I have to admit that I generally avoid watching television programmes about the Second World War, particularly if they involve the Holocaust. It is perhaps difficult for someone who is not Jewish to accept the crimes committed against the Jews over many centuries, not only by Fascist governments such as Hitler's but by the native populations of other so-called Christian countries. It happened that I watched one such BBC documentary earlier this week and it came as something of a shock to learn that, in the world as a whole, as many as one in six people don't believe that the Holocaust actually happened. I can't imagine how Siegfried Sassoon would have reacted to that piece of information.
For the benefit of those who don't know him, David Baddiel is a British comedian best known for his participation in light-hearted programmes about football. Like most successful comedians, he is highly-educated, a Cambridge graduate and former PhD candidate. And of course he is Jewish. For him, the business of confronting the "Holocaust deniers" is truly painful. When he described how hard he found it not to get exasperated and angry with them and at the same time not to get involved in arguing with them, he was describing feelings that Sassoon had, in relation to some of his right-wing friends.
"The Case for the Miners" was a poem in which he described those feelings: "And that's the reason why I shout and splutter..." He wasn't talking about the fate of the Jews. He wasn't even talking about the First World War. He was talking about the assumption of a few of his friends that those who were less fortunate than themselves had somehow deserved their fate. The miners weren't so badly off, they argued. Even if they had more money, they wouldn't spend it wisely. Sassoon found himself a one-man opposition to people who were talking what he felt was inhumane nonsense. His response was to get himself a job as a political correspondent so he could visit South Wales and find out what was really going on. Doubting himself as he usually did, he wanted to be 100% sure he was on the side of the truth.
This was also the case with David Baddiel, who felt he had to talk to the Holocaust deniers simply to be sure that they really didn't have any worthwhile arguments to offer. He went on to describe his mixed feelings about the idea of a Holocaust Memorial Day, eventually reasoning that the inhuman conduct of the Nazis towards the Jews and the events he was discussing were unbelievable, which was in itself enough justification for a memorial. To look at it another way, if the Menin Gate had not been built, would anyone today find it possible to believe that over 50,000 men died in the Ypres Salient without their bodies ever having been recovered?
It brings to mind a scene from Sebastian Faulks's novel Birdsong, when Stephen's granddaughter Elizabeth, looking at the names on the Thiepval Memorial, exclaims,"Nobody told me. My God, nobody told me." Until now she has had no idea of the enormity of the Western Front's catalogue of death.
And so Sassoon and Baddiel are brought together by a desire to ensure that no one can excuse their present behaviour by claiming a lack of awareness of the terrible deeds of the past. Sassoon would have liked the First World War to be the war to end all wars, but within twenty years he was seeing history repeat itself, as Britain went to war with Germany for a second time. He did not favour it, but the gradual realisation that, as a Jew, he would have been one of those earmarked for torture and extermination by the Nazis must have been a severe blow to his belief in humankind.
As so often, there is no conclusion to this post. I have no answers to the questions faced by these two men. I can only say that I admire them both.
