I’m not Jewish — which is why I had to do this

Lord Shinkwin reflects on the lessons of this year’s March of the Living, and explains why the bond he had with the surgeon who saved his life compels him to pass on those lessons

I DON’T understand why you went, to be honest”.

It was a perfectly reasonable response from a concerned family member. I had not long returned from Poland with March of the Living. In the space of five intensive days spent with that remarkable charity, I had learnt more about the Holocaust than most people would ever choose to know.

What I witnessed left me traumatised by the scale of the tragedy and uplifted by the evident triumph of the human spirit despite it.

So why did I put myself through it? What compelled me to choose to learn more about such an abomination?

After all, unlike many of those who accompanied me on the trip, I am not Jewish. I did not lose any of my family to the Holocaust. So what has it got to do with me?

In the Commons debate on antisemitism, Luciana Berger told how more than 100 members of her family, aged four to 83, were killed in the gas chambers of Treblinka, Sobibor, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz — and that was just on her mother’s side. She concluded: “The time for action is now.”

I am conscious of the question which her call for action poses to me and to each of us: what action can any of us take — especially those of us who are not Jewish — which will actually make a difference?

And this is the nub, because immediately I am distinguishing myself. I am different from “them”. I am not Jewish. What is happening now with the return of “mainstream” antisemitism may be terrible — but it is happening to them, not me. It is happening to other people.

For, quite apart from the Holocaust’s incomprehensible magnitude and unfathomable depravity, that instinct to separate is perhaps one of the most pervasive legacies of the Nazis’ virulent antisemitism and, indeed, of the Holocaust itself. It happened to the Jews, not to me, not to my family, not even to friends of my family.

Tragic, yes. Relevant, no. Wrong! I believe the Jewish people’s almost immeasurable loss — when one looks beyond the statistics — was a shared loss: it was humanity’s loss, too. Given its colossal scale, how could it not be?

That is the first lesson I learnt on March of the Living — that the tragedy that befell the victims of the Holocaust directly befell us all indirectly, too. It is relevant to all of us because it is quite simply the greatest single crime ever to have been perpetrated by — and the greatest single tragedy ever to have befallen — humanity.

It was only when I went on March of the Living that I fully appreciated the enduring human cost of almost threeand-a-half million of Poland’s citizens being lost to the Holocaust and, with them, a vibrant Jewish culture and the significant contribution that its Jewish community made to so many aspects of its national life.

Unsurprisingly, the attempted annihilation of Europe’s Jewish population left a gaping wound which affected — and still affects — Europe as a whole.

And yet, incredibly, I learnt that the Nazis planned for it to be worse, to the tune of a further five million deaths. 330,000 of them were to come from what the Nazis described as England (presumably the UK, as its component parts were not listed separately).

As the film, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society reminds us, it did actually happen on British territory; people were removed from the Channel Islands and sent to their deaths for being Jewish.

The second lesson I learnt on March of the Living is that personalising this is crucial to appreciating both the loss and its relevance to all of us.

My own personalisation of that loss and, thus, my decision to accept the invitation to join March of the Living 2018 was due to one man, someone who almost lost his life because he was Jewish and who went on to play a very important part in my life: my doctor.

His story is quite extraordinary. It starts in Nazi-occupied Prague. The teenager’s father, Alfred, had got to Britain first where he found safety for his family by obtaining guarantors for Hanus and his mother, Mary, thereby enabling them to join him here.

Nonetheless, it was still touch and go. They only just made it on to the very last train out of Prague before the Nazis closed the borders.

How different life would have been had they failed to make it, for him — and for me. Not one of his relatives who came to wave them off that day survived the Holocaust.

Hanus Weisl would have simply become another grisly statistic, one of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. Instead, through finding refuge in this country, he became one of the most important people in my life.

Fast forward to 1971. By the time I was born that June, he had already established himself as a well-respected consultant orthopaedic and trauma surgeon; I was to be under his expert care for the next 13 years.

My brittle bones meant that I was barely out of hospital for much of my childhood. One year, I managed to be in traction, recovering from yet more fractures, for both Christmas and my June birthday. Throughout, Hanus’s obsession with perfection, his compassion and his respect for his patients and their families meant that the care I received from him was second to none.

When I was only one year old, he broke with all medical convention and let my mother take me home with my leg still in a splint; he would complete his ward round at our house on his way home.

On one occasion, he had me wheeled back down to theatre for my leg to be reset because he was dissatisfied with People take part in the annual March of the Living to commemorate the Holocaust

the x-rays following surgery performed in his absence the previous day.

As a tearful ten-year old, I did not thank him for his diligence, but I do now. Thanks to Hanus Weisl, I had the best possible medical start in life. He made my legs straight when my bones kept on snapping and insisted I continue weight-bearing (crucial to maintaining bone density), no matter how often I had to learn all over again how to walk after months in bed.

Most importantly, he taught me, by example, never to lower my expectations because I had a disability. He was light years ahead of his time. His progressive attitude and radical partnership-based approach are perhaps best summed up in a Christmas card I treasure.

Written shortly after his retirement in 1992, it reads: “I was most touched by your note of thanks for whatever I tried to do. However, I am convinced that whatever the surgeon does, it is the patient who makes it work (or not).”

Hanus Weisl, the teenage refugee from Prague, whose dedication helped transform the life chances of a nonJewish boy, a boy who would one day sit in the House of Lords and recall on the floor of that house his old orthopaedic surgeon with heartfelt gratitude.

It could have been so different. He and his mother might still have got the necessary visas only to discover that the last train out before the borders were closed had already left.

The Nazis had already shown their bestial true colours by 1939. Yet no one foretold the Holocaust, and no one would have been believed had they done so.

How could any human being possibly have conceived and then participated

in the implementation of such a programme?

And confronted with the evidence and the tragic legacy of the Final Solution, as I and 11,000 other participants of March of the Living were in Poland, how could we begin to understand how it could have happened in a country only a few hours away by plane?

These were the questions I took with me on what was in many ways a personal pilgrimage, both to honour the memory of my former doctor and the war-time victims of antisemitism and reflect on the lessons of their suffering.

And these were just some of the questions I came home with. For another crucial lesson I learnt during those five intensive days was that the deeper you delve, the less you understand and the more you realise that the clinical, brutal belief system underpinning the Holocaust should never make sense. In fact, it would be disturbing if it did.

Now I am home, I am haunted by guilt at having returned so easily from camps deliberately designed to be places of no return.

But what next?

On the penultimate night, we were encouraged to make a personal pledge of at least one follow-up action. Top of the list was telling people about what we had witnessed. Processing what I learnt is proving to be the hardest part.

For while a temporary immersion into an alien world of institutionalised, racist sadism, appalling suffering and methodical mass murder is tough, reentry into our comfortable Western world of respect for human rights and freedom from fear is tougher still.

I found the exposure to such a different, desolate world deeply traumatising. Nothing prepared me for the shocking, tangible realisation of the enormity of the Final Solution.

Auschwitz is not the Holocaust, and the Holocaust is not Auschwitz, but if

I believe the Jewish people’s loss was a shared loss’ Processing what I learnt is proving the hardest’