Holocaust survivor’s fury on day Corbyn shut down dissent
WITHIN minutes of the start of the stormy Holocaust Memorial Day meeting in the Commons back in 2010, Jeremy Corbyn called on the services of a uniformed police officer posted outside the room where it was being held. Corbyn, at the time a backbench Labour MP with a long history of antagonism towards the state of Israel, was hosting the meeting and, with the officer, he walked up and down the Boothroyd Room, named after Britain’s first woman speaker, pointing to hecklers.
The officer duly asked them to leave.
One of the first of the halfdozen or so people to be ejected was Jonathan Hoffman, a member of the Jewish Board of Deputies at the time. His crime? He had noisily protested at the ‘ poisonous bile’ spewed out by some of the speakers.
Hoffman had emailed Corbyn days before the meeting asking him not to proceed: ‘Why are you hosting a meeting … which will be a farrago of lies about Israel, will demonise Israel and may well contain elements of anti-Semitism?’
Corbyn replied: ‘ How on earth do you know what will be said at a meeting yet to be held?’
Mr Hoffman emailed back. ‘You wouldn’t host a meeting that was offensive to the vast majority of Muslims – so how come you think it’s OK to host a meeting that’s offensive to the vast majority of Jews?’
In the audience one smartly dressed silver-haired pensioner gasped out loud at the ejections. Rubin Katz, now 86, had made a special trip to the Commons to hear Corbyn.
In his suit pocket was the gilt- edged invitation to the official Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in January 2010 at London’s Guildhall attended by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Archbishop of Canterbury with some survivors of the concentration camps.
‘I decided not to go to the Guildhall but to listen to Corbyn who I knew was highly critical of Israel,’ he said last night from his home in Israel, where Mr Katz now lives with his wife Michele.
‘I wanted to make a stand against him and other antiZionists on such a symbolic day for Jewish people.
‘l was astonished the police were ejecting people from a public meeting in Parliament.’
MR Katz, a retired London businessman, estimates at least 100 people crowded into the Boothroyd Room for the event titled: ‘ Never Again – For Anyone.’
He remembers that leaflets bearing that solemn pledge ‘Never Again’ had been placed on every seat in the room. They displayed the harrowing image of Jewish women with their hands up and heads held high being led out of burning buildings. Mr Katz recognised the photo. The women were being led out of the Warsaw Ghetto.
But it had been juxtaposed with another photograph of Arab women ululating and appearing to be giving a two-fingered victory sign – as if in response to the trauma of the Jewish women from the ghetto. ‘It was sickening... a photographic perversion which would have been worthy of Goebbels (the Nazi minister of propaganda),’ said Mr Katz.
Mr Katz was even more sickened when the speakers compared Israel’s treatment of Gaza to the Holocaust in which six million people were exterminated.
‘It was chilling. They were propagating hateful, distorted views of Israel, comparing Gaza to the horrors of the death camps, and on Holocaust Memorial Day for God’s sake. Corbyn never once challenged them.
‘The room was brimming with raging hatred. It was directed at Israel and at Jews who did not share the disgusting views of the speakers.’
On the panel alongside Mr Corbyn was Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer, who was on a speaking tour organised by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. The founding of the network in 2008 was welcomed in a Commons motion signed by Corbyn and John McDonnell, now the Shadow Chancellor. Mr Meyer, a physicist, spoke at the meeting against the ‘Nazi genocide of Jews to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the state of Israel’.
He had been born in Germany in 1924, but was not allowed to attend his school after November 1938 and fled to Holland without his family. In 1944 he was caught by the Gestapo and spent ten months in Auschwitz.
His parents died in the camp. After the war, Mr Meyer returned to Holland and worked as a scientist. When he retired he made musical instruments but from 2001 he started propagating the claim that Israeli leaders were acting in a way similar to the Nazis. He died in 2014.
During the meeting an increasingly upset Mr Katz repeatedly raised his hand to speak, flashing his Guildhall invitation to establish his credentials. ‘Corbyn said: “You can ask questions when the meeting is over”. He never intended it to be balanced.
‘I wanted to ask Mr Meyer, a survivor of the camps, who was Jewish, why he would say such things. I felt the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and Corbyn were shamelessly exploiting a feeble, 84-year- old death camp survivor by wheeling him out in Parliament, the cradle of democracy, but refused to let anyone challenge him.
‘Decent people would be appalled if they heard what went on in that room that night.
‘How could an MP countenance staging such a hate-filled event on that day of all days? They equated Gaza with Auschwitz, repeated fabricated Palestinian atrocity stories, and compared Jews to Nazis. My blood still runs cold at the thought of it all these years later.’
Mr Katz has his own remarkable story to tell of the Holocaust. One of six children, he and his family lived in a large home in the Polish countryside, near his father’s successful chocolate factory, which was confiscated by the Nazis.
In his book Gone To Pitchipoï: A Boy’s Desperate Fight For Survival In Wartime, he writes about being brought up in the country near Ostrowiec almost 100 miles from Warsaw.
An idyllic childhood ended on September 1, 1939, as the drone of Luftwaffe bombers was heard in the skies above Ostrowiec – along with the sound of explosions in the distance. Three weeks later soldiers riding BMW motorcycles rolled into town, covered in dust and grime, with goggles on their helmets, and machine- guns mounted on their side-cars.
As Jews were being rounded up to be deported to the death camps, his father created a makeshift cellar under a chicken pen. They had only one narrow pipe in the floor of the pen for ventilation. They lived there for a week until they were discovered and moved into one room in the Warsaw ghetto.
THEN the family was split up. His father and one brother perished in Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Another brother died in the Warsaw Ghetto. His mother managed to escape from Auschwitz.
As for him, in four years from the age of nine he evaded capture by the Nazis in an extraordinary odyssey across his native Poland through towns, forests and fields, constantly on guard, and fearful of discovery and capture.
eventually he was rescued by Russians in January 1945 and made it to england.
Mr Katz said: ‘I was a lone 14year-old, but London was glorious and I made england my home. We retired to Israel four years ago. I’m so sad now there are people who perpetuate hate, riven by extreme politics, which were once alien to england.’
Told Jeremy Corbyn had finally apologised, Mr Katz paused before saying: ‘Because he’s been found out? He can apologise. But he will never have my blessing.’