The plight of Syrian refugees is not on a par with Jews fleeing the Nazis

The term Kindertransport has been bandied about in a lazy and dishonest manner by commentators

On Holocaust Memorial Day, I turned on the TV and watched as a woman wearing an immaculate Thirties suit put her young daughter on a train. “My mother saw me off on the Kindertransport and she took a handkerchief out of her bag in order to wipe my tears at our goodbyes,” recalled Susie Lind, “I knew I would never see my parents again. I have kept this handkerchief newly laundered ever since.”

Susie was recalling her experience for the superb BBC One documentary, Children Saved from the Nazis: The

Story of Sir Nicholas Winton. It is customary to say that their suffering is unimaginable. I find it is all too easy to imagine. All you have to do is look at your children and think that people want them dead. So, you override every maternal instinct, which is telling you to keep them close, and hand them over to strangers who promise they will take them to safety in England. At the station, you strain every sinew not to show your children how you feel because you don’t want this, their last memory of you, to be one of sorrow or fear. As calmly as you can, you post your darlings into a future you will never know.

Over the past few months, as the refugee crisis in Europe has spiralled out of control, the term Kindertransport has been bandied about in a lazy and dishonest manner. Those who use it, including MPs, charity leaders and commentators, are trying to hijack the emotive power of that humanitarian effort, in the months prior to the Second World War, when the UK took in some 10,000 Jewish children. They imply that there is a clear equivalence between the plight of Syrian refugees today and Jews in Nazi Gemany.

Such comparisons are odious, not only because they are false, but because they are using genocide to score political points and shut down debate. Even Barack Obama was at it, saying: “In the Syrian seeking refugee today, we should see the Jewish refugee of the Second World War.”

Why should we see that? The Syrian refugee fleeing a war-torn country very soon reaches a place of safety, in Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan. Conditions are bad (and undoubtedly worse in winter), but there are aid workers trying to take care of them and foreign governments sending money (the UK has donated £1.1 billion so far, the second largest donor). Above all, no one is about to deport their extended family to a concentration camp where the strong will be sorted from the weak and the infants and the old people gassed.

Child refugees are safer in a tent on the Lebanese border than in a dodgy boat on the Aegean Sea. Anything to discourage that hazardous journey is a good thing, which is why the Prime Minister was right to say that asylum would be granted to 20,000 people straight from the camps. In addition, the Government said this week it will accept more unaccompanied child refugees, although the Home Office has not indicated how many under-18s will be taken in. (Wisely, they will be looking at Scandinavia, where certain “child” asylum seekers turn out to be over six feet tall with stubble, like the “15-year-old” Somali youth who stabbed a young Swedish social worker to death on Monday.)

This is nowhere near enough to satisfy the Virtue Signallers, whose compassion is so much greater, and certainly louder, than our own. The VS’s compassion embraces migrants at Calais, so desperate that for some reason they chose not to claim asylum in the first, second or even third EU country they set foot in. How sad that such compassion doesn’t extend to British-born children already in care, who are being removed from their home county of Kent and placed elsewhere, as the council struggles to cope with a 260 per cent increase in unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. The Virtue Signaller’s blithe dismissal of practicalities – “Let as many come as possible!” – is matched by self-righteous arguments.

On BBC One’s Question Time, the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown compared the Danish government’s decision to seize refugees’ valuables (so that they can contribute to their own care) to the Third Reich. The Nazis took gold out of Jews’ teeth, said Alibhai-Brown triumphantly.

Was she really saying the Danish Parliament’s desperate (and probably doomed) attempt to staunch the flow of refugees was on a par with the sadistic conduct of concentration camp guards? I’m afraid she was. This is a good example of Godwin’s Law, which asserts that “if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism”.

In the offline world, Godwin’s Law can be used as the ultimate trump card, a perfect way of seizing the moral high ground and shutting down discussion. Once a Virtue Signaller has compared a democratically elected European parliament to a uniformed brute wrenching the fillings out of a dead Jew’s mouth, then rational argument has left the building. That is a pity because we sorely need reasoned debate.

The temptation for a rich country like ours to open its doors to lone children from hellish places is very great. I can’t be the only woman in the UK who has looked at the unfolding tragedy on the evening news and had fantasies of fostering a Syrian orphan, making it hot milk and tucking it in under a blanket. But such a course can have many unintended consequences. Experts warn that some parents will actually abandon their offspring if they think there is a prospect of getting them into a country, with a view to the extended family following suit. One eight-year-old could soon be joined by nine relatives. Not all adults are like those selfless Kindertransport parents who despatched their children with no expectation of seeing them again.

In an irony that will surely not be lost on historians, the influx of Muslim refugees which the Virtue Signallers compare to the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany is fuelling a horrifying rise in anti-Semitism. As one French headline put it: “Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?” The murderous attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris happened against a background of anti-Jewish sentiments that has spread among young Muslim men in the suburbs.

Seventy-seven years after the Jews travelled West looking for sanctuary, Susie Lind still has the handkerchief her mother gave her to dry her tears. That is the undying story of the Kindertransport. The plight of Syrian refugees today is grave, no question, but please don’t mention it in the same breath.