THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY - speech for Holocaust Remembrance Day
The Right Side of History
Richard Zimler
On April 19, 1506, a pogrom broke out in Lisbon, Portugal, led by Dominican priests shouting “Death to the Jews!” and “Death to the heretics!” Rioters following these fanatical churchmen through the city ended up murdering some 2,000 New Christians, Jews who’d been forcibly baptised in a mass conversion nine years earlier. Their bodies were dragged to Lisbon’s central square and burnt in two huge pyres.
I discovered this crime against humanity in 1990, while researching daily life in Portugal in the Sixteenth Century, but when I asked my Portuguese friends what they knew about the massacre, they all replied, “What massacre? What are you talking about?”
I soon discovered that the pogrom wasn’t mentioned in schoolbooks or history texts. It had been erased from memory.
This amnesia in Portugal seemed to me a second crime, because those 2000 dead New Christians were as real to themselves as we are to ourselves. They had joys and sorrows, birthdays to celebrate, bad backs and chest colds and houses waiting for a spring cleaning. And dreams yet to fulfill.
And so I decided to make the massacre the background for the novel I was planning about a Jewish manuscript illuminator living in Lisbon. In such ways throughout my life, I have learned that I have a deeply subversive personality; it gives me a great sense of purpose to write of events that those with economic and political power would prefer to whitewash or forget.
The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon ended up telling the story of Berekiah Zarco, a studious young New Christian who survives the Lisbon Massacre only to discover that his beloved uncle, his spiritual mentor, has been murdered in the family cellar. While beset by grief and despair, he decides to try to track down the killer. But as a kabbalist interested in the symbolic significance of events, he grows far more interested in what his uncle’s murder and the pogrom mean for his family, the Jews, all of humanity and even for God. Berekiah offers the reader his own interpretation on the last page of the novel and his words give the narrative a chilling significance.
By now the book has been published in 23 languages. And made me an enemy of the Church hierarchy. The most repressive wing of the Catholic Church – Opus Dei – has placed the book in the category of absolutely forbidden works.
Would you be surprised to learn that I’m pleased by this ban? Because it is proof that those with religious and political power who want to prevent the truth from being exposed are afraid of me! As well they should be. Because I have no intension of keeping quiet.
With any luck, the movie of The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon will start filming in September. But more important than the book’s success is what it has taught me: that I value the chance to write about people whose voices have been systematically silenced. It gives me the energy – the slow burn of anger – that I need to keep me going over the two to three years it takes me to write a novel. It also makes me feel as if I’m fighting on the right side of history, which seems the best possible place to be.
I would ask you to remember this: the right side of history is always the side that has a memory.
Now, although the organizers of this ceremony asked me to speak about contemporary anti-Semitism and my own experiences – and I will – I wanted to start with how the Lisbon Massacre was nearly completely forgotten. Because you may believe that the Holocaust is certain to remain central to the telling of modern history, but you are wrong.
Many past crimes against humanity have already been forgotten. I grew up in the state of New York, which was once the territory of the Iriquois and other Native American tribes. But do you know how much time we devoted in our classes to their culture, history, religion and music? And to how they were brutally chased off their land and murdered by the United States government?
If I said not a single day would you be shocked? Unfortunately, complacency and guilt and political interests encourage a wilful forgetfulness in whole populations. And that’s what will happen to the Holocaust unless we work very hard to prevent it.
Already, there are grave signs that most people in America and Europe have no understanding of the Nazi genocide. In the USA, 41% of adults and 66% of young men and women born after 1990 do not know what Auschwitz was. They have no idea of how many Jews died in the death camps; or how many Roma or Gays or Communists.
The memory of the Holocaust is fading.
Worse: it has to compete with neo-Nazi propaganda and Holocaust deniers who now spread their sick lies on social media, any time they like and with near total impunity.
Are you aware that anti-Semitism is ferociously strong now in countries like Japan, Sweden and Spain, where there are hardly any Jews?
And in Hungary, Lithuania and other Eastern European countries where there once were thriving Ashkenazi communities, history has been re-written to exonerate their citizens from any blame. It is now a crime in Poland to write or talk about Polish collaboration in the Nazis’ plan to exterminate the Jews.
Will anyone in those countries and the rest of the world know anything but the vaguest outlines of the Holocaust a hundred years from now? Given the contempt for the truth evidenced by some of our most powerful politicians and the media, I doubt it.
So I think that what we are doing here today is extremely important. Especially if we wish to halt the rise of the ethnic and religious hatred that is blossoming all over the contemporary world – even, unfortunately, in Great Britain.
*****
About forty years ago, I learned about the extent of anti-Semitism in the modern world under very difficult circumstances. It was 1982… The year Argentina invaded the Falklands and that E.T. phoned home. That summer, I did an internship at the offices of United Press in Paris. At the time, it was one of the major news agencies.
On my first day of work, I walked into the United Press offices and five reporters and photographers were watching a TV mounted on a side wall. The receptionist pointed out to me the acting bureau chief. His name was Georges Sibera. He was balding and paunchy. His face was red and he was sweating heavily. He looked drunk. Although I couldn’t see the TV from my angle, the sound made it clear that it was a news report having to do with Israeli soldiers razing a Palestinian village. While I waited for a pause, Georges raised his middle finger toward the TV and cursed the Israeli soldiers. A few minutes later, when the report ended, I stepped up to him and introduced myself. And the very first thing he said to me – I swear that I’m not making this up – was, “I hope you’re not another Jew.”
Do you sometimes wonder if you would admit to being Jewish when faced by a hostile, very possibly drunk, anti-Semite?
I felt my head shrinking turtle-like into my shoulders, smiled weakly and said, “For better or for worse, I am indeed Jewish.”
He looked me up and down. An insect about to be squashed might feel as encouraged as I did at that moment. And then he showed me to my desk.
I worked for Georges the anti-Semite for three months that summer. Perhaps out of perverse pleasure, he had me cover all the anti-Zionist rallies, where I learned the going chant, which had some nice rhymes and referred to the Prime Minister of Israel at the time, Menachem Begin, and the then-American President, Ronald Reagan:
A bas Begin, a bas Reagan. Vive les combattents Libainais Palestinians…
Down with Begin, down with Reagan. Long live the Lebanese and Palestinian fighting men…
I spent hours perfecting my articles about these rallies, though little of what I wrote interested American readers. But my disappointment soon lost all importance. Because at 1:15 p.m. on August 8, 1982, two assassins from a Palestinian terrorist group tossed grenades into the dining area of Jo Goldenberg’s, a well-known Jewish Restaurant in Paris’ Jewish Quarter. They then ran inside firing automatic weapons, murdering six persons and injuring 22 others.
That evening I went to see the restaurant, which had been cordoned off, though it was easy to spot dried blood on the cobblestones outside.
The next morning, Georges sent me to the Hotel Dieu hospital to interview the husband of one of two Americans murdered in the attack. His name was David. His wife Ann had been killed. They were university professors in Chicago and had been working on a book about the history of architecture. Ann and David had been sitting at the counter when terrorists tossed their grenades inside.
David and I spoke together all morning, in part because he was desperate to talk English with someone. Though he had been wounded in the shoulder by a bullet, he was able to talk coherently. He told me that he and Ann had survived the two grenade explosions and had tried to crawl together to the back of the restaurant. As soon as the blasting of automatic weapons began, he had covered her body with his. He was sure of it. He simply couldn’t understand how she’d been killed. Or why. It made no sense. He told me that if either of them had to die, he should have been the one.
What David told me over the hours we talked together gave me my first three lessons in Jew-hatred:
The FIRST: That it can turn deadly when you least expect it.
SECOND: That attacks like this – on innocents far from any conflict – NEVER make any sense.
THIRD: If you are Jewish and manage to live your life without ever being attacked, count yourself lucky, because being beaten, stabbed or shot is just a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In the weeks that followed, I learned a disheartening FOURTH LESSON: That many supposedly intelligent people are unable – or unwilling – to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. I want to emphasize that the attack that killed Ann and wounded David was nothing but visceral anti-Semitism. Why?
The people killed were French and American citizens, not representatives of Israel or its government. The terrorists chose a Jewish restaurant owned by a Jewish-French citizen in the French capital.
And yet many Parisian newspapers referred to this as an anti-Zionist attack – exactly the lie that the terrorists wanted them to write, which infuriated me. And still does.
And here’s a FIFTH LESSON: justice is hard to come by in the very unfair world we live in. Why do I say that?
Though we now know where the men suspected of planning the attack and carrying it out are currently residing, the governments of Jordan, Norway and the Palestinian Territories refuse to allow them to be extradited.
Back to David at the hospital… His deepest and most distressing concern was how to tell his three-year-old daughter that her mother was dead. I stopped taking notes when he told me that because our conversation didn’t fit my definition of news – it was simply too personal and private.
After four hours of conversation, I left him. I cried in the hallway for a while, then interviewed several French survivors of the attack. I can recall only one person because what I saw shocked me so deeply. She was an elderly Frenchwomen and she had maybe two hundred small holes in her face and body. The holes were crusted with blood. They’d been made by shrapnel and bullets. Yet she was able to talk with me and smile and ask me about my work and tell me exactly what had happened to her.
Even today, nearly forty years later, when I hear an anti-Semitic trope or reference – no matter how slight – I think of her and how brave and wonderful she was. And I think of David, of course.
After leaving the hospital, I returned to the news bureau to file my story. Just after I finished, a senior reporter yelled at me for failing to tape-record my conversation with David, since we could have sent out sound-bites to radio clients. A few minutes later, Georges screamed at me in both English and French, since one language couldn’t contain all his contempt.
And so it was that I learned that I didn’t really want to be a journalist, though for the next eight years I would make believe I did, until I found the courage to start writing my novels.
*****
My most recent personal experience with anti-Semitism came last spring.
A bit of context… Whenever a new novel of mine is published, I generally come to the UK to do promotions. My latest book, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LAZARUS, was launched last April. So an old friend of mine who is a part-time book publicist began trying to set up events for me three months before that.
Keep in mind that his attempts to interest event organizers in me aren’t always successful. I’m just not well known enough. But in March of last year, for the first time, I was turned down for being Jewish.
At that time, my publicist called and confessed – in a distressed tone I’d never heard before – that I had just been rejected by two cultural organizations that had previously shown enthusiasm for hosting an event with me. “They asked me if you were Jewish,” he said, “and the moment I replied that you were, they lost all interest. They even stopped replying to my emails and returning my phone messages.
I’ll call my publicist John as he prefers to remain anonymous. John told me that the final conversations he had with the two event co-ordinators convinced him that they weren’t anti-Semitic themselves but they feared a backlash – protests by their members and others – if they extended an invitation to a Jewish writer.
After my phone conversation with him, I was shocked and upset. I never expected that my career in Great Britain would be prejudiced by my being Jewish. It made this country seem like a place I didn’t know and maybe never knew. Even just asking about my religious affiliation struck me as outrageous. Obviously, I do not believe that anyone benefits when writers are censored for their ethnicity or faith.
And once again, let’s not get sidetracked with references to Israel. Although it’s perfectly legitimate for those who oppose Netanyahu’s policies to protest against them – I often do myself – I have no connection with Israel. I have neither investments nor family there. It’s true that my new novel is set in the Holy Land, but it takes place 2,000 years before the foundation of the state of Israel. As for my nationality, I’m American and Portuguese.
But, as I learned back in Paris in 1982, a great many people refuse to acknowledge the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Or between a Jew and an Israeli. In their minds, all Jews are responsible for Israeli policy. We are all guilty of putting Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. And of thwarting Palestinian hopes for a stable homeland. We all therefore deserve to be shamed and punished.
Any Jew who is even slightly well known – like me – is unable to post anything on Facebook – a quiet dinner with friends, a book launch, a trip to the UK – without receiving insults and even occasionally threats from anti-Israeli trolls.
Happily for me, my particular case is unimportant – I’ll be able to write my novels and make a living even if I never receive another invitation to speak in Great Britain. But what about Jewish artists, writers, scientists and others whose careers are hindered or blocked by fears about protests?
And this I know: anyone who fails be welcoming to Jews because they fear a backlash makes it possible for the haters to have their way – to spread their irrational prejudice and make shunning them seem acceptable. But is that really the “new normal” we want for Great Britain?
*****
When the organizers of this ceremony asked me to talk about contemporary anti-Semitism I decided to print out all the current news articles about such prejudice that I could find. But a problem soon arose – new horror stories appeared every day, way too many for me to speak about.
Hate crimes against Jews – like the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018 that killed 11 worshippers – are way up. And more violent than ever.
We have been targeted by the far Left and the far Right.
A number of the articles I read opened my eyes about the causes and manifestations of the current rise in anti-Jewish sentiment, revealing nuances that I hadn’t much thought about.
A first example:
Here is a headline from last November: Labour student activitst contemplated suicide after backlash for speaking out against anti-Semitism.
This story in the Jewish Chronicle explored how a 19-year-old Hull University student – who doesn’t happen to be Jewish – was threatened, bullied and insulted by Labour activists and by dozens of online trolls when she agreed to speak to the BBC Panorama reporters doing an exposé on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. As a result, she went into a deep depression and contemplated killing herself.
All of which demonstrates what we’ve had to learn over the past couple of years – that a good deal of prejudice against Jews is made even more repugnant and dangerous by the bullying of bigots aiming to stifle indignation and protests. To shut us up.
Another article, this one from last December: Labour urged to suspend candidate who shared message questioning Nick Robinson’s Jewish heritage.
In this case, a Labour MP – Jean Anne Mitchell – blamed reporter Nick Robinson and his questioning style for Jeremy Corbyn’s poor showing in a televised debate. Mitchell told colleagues in her message that Robinson was born to German-Jewish parents. As if his religious and cultural identity were a crime in itself, she added, “And that makes him Jewish!”
So, when all else fails, blame Jews. Because you will suffer no serious consequences. And who knows, some very ignorant people may even believe you.
This next story is from Italy and was published last November: Italian Holocaust Survivor given police escort after far-right threats.
This was one of the most upsetting pieces I read over the past few months because it informed readers that Liliana Segre, a survivor of Auschwitz, receives online threats every day, many against her life.
One teacher from Veneto wrote on Facebook: “Segre would do well in a nice little incinerator”.
Why has this 89-year-old woman been victimized? Because she has proposed forming a parliamentary commission to combat racism, anti-Semitism and incitement to hatred.
How many violent threats she receive a day? 5, 10, 20? Try 200!
The meaning? Jew-haters have no scruples. And when you think they can’t descend any lower, they do.
Here are two stories that we need to understand if we are going to fight against those who despise and denigrate Jews and other minorities.
The first reports on a speech made by Home Secretary Priti Patel to the Tory Party conference in Manchester last October. She vowed to end freedom of movement after Brexit. When speaking of the criticism she has received for her proposals, she said defiantly, “This daughter of immigrants needs no lectures from the north London, metropolitan, liberal elite.”
I confess that Patel’s condescending affirmation pleases me in a perverse way because I enjoy de-coding the insults used by shameless politicians who feel too constrained to express their contempt openly.
Who are the north London metropolitan liberal elite so despised by Patel?”
Jews, of course. Up there in leafy Hampstead. Shopping at Daunt Books in Belsize Park. Walking their dogs on the Heath.
Jews and their friends.
What Patel is saying is that there are good and clear-sighted children of immigrants like her, men and women who have learned the right lessons from English history and who know what needs to be done to exclude foreigners and refugees. And then there are bad and misguided children of immigrants, those hectoring old Jews up in north London, who haven’t learned the right lessons from their experiences and who are too elitist and isolated to even understand the issues involved.
Jews are slandered the same way in the USA, of course, where for many decades, Republicans have denounced criticism from the so-called New York urban liberal elite – meaning Jews and their friends.
Lest you think that I’m showing bias by excoriating a Tory politician, here are my three favorite moments in the recent history of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party: In 2012, Jeremy Corbyn shared an image of a London mural on his Facebook page that depicted a group of bankers, some of whom were drawn with clear Nazi-style caricatures, playing a game of world domination. In 2013, he said that certain “Zionists” in Britain “don’t understand English irony,” which was his own coded language, of course, for stating that English Jews aren’t really English. And my favorite of all was his car-crash TV interview in November in which he hesitated for an excruciatingly embarrassing period of time before recognizing as anti-Semitic the lunatic conspiracy theory that holds that “Rothschild’s Zionists run Israel and world governments.”
Is it any wonder then that so many Jewish journalists, politicians and cultural figures stated during the recent election that they felt lost in a no-man’s land between two different but equally repugnant strands of bigotry?
Here’s another recent example from my own life of the ubiquitous nature of Jew hatred…
I ride the train each week in Portugal because although our permanent home is in Porto, my husband is an MP in Parliament and we have to be in Lisbon at least four days a week.
On the particular day I wish to discuss, back in 2018, four British men were sitting around their table at the center of our carriage. The train left Lisbon at 10 a.m. and by 11 a.m. each of the tourists had drunk two large cans of beer and were talking very loudly. When they started discussing the 9/11 attacks in New York, one of them said to the others, “Remind me to tell you the REAL story.”
“No, tell us now,” one of his friends replied.
“Right. Well you know it wasn’t really Bin Laden who was behind it all.”
“No?”
“It was the Israelis.”
“Really?”
“Yeah they paid the Americans to carry out the attacks themselves.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely. There’s proof all over the Internet.”
I shall spare you the rest of their drunken conversation. My point is that this particular conspiracy theory and others that are equally inane are believed by millions of people in America, Britain, the Middle East and all over the globe. They are convinced that Jews financed the 9/11 attacks as a money-making scheme.
Do you recall the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017? Maybe you remember Trump declaring that there were good people amongst the neo-Nazis and Klansmen assembled there. One counter-demonstrator, Heather Heyer, was killed and 19 were injured when a white nationalist named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into the crowd of protesters.
And here’s the stuff of nightmares: the chant of the racists marching that day was: “JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US”.
Why that particular rallying cry?
Right-wing groups all over the world spread the belief that the white “race” – and I’m using that unscientific term because it is the word they use – …that the white race is doomed to extinction. What they call a “rising tide of color” – of black people and Latinos – will overwhelm and exterminate them. And who finances and controls this rising tide? You guessed it – Jews!
Now, in reading about these conspiracy theories, I had a small revelation. Maybe you’ve had the same one…
None of this insanity is anything new. Anti-Semitism has been based on inane slanders since the Middle Ages.
Do you know why Edward I expelled the Jews from England in 1290? It was largely because of allegations of ritual murder, in particular the Blood Libel – that Jews kill Christian children in order to use their blood in their religious rituals, including the making of matzah.
That might be the most bizarre and hard-to-believe conspiracy theory of them all. And yet millions of Englishmen and women did believe it.
In the most famous case, 45 years before the expulsion, King Henry III gave official authorization to the allegation that a murdered nine-year-old Lincolnshire boy named Hugh had been kidnapped by Jews, tortured and crucified.
The king had 90 Jewish residents of Lincoln arrested and charged them with ritual murder. Eighteen of them were hanged.
Hatred of Jews grew so strong over the following decades that Edward I decided to rid his kingdom of that evil, poisonous, murdering minority once and for all.
A prediction… Conspiracy theories are going to become more powerful and influential over the coming years. Because we live in an age when hundreds of millions of people get their news from Tweets and Facebook posts. An age in which the leaders of the most powerful nations in the world make no attempt to distinguish between facts and fraud.
Unfortunately, lunatic fantasies always have the advantage over the truth because they appeal to ignorant people’s need for a hidden and all-encompassing reason why they haven’t got the life they want.
You didn’t make it onto Britain’s Got Talent, it’s because TV is run by Jews. You weren’t accepted by university you wanted, it’s because blacks and Indians are given priority by Jews who manipulate the system.
Believing these conspiracies is a whole lot easier than taking responsibility for your life.
Just how bitter and under-educated are the people who subscribe to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories? And why are they so enraged? I want to focus on America for a moment because I know it much better than Britain.
The United States is a country where tens of millions of old people lose all their savings because of an inadequate and underfunded national health care system. It is a country where diabetics go into debt to buy insulin – or dangerously ration its use – because prices are inflated to make huge profits for pharmaceutical companies. In America, insulin costs seven times what it does in neighboring Canada. The crazy, unwinnable war on drugs puts kids smoking marijuana in prison for 10 years or more. Prisons run by private companies make huge profits from their misery – and the misery of all those who are behind bars. The result? A criminal justice system designed to incarcerate as many people as possible. 2.2 million Americans are currently behind bars – more than a fifth of the entire world total. It is also a country where refugee children are kept in cages and separated from their families, and the President speaks of their homelands as Shithole countries. Kids grow up without learning Darwin’s theory of evolution or the history of slavery because these topics are considered incompatible with Biblical teachings. The American dream? Well, the minimum wage has fallen catastrophically over the last 50 years. If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept pace with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 per hour. Instead, it’s $7.25. About 70% of Americans born into poverty will die in poverty. Most minority kids born in ghettos never make it out. Their schools, funded by diminishing local taxes, are inadequate and dangerous.
As for the shrinking middle class, families go into lifetime debt to pay for their kids’ education because universities now cost about 45,000 pounds per year in tuition and fees. In America’s rust belt, where manufacturing plants and unions have been destroyed – and in its rural areas – the hopelessness is so great that drug use is at epidemic proportions. Over 42,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses in 2016 and millions more remain so addicted that they see no way out.
As a result of all this, 45,000 Americans commit suicide every year. Another 1.1 million attempt it.
Trump’s slogan is Make America Great Again and his solutions for the hopelessness of tens of millions of people range from tax-breaks for the super-wealthy to an increased military budget to defunding all the nation’s environmental programs. Make America Great Again? America has never been so cruel and miserable and despairing and menacing a place. Maybe not where tourists go, in Midtown Manhattan and Hollywood and Washington DC. But take a short ride to the Bronx or Compton or to once-proud manufacturing cities like Scranton and you’ll see the burnt out buildings and meth junkies and endless avenues where the only restaurants are a McDonald’s and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Once-thriving shopping malls and supermarkets are abandoned and boarded up. In the USA, we call this new phase of urban collapse the Retail Apocalypse. And it means that in low-income neighborhoods, the few jobs that are available pay the absurdly low minimum wage I mentioned. And even if you are lucky enough to get a job, your employers will either hire you part-time or sack you before your probation period is over so that they don’t have to pay your health insurance.
America alone among developed nations has seen its citizens’ life expectancy fall three years in a row – and for the first time in a century.
The USA is a broken-down ship with a sociopathic captain, and although it is half-capsized, those partying on the highest deck – the captain and his family and the leaders of the Republican Party – simply don’t care.
Given all that, is it really surprising that unemployed white men in particular are attracted to neo-Nazi hate groups that offer them comradeship and a purpose in life and access to weaponry? Considering their inadequate education and reliance on the social media for news and opinions is it any wonder that they don’t understand who really is responsible for their desperately difficult lives and instead blame Jews, blacks, immigrants and feminists?
So how are we going to fight this? How are you going to keep Britain from becoming a smaller but equally brutal and wretched version of America – with ever higher indexes of xenophobia and racism and anti-Semitism and violence?
A few recommendations: Strengthen the National Health Service. Reinforce your education system. Teach your children that a good education isn’t a luxury, it’s their right. As is health care. As is a decent job at a decent wage.
Vote against all politicians who systematically lie. Who give tax breaks to the super-wealthy. Who reveal in coded language that they despise minorities.
Denounce anyone who spouts conspiracy theories. Keep your children from falling prey to them and all hate-filled ideologies by insisting that they learn to reason and think for themselves.
Show your kids that you respect knowledge. And respect the truth.
Fight all prejudice. Stand up for Muslims and blacks and gays and Roma who are treated badly. And ask them to do the same for you.
Refuse to adopt the language of scape-goating. Speak and act compassionately. Show solidarity and empathy for refugees and everyone else who struggles to get enough food and adequate shelter. Keep in mind that except for the accident of birth, you could be one of them.
*****
To end, I want to return to the Holocaust for a moment and quote Erik Cohen, the narrator of my novel The Warsaw Anagrams. Erik doesn’t survive the Nazi genocide. But before he is killed, he speaks to his best friend about the annihilation the Jews are facing. “After the Germans lose,” he says, “they’ll want us to forget all that has happened. Remember one person – even just one! – and you will have foiled their plans.”
So part of what we are doing here today is foiling the Nazis’ plans. Be grateful for that chance. And be proud that you are here. We owe it to the dead – to the millions who were murdered in the death camps – to keep foiling the plans of the Nazis’ ideological copy-cats in contemporary Great Britain and elsewhere. Every day. In every way.
And remember: The right side of history is always the side that has a memory.
Thank you.