Britain is forgetting where anti-Semitism leads

SIR – I take great exception to David Rosenberg, an ally of Jeremy Corbyn, saying that Margaret Hodge had “cynically drawn on her family’s direct experience of the Holocaust to bolster her special right to pronounce on the subject” (report, July 29).

I am the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. My father died four years ago, aged 92, and although I always knew he was a survivor, he never talked about his experiences until 13 years before he died.

Towards the end of his life he used to have terrible nightmares and I saw how much my father – a good, kind honest man who loved his fellow human beings – had suffered.

Just before he died, my niece had a very premature little girl. My father had been extremely worried. When he heard of the safe arrival of his new great granddaughter he said to my mother: “When I left the concentration camps I thought that I would always be happy with just a crust of bread, but now I realise that I will never be happy unless all my family are all right.”

As his loving daughter, I never thought I would say this, but I am glad he isn’t alive today. I am glad he isn’t alive to see anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head again within living memory of the Holocaust.

After the Holocaust the world said: “Never again”. Where is that promise today?

As the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said: “The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews … It wasn’t Jews alone who suffered under Hitler. It wasn’t Jews alone who suffered under Stalin. It isn’t Jews alone who suffer under Isis or Al Qaeda … We make a great mistake if we think anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. It is a threat, first and foremost, to Europe and to the freedoms it took centuries to achieve.”

Marta Josephs Newcastle upon Tyne