This Much Is True

The insularity of some Jewish communities, of course, is a reaction to our people being destroyed. Christians are under threat in many places, I know that, but they haven’t been under threat in the way that the Jews were. Jewish people have always felt that others wanted us dead and ‘disappeared’. Why Hitler, in particular, wanted that I don’t know. And millions joined him in his crusade to eradicate Jews from Europe. Like most Jews, my family lost relatives in the Holocaust. It’s something I cannot forget, it’s there all the time. People were murdered in their millions because they were Jews, and you can’t ‘get over’ that: you can’t forget it. It has been a shadow across my entire life, and I think nearly all Jews would say that. Every time I go in a train, every time I have a shower… I think about those people, and I am torn with horror and rage and pity for them.

When we were filming Yentl, Barbra Streisand arranged a coach trip to Theresienstadt. It was the most sobering and overwhelming experience. Theresienstadt had been a concentration camp, not an extermination camp. It looked like an out-of-season caravan park: a memorial to the banality of evil. There was nothing there that could alarm you or make you realise how people suffered there. In fact, I later found out that some of my relatives had died there.

Much, much later on, about five years ago, I went to Auschwitz. It made me extremely angry and feel helpless at the same time. Of course, like Theresienstadt, the long barracks, where people were so cruelly housed, were all cleaned, but the manifold tragedies that had occurred there weigh on you. It was a hateful place. It left me feeling as if I didn’t want to laugh ever again. There are collections of hundreds of thousands of suitcases and umbrellas, and shoes — millions of pairs of shoes — behind windows, and you realise that each is a skeleton of a person: a human being wore those shoes and carried that case and that umbrella, and within hours of arriving at Auschwitz, they were just ashes. It was an efficient death factory.

It had also been made into a tourist destination. People were eating ice creams and looking at the death chambers, walking around taking snapshots of each other. ‘There’s no business like Shoah-business,’ as they say. I wanted to scream at them, ‘My cousins died here. How would you like that?’ It is as if the horror of what happened doesn’t sink into people, they try not to see it, but they must: that’s why it’s there — for us to be aware, and not let it happen again. This is what can result when some people become ‘less important’, when it’s frighteningly easy to take life away.

Neither Hitler, nor the many previous centuries of pogroms, succeeded in our eradication, however, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m so outspoken. I push being Jewish down people’s throats; it’s my way of saying: ‘Hitler didn’t win, I’m still here and I’m still saying I’m a Jew, so you can’t ignore me. I’m here.’ I can’t let it be. Why should I let it be when, in my lifetime, six million people were murdered, because of it? How can I hide my head and duck down behind the parapet?

So much energy has been focused on the concept of Israel, the return to Zion, the ‘Homeland’; and when people are trying to destroy you — and not just trying but succeeding in destroying you — you cling on to the chance of life and hope, and a continuation of the family and the people and the nation. But when the Zionists reclaimed Israel, they didn’t take into account the Palestinians who were already living there. What were they supposed to do? Were they supposed to disappear? That’s where, as a people, we Jews fell down, and where Hitler won. He changed us from being a compassionate nation into a destructive, uncaring and inhumane one. The tragedy of the Palestinians is just as much the tragedy of the Jews.

Choosing My Side

Since I met the Hodgkin family, I’ve always been political — now more than ever. I thought I was a middle-of-the-roader, but I veer towards the left. Since Brexit, politics consume me; I never thought that I would feel so alienated from my own people, from my country.

We have now in power a government, chosen by a relatively small number of people, of almost unparalleled incompetence, whose probity is in doubt, whose lack of diligence has killed thousands of people, and whose majority in Parliament prevents their being held to account.

Like Alastair Campbell, in his recent article in the New European, I am puzzled by the lack of rage in the country. Racial prejudice fuelled the Brexit blindness. And my heart bleeds for Britain, particularly for the young. We are part of Europe; the knaves who bamboozled the nation into thinking otherwise will deserve the damning verdict of history, but I won’t be there to see it. This is truly Scoundrel Time.