (author of Cultural Walks of the Vanishing Jewish East End published by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets). The walk, beginning in Aldgate, will cover the Battle of Cable Street and will feature stories on the lives of prominent East End Holocaust survivors such as Leon Greenman. Time: 12 - 2:30pm
On the same day, the Tower Hamlets HMD Interfaith Commemoration takes place at the East London Central (Nelson Street) Synagogue, with representatives from the Tower Hamlets Interfaith Forum speaking on the theme of ‘Imagine: remember, reflect, react’ from the perspective of their own faith community, with candle lighting and reflections from 96 year old former British Military Chaplain, Reverend Leslie Hardman, who was present at the Liberation of Belsen.
‘The Martyred Letters’ began on 14 January and runs until 2 February at the Brady Arts Centre in Hanbury Street. This exhibition by local artist Gitl Braun, daughter of Holocaust survivors, featuring her acclaimed memorial to Holocaust victims.
Holocaust Memorial Day has a special resonance for East Enders then - though it’s really irrelevant whether you or your family are Jewish or not. The tragedies of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur show that the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau didn’t see an end to genocides. 27 January is not just about the past then - it is about the future too, and ensuring those crimes are not repeated. The famous poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller ‘First They Came for the Jews’ makes the point with precision and eloquence.
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Go to www.jeecs.org.uk for more information on events. Also see www.jewishmuseum.org.uk.