Holocaust survivor hopes pandemic will make people kinder

‘World disaster’ of coronavirus demonstrates the truth that ‘people are people’, says Holocaust survivor

A Holocaust survivor says the coronavirus pandemic might help remind the world “people are people” and slow the rise of populism.

Speaking on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-belsen concentration camp in northern Germany, Anita Lasker-wallfisch said Covid-19 “might wake people up to have better attitudes towards each other”.

The first camp to be liberated by British troops, the horror of Belsen was on such a scale the BBC initially refused to broadcast the full report by journalist Richard Dimbleby for fear of distressing listeners. Footage of the piles of emaciated bodies left outside the camp’s wooden huts soon followed Dimbleby’s report, revealing for the first time the reality of the Nazis’ “final solution”. It is estimated 50,000 people died at the camp.

Mrs Lasker-wallfisch, now 94, was an inmate at Auschwitz before being crammed on a train to Belsen with 3,000 others as the Red Army marched on the notorious extermination camp.

She said: “People always ask me: ‘Was Belsen better or was it worse than Auschwitz?’ It was just different. Belsen was not an extermination camp.

“In Auschwitz people were murdered in the most sophisticated manner, in Belsen they didn’t need that. In Belsen you just simply perished.”

Asked if the world might be in danger of forgetting the lessons of the holocaust, she said: “Of course, we are all worried, but we are worried about something else now. We are worried about coronavirus and maybe with what is happening now in the world where everyone is affected, maybe people will wake up and realise that people are people.”

According to some elements of Chinese state media, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 should be called the “USA virus” because of a highly implausible theory that the disease was brought to China by a US soldier. Across the Pacific, Donald Trump and his cohorts have been keen to use a different name, the “Chinese virus”, because that’s where the first cases were identified.

However, just like the early 20th century’s outbreak of Spanish flu, a famous misnoma, both sides in this blame game ignore a simple fact – viruses don’t have a nationality or respect human borders. And, in a philosophical triumph for things that probably aren’t actually ‘alive’, they treat human beings equally, which seems to be a struggle for all too many people in this age of ‘populism’, identitarianism and far-right nationalism.

But a pandemic of a deadly disease can provide a fresh perspective on ideas about nationality and other human divisions that are sometimes taken so seriously that they too have fatal consequences.

Anita Lasker-wallfisch was close to being a victim of the Nazis’ deranged ideas when, 75 years ago, she was rescued from the Bergenbelsen

concentration camp by British troops.

Now 94, she was asked whether the people might be in danger of forgetting the lessons of the Holocaust in an interview to mark the anniversary of the camp’s liberation.

While she said this was indeed a worrying trend, she added that the “world disaster” of coronavirus “might wake people up to have better attitudes towards each other... maybe people will wake up and realise that people are people – human beings.”

Another survivor Susan Pollack, 89, spoke of the “gentleness, kindness” of a British soldier who found her like a living “corpse”, riddled with lice. That soldier saw her simply as a human being in distress, a fact that, blinded by a hateful ideology, the camp guards refused to recognise.

A virus is not sentient, it has no ideas, no compassion or hatred. It infects animals simply because that is what it does. And everyone – regardless of nationality, race, creed, religion or any other human division – is at risk because of a fundamental truth about what we are – a single species of animal which has spread all over the world.

Or, in other words, “people are people”.