Yesterday I went to my uncle’s funeral. 88 years old and alert and amusing until the day he died. I never knew that he was in the RAF during the war – back-end technical support, I believe. One of the engineers who kept the planes flying during the Battle of Britain. Not as glamorous as being a Spitfire pilot, perhaps, but absolutely vital and insanely dangerous nonetheless (messing around with bombs and ammo while surrounded by fuel tanks, often ducking German air raids while he was at it).
Last week I was down in the West Country visiting my 85-year-old grandmother. In 1940, at the age of 17, she felt the call, left the tiny hamlet in which she had spent her entire life down in a remote part of Cornwall and moved to London to train as a nurse. She hit the wards of Guy’s Hospital just as the bombs of the Blitz started hitting the streets and houses.
In the previous war, her father – my great-grandfather – had likewise signed up as soon as he could (this despite, or perhaps because of his Prussian father’s internment on the Isle of Man), being shipped out from the back-end of Cornish tranquillity to the trenches of the Western Front, and lasting all the way, through both the Somme and Passchendale.
My great-grandfather went on to become a teacher. My grandmother a housewife. My uncle an accountant. They became ordinary, everyday people again, and none of them liked to talk about their experiences. And herein lies the problem.
The recent attacks on Roma settlements in Italy and plans to fingerprint all Roma in the country have so many obvious echoes of the early anti-Jewish rumblings of inter-war Germany (and pre-WWI Austria, where Hitler gained his political education thanks to the populist likes of Schonerer, Lueger and the like, for that matter), that they shouldn’t need to be underlined. Indeed, by likening anything at all to the actions of the fascists of the 1930s/40s it’s hard not to fear slipping into hyperbole – and on the internet, of having Godwin’s Law brought up yet again.
The problem is precisely that everyone knows about the Nazis and about the Holocaust. It’s part of the education of pretty much every European child, and has been for more than half a century. In some countries, the teaching of the Second World War would even take preference over more general national histories, so important has it rightly been considered (while I was at school we spent two years on the Second World War – with not a single lesson on the British Empire). Documentaries about the Nazis are on a constant loop on the various history TV channels. History sections of bookshops are dominated by picture books and chunky tomes about the Third Reich and the chaos it wrought.
And what do we learn? That the Nazis were evil. That this was an extraordinary moment, an unprecedented time.
None of this, of course, is entirely true. Continue reading