Category: .

My father is 82 years old. He was born in 1933 in Germany, a very auspicious time and place to come into the world. He spent the final months of the war hidden in a cellar as British bombs fell all around. When the Allies arrived, he defied the advice of his parents and crept out of their hiding place. He met his first British soldiers stationed in his family’s garage and they gave him some sweets and taught him his first few words of English.

After the war, his own father became Mayor of the local town, Verden an der Aller in Lower Saxony. Among his credentials were the fact that his family had had a travel agent’s which had helped a number of local Jews to escape the Nazis. Andreas Willmsen (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Willmsen) also became head of the local denazification committee. Had he stayed, my father would probably have competed his education and followed in his footsteps. As it was, he left Germany in 1950 after his Mother took off with a British serviceman. He remembers the incredibly complex procedure he faced in trying to cross so many borders, with so many documents and visas to be obtained. Working long hours in a hotel as a kitchen assistant in Guernsey, where his mother had settled, he became gravely ill. Much to his surprise, the head chef, a Frenchman who had been imprisoned under the Nazis and who consequently hated the Germans, nursed him like he was his own son.

Within a couple of years, my grandmother and her husband found another job in Sheffield, England and moved there. My father went with them. At some point he decided to apply for British nationality. On the form he saw the question: would you be prepared to do National Service in the British Army? Perplexed, he asked his father-in-law what he should do. Tick it, was the response. They’ll never take you.

They took him. For two years, first in the UK in Somerset and then in the Rhine Valley in Germany, he served in the British Army. The reception he got from his fellow soldiers was not always welcoming. He tells of having a bayonet held to his neck and repeatedly being referred to as ‘that bloody Jerry’. Nevetheless, he stuck it out and was eventually offered a commision. In the meantime, his culinary skills came in handy. He was appointed personal chef to the General of the British Forces in the region. One day the stately home where he was stationed received an honoured guest: the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Phillip. The singlemost profound shock of my father’s life came when he was introduced to the Prince. Upon being told that the chef was German, he responded to my father in perfect German. There has never been a single day in my father’s life since then that he has not mentioned this experience at least six times.

His subsequent career as a chef took him to numerous countries: Kenya, Tanzania, the Bahamas, Barbados, Nigeria, always coming back to London between assignments. Wherever he went he met fellow Europeans: Dutch, French, Greeks, Portuguese. Many of them had reservations and prejudices against Germans, but he got to know them all on an individual level and their initial suspicions were overcome. Over the years, his European identity became a central element of who he was.

In 1973 Britain joined the Common Market, and my father was overjoyed. The Little Englander mentality, with its insular and resentful attitude to the rest of the world, seemed to be on the retreat. He still has a letter he received from Prime Minister Edward Heath in response to an enthusiastic letter he had written praising Britain’s foresightedness. Now my parents make regular visits to the grounds of Chatworth House in Derbyshire, and my father is hugely proud of the fact that the Duke and Duchess always recognise him and call him ‘The Hannoverian’. In addition to being a convinced European, he has long been something of an Anglophile.

That is not to say that he is enamoured with everything in the UK. For reasons best known to herself (mostly, she claims, related to an addiction to the crossword) my mother reads the Daily Mail. This means that for several decades my dad has been exposed to headlines written by people too young to have experienced war in Europe telling him that he doesn’t belong, that this is not his country. This puerile, hateful, reactionary set of attitudes provokes the response one might expect from someone with his particular background.

At his age now certain developments in the world pass him by: the internet, Russia’s increasing authoritarianism, Isis, refugees, the changing climate are all a bit too much for him to fit into his picture of the world, once that has become more fixed with age. At its centre is Europe, and its institutional form in the EU. For his generation, the social and economic relationship between Germany and France was the foundation of the building of a new, stable, peaceful Europe, a guarantee that the wars of the previous centuries will not be repeated.

I haven’t spoken to my dad very much since this whole puerile, blimpish, hateful referendum began. I suspect that at this stage, for all his long-standing contempt for those who want Europe as a historical project to fail, he has reached a state of equanimity. In his case, I think this is probably a good thing. I hope that he votes and that the result will not make him feel that his values have been exposed as worthless. But when I see characters like Gove, Farage and Johnson playing games with peace and stability, repeating the mistakes and follies that in the past have led to war, and pouring scorn on economists and historians who tell them very clearly what dangers they are leading us into, I feel a rage that goes back to before I was born, and an ancestral fear of how the egos and the will to power of men who have simply never grown up can lead to us to mass death and destruction beyond our current imaginings. In his own time, my father’s father fought in the trenches of the First World War. My dad learnt as a teenager what his own countrymen had been responsible for, and has fought throughout his life to make sense of that and to live a meaningful life in the light and dark of it. The building of European union, with all its myriad betrayals and contradictions, with all its corruption by corporate forces and its callousnessness and cowardice when it comes to the current refugee crisis, was an honest attempt to stop such horrors and barbarity from reoccurring. It is worth defending and fighting to improve, and Britain has no right to leave it.

When I was a child I loved reading novels about escape. They were mostly stories of people escaping from areas under Nazi control, being smuggled across borders into neutral countries, or trying to get hold of the right papers, or at least ones convincing enough to allow them to escape from imprisonment, torture and death. Along the way they would meet some people who would help them and some who would betray them — the suspense and drama came from sharing the character’s uncertainty as to whether or not they’d make it, and whether or not the person they’d just met could really be trusted. The escapees, exhibiting bewildering levels of courage and ingenuity, were occasionally assisted by networks of resistance, anonymous people of staggering bravery who were prepared to face torture and give their lives to save others and to combat injustice.

This kind of fiction was everywhere when I was a kid, which was still within the broad cultural aftermath of the excitement and traumas of the war. You could still buy Victor annuals which revelled in imagery of armed conflict — I’m pretty sure the very first phrase I learnt in German was ‘Achtung! Ich bin hit!’. By the time I came into being there had already been a good couple of decades of this stuff. As an adult I read A Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque, a more complex account of the brutalities of the struggle for escape and survival, and also Austerlitz by WG Sebald, which explores the deeper implications of what it is to be rescued and to start a new life elsewhere. They depicted deep, intense psychological and moral battles, in a way conditioned by a profound sense of empathy at suffering and loss. There was always a great deal of romance in these stories: divided couples and also people with divided emotions and divided loyalties who were forced by the threat of violence or by their conscience to do the wrong or the right thing. Intense human drama, in other words.

Brave and principled people who, despite not being perfect human beings, clearly did the right thing

The people who helped potential victims of Nazi persecution to escape were heroes and still are. Oskar Schindler himself is only one of them. In Portugal a few years ago there was a spate of articles about Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese Consul-General in Bordeaux in France who defied the orders of Portugal’s Salazar dictatorship to issue visas and passports to a number of refugees. There is also the similar story of Gilberto Bosques Saldívar, Mexican Consul in Marseilles, who directed his employees to issue a visa to anybody wanting to flee to Mexico. Two weeks ago in the UK press there were a number of obituaries of Nicholas Winton, who organized the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia.

These were all extremely brave and principled people who, despite not being perfect human beings, clearly did the right thing, and they were not few in number—it is remarkable that in a few minutes’ googling I was actually quite hard-pressed to find any nation that doesn’t have a claim to their very own saviour-of-the-Jews (one might even argue, given the ending of the film, that Schindler in Spielberg’s film is the Israeli Schindler, a stand-in for the state of Israel itself as the only possible refuge for the Jewish people).

Another example is closer to home. When my mother was trying to open a kindergarten in the UK about 20 years ago, she was temporarily stymied in her efforts by a group of local residents who didn’t want to hear the sound of screaming kids on their street day in day out. My father looked at their petition and recognised a name from many years ago. He went to the house and introduced himself to the son of a man whose family my father’s father had, by means of his travel agency, helped to escape from Nazi Germany sixty years or so before. They soon dropped their opposition to the nursery.

What about the wars of today? Where are the 21st century Schindlers?

All of the Schindlers above are dead and buried. The war they fought seemingly has a happy ending: tyranny was defeated, and a handful of good people tried to do the best they could to help the helpless. It’s a comforting tale which allows us to get on with our lives without dwelling too much on our own standing in relation to the events we’ve seen. Schindler’s List flatters ordinary people by putting us partly in the position of helpless victims, partly in the role of the heroic saviour, helpfully allowing us to forget what we know full well: that ordinary people like us were actually the protagonists of the Nazi genocide. But that was seventy years ago. What about the wars of today? Where are the 21st century Schindlers?

It is worth playing devil’s advocate in relation to the massive refugee crisis engulfing the world, a world in which 1 in every 122 people is now exiled from their home by war, the changing climate, or extreme poverty.

There are two recent must-read articles which can help us begin to do this. One of them has a happy ending: it tells the story of Hashem Alsouki, who managed, over the course of three hellish years, to make his way from Syria to safety in Sweden, suffering enormous tribulations along the way, managing to keep at all times his identity papers and a Human Rights Watch report about the destruction of his hometown hanging from his neck in a waterproof pouch. In the other story we don’t meet the main protagonist, who met a less happy fate.

In both cases many people helped them along the way. Some of them were activists serving as a point of contact for people escaping from horror. Others were fellow refugees in an equally desperate plight. But some were traffickers, people who promised that they could take them the next stage of the journey in return for everything they possessed.

It’s probably fair to regard the majority of these traffickers as exploitative and abusive, but…

It’s probably fair to regard the majority of these traffickers as exploitative and abusive. It is a brutal and horrifying trade. A great deal of stories involving people smugglers resemble tales of kidnapping rather than transport. People fleeing are extremely vulnerable to fake promises and attempted rip-offs, and women, particularly those travelling on their own, are especially at risk. Cases abound of those piloting ships and boats in the Mediterranean simply abandoning their human cargo to the waves.

But given the near-impossibility of refugees reaching safe countries in which they may be able to exercise their fundamental human right to claim asylum through anything approaching conventional means, it cannot be denied that such people are also serving a fundamental human need.

Clearly not all involved in the trade are, in the words of the former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, among the ‘vilest form of people on the planet’. Confronting such hyperboles, the following truism bears endless repetition: if European society (and, for that matter, Australia) were truly concerned with the fate of refugees, they would allow them to reach their countries and claim asylum. Yet instead of this the EU demonises people smugglers to the point of seriously proposing bombing parts of North Africa in order to deter their trade, while Australia maintains concentration camps on Nauru island in order to prevent migrants setting foot on Australian soil.

We endlessly hear that human smugglers are evil people motivated only by the desire for wealth, an effective explanation as it relates to our increasing conviction that personal advancement is the only motivating factor in human affairs (indeed, we have actually come to believe that such aspiration is not only natural but also moral). The stories of people smugglers or the stories of those they have saved are hear much less often.

Of course there is enormous and widespread abuse. Of course there are, as in pretty much any industry, those at the top of the pile who get enormously rich on the basis of the brutal exploitation of basic human need, not to mention those at the bottom under very great pressure to avoid treating their passengers as anything other than human beings. But there are also staggering achievements mixed up in these cases of abuse, inspiring tales of bravery, suspense, drama and excitement.

Why is so little effort made in the media in particular to give a voice to those who have sacrificed everything at enormous risk in order to reach safety and try to protect and provide for their friends and families back home? Almost all refugees are ready-made heroes with astonishing stories to tell, tales of human endurance, ingenuity, bravery, desperation and abuse, but also of generosity and ultimately of survival and hope. However, there doesn’t seem to be much of an appetite for hearing them, possibly because at some level our feelings are conditioned by a sense of guilt and helplessness.

Libya is a case in point. We Europeans first stabilised the country by supporting its dictator and then we destabilised it by bombing it to pieces without the slightest regard for the consequences. And let us be honest: the British did much the same to Iraq. We co-created the conditions for ISIS to thrive. The victims in this situation, people who were going about their lives, developing their societies, looking to the future, these people need help from someone, somewhere. We share responsibility for their fate, and we are not in a position to blithely condemn all those who are, whatever their motivations, trying to help them escape from the hell we have helped creating.

But increasingly we’re not inclined to help. We’re full, we tell each other. We have our own problems to deal with. And so we demonise those who help them. We’re happy to go along with the story that those people stuffing desperate people onto tiny leaking boats are doing so only out of self-interest, that the human desire to help others cannot possibly be a factor.

Perhaps the Schindler stories are a form of romanticising the past, even while we disown our present responsibilities.

Perhaps the stories of all these Schindlers were never more than a comforting fairy tale about how we would all (as British, Mexican, Portuguese people) do the right thing in such circumstances, that we, and our kind, are essentially good people at heart, a form of romanticising the past in order to show ourselves in the best light, even while we disown our present responsibilities. But out there right now there is an Afghan Schindler, a Moroccan Schindler or a Libyan Schindler. We don’t get to hear about the lives that they’ve saved. We’d rather not hear their stories or the stories of the people they’ve managed to rescue.

There are millions of our fellow human beings exactly like us crammed into refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon, the Jungle in Calais, in Melilla, Kos and Lampedusa. But they’re Muslims. They might be armed, or diseased. There are far too many of them. They don’t share our values of liberalism, tolerance and generosity. They want to scrounge off our society. This is the story that we seem to find more comforting and more compelling.

Of course, back in the 1930s and 40s there were a number of people who talked in this way about European Jews. They were a minority. This time round, in addition to the very worst that humanity has to offer, the countless digital equivalents of this emblematic product of European civilisation, there’s most of us, and there’s those who we increasingly choose to represent us: people indifferent to the fate of our/their fellow humans facing tyranny, torture, starvation and death, unwilling to take responsibility for their fate, and prepared to assume the worst of those who are risking their lives to help them escape. We should learn and share their stories if we are to have the slightest chance of rescuing our humanity.