HMD is commemorated on 27th January every year. Using this year’s theme, Ordinary People, Bill tells the story of three men whose lives form part of the story of the holocaust. Bill is studying for an MA in Holocaust Studies, an interest sparked off by a meeting with Zigi Shipper who died this week and whose words “don’t hate” are at the end of this account.
It’s a good read (and really, I’m not just being biased). See what you think
Across the World, The Holocaust Remains as Relevant as Ever
The 1928 Olympics, Amsterdam. A debut at the games for women’s athletics and gymnastics, controversies and boycotts, and as seems to happen at every games, the United States topped the medals table. On the Umpire’s panel for the hockey that year sat Leonard Frank. Leo was a keen hockey player, having captained his university team and would write many books on the sport. Such was never his full-time occupation though. An eminent lawyer engaged with social issues, he would direct two of Amsterdam’s mental health hospitals. For his work on financial law, he would in 1936 be honoured by Queen Wilhelmina of Holland.
In the same year these Olympics were taking place, the young priest, Marc Boegner would inaugurate the Protestant Sermons of Lent on the French Radio, contributing to his rise through the Church ranks. The next year, he would become the first President of the Protestant Federation of France, a position he would hold for more than three decades. Elsewhere in the country, Charles Kon would be born four years later. Growing up, he would attend school, regularly go to the beach, and he would go on to marry and have children and grandchildren.
To me, there is little particularly extraordinary about any of these three individuals’ stories. On the contrary, they seem not only wholly ordinary, but also totally unconnected. Yet, one crucial detail of all their lives I have so far neglected to mention ties them all together: each of them forms a part of the story of the Holocaust.
The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2023 is ‘Ordinary People’. In genocides, the roles of such people are often understated, but the truth is that many of those involved are precisely that—ordinary. Whether as victims, survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, or heroes, the labels that come to define them were never what they were born to be. Both Leonard Frank and Charles Kon were Jewish. Under Nazi rule, nothing else mattered. The two would have hugely different Holocaust stories, but this one part of their identity was enough to turn them into potential victims.
Leonard Frank was active in the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands but would be betrayed to the Gestapo in 1942. He was then deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. He was just one of six million Jews to perish during the Holocaust, but like him, every victim had a story.
Charles Kon survived the Holocaust. Fearing the consequences for Jews the Nazi occupation of France would bring, he and his father fled illegally, first through Spain to Portugal, eventually settling in Canada. The life he went on to live is just one example of what the many futures lost in the Holocaust may have looked like. His children and grandchildren serve as a reminder of the generations of European Jewry lost whose absence is painfully visible on Europe’s streets even today.
Marc Boegner was one of the Holocaust’s few heroes. As the head of the French Protestant Church, he used his position to speak out against the ongoing persecution of Jews in France, a small voice in what was largely an otherwise deafening silence on the part of the French public. He would personally be involved in saving around 100 Jews despite calls for him to be prosecuted.
Both Charles Kon and Marc Boegner’s stories have formed the basis of two of my most recent studies, and from both, there are valuable lessons to be learnt. From the people who risked hiding Charles in France, the Spanish police who let him flee, many of those who helped to facilitate his escape were ordinary people choosing in some way to make a difference. Marc Boegner’s protests in France were drowned out by apathy among most of the rest of the French public. Anti-Jewish laws continued to be introduced and enforced in France with little pushback. The culmination of all this was a series of mass roundups in the summer of 1942, in which tens of thousands of Jews would be deported to their deaths. Yet, from the French story come two lessons: the negative difference bystanders can make, and the positive difference ordinary people can make by choosing to intervene. After such roundups, protests in France became widespread, Boegner’s opposition one voice among many. Following this outcry, deportations from France slowed substantially, remaining comparatively slow for the rest of the Second World War. The French public were not blameless. The vocal response from the Church and the wider population was not enough to halt deportations completely, it came too late for those already sent to their deaths. But such a case shows how pivotal the (in)actions of ordinary people can be.
Despite Covid restrictions, I have been privileged to travel fairly widely over the last few years. Most recently, I visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, the resting place for over 250,000 victims of the Genocide against the Tutsi. This visit was a harrowing reminder that the Holocaust was neither the first genocide, nor sadly was it the last. Nearly fifty years on from the end of the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of people in Rwanda were brutally murdered, often by people they knew just for being born Tutsi. It is impossible to list and detail every genocide to have taken place; each was different from one another and I don’t consider comparing them to be helpful. However, the one universal message that emerges from all of them is that while the Holocaust may be fading further into history, the human capacity for cruelty and hatred is not.
In April last year, I was lucky enough to join hundreds of young Jewish people from across the country in travelling to Poland, touring the sites of Holocaust memorials and former camps with survivors. On this trip, many of these Jewish people shared their experiences of antisemitism in a variety of settings. Indeed, the latest report from the Community Security Trust, the UK’s leading antisemitism watchdog has reported a 22% increase in antisemitic hate incidents on university campuses over the last two years. It is clear that despite the time that has passed since the Holocaust, the antisemitism from which it stemmed still feels very real.
Some of the Holocaust survivors who came with us to Poland insisted this would be their last time visiting the country. As these inspirational people sadly die out, their messages remain as relevant as ever. Just this month, I heard of the passing of the first Holocaust survivor I ever heard from, Zigi Shipper. In a context where I have already highlighted the differences ordinary people can choose (not) to make, it seems fitting to close with the two words Zigi told the room in 2014: don’t hate. Only that way can we ever put some meaning to the phrase ‘never again’.
To find out more about Leonard Frank’s story, see here. Charles Kon’s full testimony can be viewed via the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History archive. Marc Boegner was honoured for speaking out against the persecution of Jews in France by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem. He is one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a title reserved for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from extermination during the Second World War. More information about him can be found here.
Photo by Eelco Böhtlingk on Unsplash Memorial at Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, Israel
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Musings of a Maverick Priest 