How brave we would have been

This year has been filled with lessons in humanity that I never wanted to learn.

As much as I knew about the Holocaust, I could never understand how it happened. How did so many people turn a blind eye? The Holocaust didn’t start with the death camps. It began with hate, with dehumanisation, with fear, so that people allowed others to be branded, rounded up, and thrown into ghettos. By the time the cattle trucks started rolling and the chimneys smoking, the perpetrators knew anything was possible. I couldn’t understand that. Unfortunately, I do now.

The first thing you can rely on is our biggest failing as humans and that is that most people don’t care about others unless it directly affects them. We can care deeply about those in our inner circle, can also care about those in our community, we like to care about those who live like us, look like us, believe like us and act like us. But others?  Not really. And you know, it’s complicated.

For anyone else, you give them something to be scared about, which in turn gives them something to hate. You label that fear, that hate, with something like the word “terrorist” and lie about “40 beheaded babies” and “horrible mass rapes” – it doesn’t really matter. As soon as people fear and hate then anything is allowed.

I have been involved with conversations along the lines of “I would have fought the Nazis when they liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto”, “I would have been a spy” more times than I can remember.

The sad reality is that we all now know what we would have done, and that is exactly what we are doing now.

How brave we would have been

As much as we like to talk about

how brave we would have been,

how proudly we would have marched

alongside Martin Luther King,

the last one standing in the Warsaw Ghetto,

making lists like Schindler did,

fighting Nazis with Nancy Wake,

providing the home where Anne Frank hid.

Unfortunately, the reality

is something very different,

because when faced with horror, far removed,

what we give is our indifference,

as for a girl with a diary,

we’d be really quite emphatic,

“she’s a dirty Muslim terrorist,

“you’ll find her in the attic.”