My grandparents died at Auschwitz. Corbyn’ s refusal to tackle Labour anti-Semitism is a stain on Britain —and an insult to their memory

A DEVASTATING INDICTMENT BY ALEX BRUMMER

MY FATHER, a refugee from the Holocaust who died just two short months ago at the grand age of 103, would have been horrified.

The British value he held most dear was that of tolerance. It had been ingrained in him from the day he first set foot in this country as a victim of the Nazi conquest and after suffering a brutal anti-Semitic attack in his home town on the Hungary-Czechoslovakia border.

The very idea that the future leader of Britain’s major opposition party might host an event on Holocaust Memorial Day where a speaker equated the Israeli government with Nazis responsible for the most terrible atrocities known to humankind would have been as shocking as it was unbelievable.

Anxiety

Yet Jeremy Corbyn presided over such a gathering in 2010 at the House of Commons. That Corbyn failed to distance himself from the meeting as soon as the remarks were made is shocking. That he failed to do so after reports of the event in The Jewish Chronicle is unconscionable.

That it has taken the Labour leader eight years to issue a mealy-mouthed apology ‘ for the concerns and anxiety this has caused’, makes him appear not only virulently anti- Jewish, but utterly insensitive to the ghastly events which all but wiped the Jewish people from the face of the earth, along with other victims of Nazism such as the Roma and the disabled.

Corbyn’s defenders, if there can be any shameful enough to continue supporting him, will claim it was appropriate for him to host the gathering because the star speaker who made the comparison with the Nazis was Hajo Meyer, himself a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz.

But why should this confer any legitimacy on Corbyn’s presence at a meeting which sought to brush over the industrial killings of six million Jews, along with the atrocities so many suffered?

My own family was all but destroyed by the Nazis and their Hungarian allies, the Arrow Cross Party. My father Michael’s two older brothers, Joseph and Ferenc, living peacefully in the community of Berehove (now in Ukraine), ran a popular milk bar in the centre of town. It was from this bar that they were forcibly dragged to join work gangs in the forest.

At first there was an exchange of letters and food parcels with the family then, after 1942, only silence. More than seven decades on, none of us knows what befell them. What I do know from first-hand accounts is the abomination which affected the rest of the family.

In 1944, Hitler’s arch bureaucrat and assassin Adolf Eichmann was charged with exterminating Hungary’s Jews.

My grandfather Sandor (after whom I am named), my grandmother, my father’s two younger sisters, younger brother and niece were shipped off to Auschwitz death camp. As they left their home town by train they begged Jew-hating locals for water and were showered with salt.

When they disembarked at Auschwitz my grandparents were separated from the young and dispatched straight to the gas chambers. My teenage aunts and young cousin miraculously survived, but the ghastly smell of human ashes from the crematoria and the filth of the huts to which they were dispatched would deprive them of their sense of smell for the rest of their lives.

My two aunts also suffered terrible indignities and physical harm in the camps at the hands of the Nazis. That is still a forbidden subject in the family because of the enduring stain it left on their lives.

The barbarism of the Holocaust affected survivors in many different ways. Many found comfort in an intense religiosity and this resulted in the growth and spread of the Haredi community, the Jews in black hat and beards to be seen in Stamford Hill in North London, Jerusalem and parts of Brooklyn in New York.

Others were so alienated by the experience that their families turned away from Judaism and embraced Christianity.

A few, such as Hajo Meyer who spoke at that Corbyn meeting, were so embittered by their experiences that they became human rights extremists, turned to the hard-Left and embraced the anti-Zionist creed, and drew comparisons between Israel and the Nazis.

But the idea that anyone — particularly someone as politically active as Corbyn — should ever think these Nazi comparisons acceptable or mainstream is beyond belief.

By treating them as if they are, Corbyn and his supporters cheapen the horrors suffered by those in the Holocaust.

I do not tell of my own family’s experiences with anything but reverence. Indeed, some of my cousins think it unseemly to remind still-living survivors of terrible events. I believe I have a duty to ensure younger generations less well-versed in anti-Semitism than my own realise where it might lead if embraced by a party with a chance of achieving power.

The reason my father Michael would have found the levels of anti- Semitism in today’s Labour Party so shocking is because of his own life story. In the late Thirties he left the family farm in Hungary and sailed to British-mandated Palestine in the hope of joining a future Israeli navy.

Onslaught

Turned back by British armed forces, who were understandably refusing entry to the huge numbers of Jewish refugees trying to get into Palestine, he made his way to Italy, then back towards the farm through war- torn Europe to try to rescue his family from the impending Nazi onslaught.

Instead, he was set upon by Nazi-sympathising thugs and almost beaten to a pulp before managing to make an escape and eventually reaching Britain where an older brother had made a career as the CantorMinister to a Jewish community in the Liverpool area.

At Victoria station, not speaking English, he wandered in error into the ladies’ waiting room. There he was approached by an elegant woman, who spoke a little German, pointed out he was in the wrong place and inquired where he was heading. He said Liverpool. She walked him across London to Euston station and helped him buy a ticket. The contrast between the decency and dignity of the welcome he received in London and the hostility and brutality of his native Hungary could not have been more profound.

As first a farmer, then owner of a kosher butcher and delicatessen and believer in enterprise, my father was a natural Tory. Yet for most of my life the mainstream Labour Party was the natural home for Jewish voters and attracted a generation of Jewish politicians who were at their most powerful in the Harold Wilson, James Callaghan era of the Seventies.

Extreme

Most were enthusiastic supporters of Israel and admirers of the country’s democratic values and kibbutz system of a shared society and culture. The Tories were regarded with more suspicion because of the Right- wing, racist views of some extremist members.

The truth is that the extreme Left, of which Corbyn is part and which has captured Labour’s inner councils, always had a virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Israel bent.

It stems partly from history. Before the enlightenment in the 18th century, Jews were forced into ancillary trades such as money lending because land ownership was blocked to them. Once they were allowed to become fuller members of society, they were seen as having acquired special privileges, using them for economic gain.

This made them targets of anti- capitalist Leftists. Layered on to this is the belief that Israel, as a ‘Jewish state’, still exploits its exclusivity. It is seen by Corbyn and the Left as a colonialist enterprise which since 1967 has occupied disputed Palestinian territory.

Yet Britain, with its history of accepting refugees, its brave Parliamentary democracy and its wars against fascism, has ensured that anti- Semitism was never allowed to flourish.

That we should now find ourselves at the centre of a row about its dramatic rise is shocking the rest of the AngloSaxon world.

It is a stain on Corbyn’s Labour and an insult to the six million murdered in concentration camps and the brave survivors and refugees who keep the flame of their loved ones’ memory burning bright.