Ourworktostemthe poison is never-ending

WHEN I first began teaching the Holocaust, I was full of hope; now I am not so sure.

I grew up in London in a non-Jewish area and I went to a non-Jewish girls’ grammar school. No one ever spoke about the Holocaust in the 1950s; I learned about it from reading the reports of the Eichmann trial in 1961, and I was so angry.

I began to study and teach it in the mid 1980s. I was lucky to have great mentors: the late Hyam Maccoby and Robert Wistrich, both of whom displayed humanity in the face of appalling truth. I worked and taught in Hampstead, the meeting place and home of many of the surviving émigrés from Europe, who tended to gravitate to the Cosmo restaurant on the Finchley Road, because it reminded them of their native lands. Then they came to the Spiro Institute, and later, the London Jewish Cultural Centre where I was CEO. And so I met survivors, partisans and genuine intellectuals. They were the remnants of a destroyed civilisation, and they were magnificent.

From 1988, I visited Poland every year with my colleague Jerry Gotel, who had first travelled to Eastern Europe in the late 1960s to honour the members of his family who had perished. We would drink in the Kazimierz district in Krakow, which was once the centre of Jewish life.

We gravitated to the Ariel Café, a Jewish-style restaurant where we would meet fellow travellers all searching for an understanding.

Our work in Poland grew because of Raphael “Felek” Scharf. He arrived in England in 1938 from Krakow to study at LSE. He was 24. His greatgrandfather had been the rabbi of the town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz). After the war, he returned to Poland often; he still loved Polish culture.

With the death of the Jews, Poland lost its left arm’