BY JOE NUTT
October 7th changed my life. I know this, like I know water is wet and dogs deserve better than us. I cannot live the same life I led before I witnessed anti-Semitic glee and hatred on the streets of Westminster with my own eyes.
Growing up in the immediate televisual aftermath of a world war, my world view encompassed both the black and white rubble of Carol Reed’s Vienna, and the colourful, charming comedy of Dad’s Army. The Third Man has haunted me ever since I first saw it and Dad’s Army has come to encapsulate a totally different, genuinely saner nation. The world war that defined my own father’s life after four years as a serving soldier formed the ubiquitous backdrop to mine.
Images of the holocaust were rarely seen, too horrific for public eyes, and profoundly disturbing when glimpsed as a child, in documentary footage or history books. Yet no one would have even thought to question the unimaginable evil they bore witness to. As a child I once found a Tommy’s discarded helmet, complete with netting, in a ditch and one of my brothers found a handful of pristine machine gun bullets, lying shining in the bed of a shallow stream.
So, when Oct 7th was immediately followed not by unanimous dismay, but by malevolent equivocation from many and much worse, unadulterated glee, I felt horribly unmoored; as though my essential identity was suddenly being questioned. That those in power reacted so weakly, only exacerbated that shock but now, almost six months later, these are words I feel absolutely compelled to write.
The trigger was a stunningly eloquent anecdote told me by a colleague only a few weeks ago, fittingly it seemed to me, in a free and revitalised Budapest. A memory of Europe from someone long dead but whose story aches to be retold today.
One thing you cannot fail to notice if you spend an inordinate amount of time in the company of working dogs, as I did as a youth, is that they have a conscience.
You will see it every so often leaking from those liquid eyes; in the raised eyelids, the brief, sideways glance and the bowed head. It’s not that they are afraid of you, they know right from wrong. Dogs undoubtedly feel guilt. So why then, when such a simple creature is capable of such an emotion; are so many fellow citizens apparently able to see and hear undeniable testimony of the most distressingly inhuman cruelty, yet respond with doubt, never mind excitement and glee? The answer is twofold. I saw it myself on the streets of Westminster and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It is every historian’s haunting, two-faced dream, like time travelling.
The mob I saw was visibly bipartite. Much of it was a seething mass of pure anti-Semitism, a raw, irrational, unquestioning, racist loathing of Jews; inherited and nurtured over generations, abruptly licensed by images of abhorrently violent vengeance.
It radiated from faces bright with excitement and delight, and resonated in voices only unified because they knew their own personal hatred, was shared. The rest were naïve camp followers, drawn into the sickening maelstrom by party politics, youth or God forgive them, mere fashion. Anti-Semitism is not an isolated phenomenon, a unique contagion that only afflicts carriers. It always and everywhere, relies on the support of the weak and easily led. It is an explosive combination of independently sterile forces that always and inevitably, seeks the same thing; destruction and death.
My Budapest colleague’s father was, like mine, a young man in the late nineteen thirties. While mine joined the army in 1938, his had just graduated from Oxford as a physicist who specialised in the newly-invented radio valves, which necessitated the use of high quality glass vacuum tubes. So, he was sent on a trip to Germany, where the most advanced glass tube manufacture was taking place, and subsequently he spent the war developing valves for British radar.
Many years later, when terminally ill, he spent days lingering, completely unable to speak to his family. But “literally on his deathbed” to use my colleague’s precise phrase, he took hold of his son’s hand and suddenly poured forth a lucid account of his pre-war trip to Germany.
As he was entering Heidelberg University, he saw a group of people, not with yellow stars, but with yellow patches attached to their clothes, huddled together in the entrance. Puzzled and completely unaware, he asked his hosts who they were. They shrugged and sneeringly denounced them as, “Just Jews.” On his return, he explained he had tried to tell people what he had seen, but gave up because, as he said repeatedly as he was dying, “But they wouldn’t believe me, they just wouldn’t believe me….”
My colleague was, unsurprisingly, moved when he told me this story, stressing that this apparently simple incident, these few seconds from his father’s entire, and no doubt complicated life, had so haunted him, he had somehow summoned up the strength and will to share them, with their concomitant injunction, in his final moments. He was, undoubtedly, a man with a conscience and my simple hope is that by retelling it here, his story; the warning his troubled soul refused to take with him to his grave, reaches many, many more decent human souls than he could ever have hoped. That seems to me, something well worth writing about – today.
Joe Nutt is the author of five books, mostly about poetry and as an essayist he writes regularly for a number of magazines.