Last year, I read “Hanns and Rudolf” by Thomas Harding.  It is a parallel lives story of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and Hanns Alexander, the German Jew who fled to Britain and ultimately tracked down Höss.  It is, as the reviews said, a remarkable book, although one of the most chilling that I have ever read.  The descriptions of what happened at Aushwitz (and the accompanying statistics) are always shocking, but were not new to me when I read this.  The really chilling aspect was that, in reading the story of Rudolf Höss from his birth to his death, I found myself faced with a real person.  He was no longer a monster beyond all understanding.  As I read, his life unfolded step by step and I realised that I was beginning to understand something of how he came to do the things that he did.  Once you understand something it is much easier to see how it could happen again.  When what you have understood is an integral part of the Holocaust, that is about as chilling as it can get.

The Archbishop of Canterbury said after his recent visit to Auschwitz, “People did this to people.”  My own visit to Auschwitz is something that I’ll never forget.  Exactly where the Holocaust started is something that will always be debated.  However, it seems clear to me that one of the early and significant steps was laying the blame for a country’s problems on particular groups of people, groups that were heavily represented within that country’s population.  The hate then spread worryingly quickly within a civilised country and then to its civilised neighbours.  So, when a holocaust survivor tells us that we all need to be very careful about any hate-propaganda, we need everyone to listen.