An insight into horror
Friday, January 26th, 2007
When I was a small boy I went into a shop with my mother. It was a hot summer’s day and the shop assistant had rolled up his sleeves. There tattooed on his arm, in blue, was a set of numbers. I was transfixed.
Once outside, I pressed my mother as to why he had these numbers. The replies to my increasingly urgent questions came with some care and deliberation, but I established in the end that he was Polish, Jewish and had been given the numbers whilst he was in a concentration camp. I was horrified – I thought it only happened to cattle – why were Jewish people put into camps? You can imagine the flow of questions. That night I could barely sleep. What I saw has stayed with me to this day, and I still think about it.
Tomorrow it is Holocaust Memorial Day. The qualitative scale of what was done to Jewish people is a unique chapter of ghastliness that we must never forget. I, for one, having experienced that incident, never ever will.