Darkness visible: Auschwitz 1945, 2005, 2025

The liberation of Auschwitz on January 27th, 1945 by the Red Army was the first open public proof of the Nazi extermination of all of Europe’s Jews. A Polish resistance fighter, Jan Karski, had already taken to London and Washington evidence of German extermination deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto. 

But Churchill and Roosevelt refused to authorise the bombing of the railway lines to Auschwitz or Madenek. Like Stalin refusing to send any aid to the Poles, who rose as a nation in Warsaw in August 1944 after the Allies landed in Normandy, the global leaders of the anti-fascist alliance were not much interested in Poland. After the war in Europe ended, the Labour government in Britain banned Polish pilots and soldiers from marching in VE Day celebrations. Labour’s Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, wrote on Foreign Office notepaper to all Polish pilots and soldiers serving alongside British forces, urging them to return to live under Soviet imperial rule. Never has the Foreign Office dispatched a more shameful letter.

No less disgraceful is the fact that Britain had refused to allow most German Jews to claim asylum from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The Daily Mail printed the Chelsea address of the British Union of Fascists and urged its readers to join Oswald Mosley’s pro-Nazi party. All that changed as soon as Hitler invaded Poland and later France, just as the far-Right and far-Left flirtations with Putin and outstretched hands for Putin oligarchs’ cash for Tory coffers shut down when Russia invaded Ukraine.

But still today the BBC can’t get the story of the Shoah quite right. There has been no mention of the heroic exploits of the Soviet troops, who tore the guts out of the German armies that ruled over Europe from 1940-44.  On Thursday and Friday Today presenters ran segments on the 80 th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The role of Russian, Ukrainian and other Soviet soldiers was never mentioned.

Instead there were memories of British soldiers arriving in April 1945 at Bergen-Belsen, a prisoner of war camp 900 km to the west in Germany. The treatment of POWs and others imprisoned at Bergen Belsen was atrocious and 50,000 died there. But it was not an extermination camp, none of which were ever situated on German soil. It is thus incorrect to include Bergen-Belsen in the network of Jewish extermination camps sited much farther east in present-day Poland, Belarus and Ukraine.

This distressing failure to know basic European history is now typical of much media coverage, even by elite news media such as the BBC, since Britain opted for isolationism from our Continent.

The BBC has a superb European correspondent  in Katya Adler. But BBC news bulletins on radio and TV rarely cover Europe. When they do, the news writers in London often get European political facts wrong.

Compare this with reporting on the United States where every BBC presenter or commentator seems to be an expert and well-rounded journalist on America. That’s as it should be. The US is still powerful, even if the dominance it exercised in the last century may not be reproduced in this one if America allows itself to be overtaken by rising powers such as China.

Europe once dreamt of being an equal in global power terms to the US. Britain’s self-chosen isolation from Europe has weakened the EU but not as much as Britain has been damaged by our refusal to play a win-win economic role in Europe or join in discussions on foreign policy and migration.

The BBC Today programme will report at length on Auschwitz on Monday. Then at least listeners will learn that it was Soviet, not British, soldiers who put an end to  the Holocaust.

Twenty years ago in January 2005, I flew as Europe Minister with a Group of Jewish Representatives from Britain to Auschwitz for the 60th anniversary celebrations. Here for interest is my diary account of that moving, deeply sad visit. I never imagined that two decades later Europe would have political leaders for whom in varying degrees nationalist, xenophobic hate politics would be part of their appeal to be elected.

Thursday 27 January  2005

Off to Poland with a plane full of leaders of the Jewish community. There’s a rabbi, a woman Flo Kaufman, deputy chair of the Board of Jewish Deputies, and Andrew Dismore who I suppose is the No. 1 representative of the north London Jews in Parliament. With the style that only the RAF can manage we are all served a giant sausage and bacon breakfast – on the way back they produce a pork chop for dinner.

We land in Katowice and go off to some kind of school where there is an exhibition of work done by children from a Telford 6 th Form College. There are also veterans . Prince Edward is there. 

Simone Weil, an Auschwitz survivor who became a great French politician and President of the European Parliament is speaking. She has a beautiful clear voice that is distinct and carries on the loudspeakers. I translate for Mrs. Kaufman a most beautiful speech in which she asks what would have happened to all the children who were gassed here. Would they have become architects or musicians or doctors or simply good craftsmen?   A good and vital question and a sense of awe settles as we realise we are standing on the ground which is the world‘s biggest cemetery though there is not a gravestone in sight.

A million people died here just before I was born. That is old Europe. The Europe of culture and civilisation we prattle on and on about but how close we have been to sheer barbarity.

A German Roma talks about all the Roma and Sinti who were killed here. Then it is the turn of the presidents of Poland and Russia. I have to read their speech in the little commemoration booklet to understand what is being said . Cardinal Lustiger, the Jew who converted to Catholicism and became the head of the Catholic church in France reads out an interminable message from the Pope.   Everyone is getting colder and colder and colder.   And yet we are wrapped up in coats and hats and pullovers. What was it like in January sixty years ago or in 1944 or ’43 or ’42?

The setting is sombre. The sun goes down and snow showers drift in · and out as the spotlights half illuminate what is going on as all the national leaders lay a candle of commemoration. A train rattles up the lines blowing its horn with great puffs of smoke and the line itself is suddenly illuminated. It is a beautiful mise en scene. The television pictures would have been so powerful.

Flo Kaufmann of the Board of Deputies comes over and asks me if I will go on Sky. The little Foreign Office press officer gets nervous and twitchy and says, “I don’t think the Foreign Secretary wants you to do that , Minister.” I ignore him and go and do quite a long interview on Sky about the sense of history and describing what is happening and how we should not  forget that only ten years ago at Srebrenica 8 , 000 Europeans were massacred because they were the wrong religion – they were Muslims not Jews – but the same principle applied. I say again and again , “Never again”, “Nie Wieder”. Stuart calls up from the Foreign Office to say it had gone down very well.

Jack Straw looks absolutely frozen . He has a small flask of whisky which he shares with the Polish former foreign minister, Cimoszewicz, who is now the Speaker at Parliament and may run for president later this year. They duck  down behind their coats to have a swig so as not to be seen on television , It’s really dark now and people’s feet are like frozen blocks. We all stamp our feet. Jack appears and leads us off in a route march back to the coach.

We have a long boring drive back to Katowice over snow covered roads and darkness outside . The big difference with Western Europe is that in the West there are a lot of street and even motorway lights whereas here everything is still dark, dark , dark.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.