Dominick Chilcott

Holocaust Memorial Day

The United Nations has designated 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red army, as an annual International Day of Commemoration to honour victims of the Holocaust.

One purpose of this day is to remember the past and honour the victims. A second and related objective is to encourage all countries to ensure that the Holocaust is known about and understood in our present time. And this leads, in turn, to a third purpose, by keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, we and future generations should be more on our guard against allowing circumstances to arise in which such terrible events are repeated.

The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has put it this way, "Holocaust Memorial Day communicates our conviction that the politics of hate will not triumph, and it symbolises our resolve to safeguard the future by understanding the past".

In the UK, we have held our own national event, Holocaust Memorial Day, every year since 2001. This year's commemoration took place in Coventry, a city heavily bombed in the Second World War, and had as its theme the exhortation "Stand Up to Hatred".

Learning about the Holocaust is a compulsory part of the national curriculum in the UK. It is taught not just in history lessons but as part of the English literature course, citizenship studies and religious education. As you would expect a responsible multi-ethnic, multi-cultural country like Britain to be, we are serious about learning these lessons from history.

In Washington, I attended a remembrance event at the Holocaust Museum during which we were addressed by a survivor who told us about her experiences during the war and her present work at the museum. As ever, when one hears a survivor tell his or her story, it was deeply moving. I felt shock at the first hand account of persecution and admiration for her indomitable spirit and calmness.

This week, I am hosting, with my Czech colleague, a reception to launch the English translation of a book about Sir Nicholas Winton ('Nicholas Winton's Lottery of Life' by Matej Minac, translated by Peter Rafaeli). Winton was a young British man who went to Prague in the months before war broke out in order to provide humanitarian relief to refugees. He quickly decided the priority was to get Jews out of the range of Nazi persecution. In eight months, he managed to get 669 Jewish children to safety.

Winton did not advertise what he had done. It came to light only in 1988, when his wife found a scrapbook in the attic, full of names, photos and letters from the parents of the children. When asked why he had kept his rescue activities quiet, Winton said that he didn't think he had done anything extraordinary.

The five thousand people who are today descended from the original 669 children might beg to differ.

In September 2007, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution honouring Sir Nicholas Winton in which they hit the nail on the head. They urged men and women everywhere to recognise 'in Winton's remarkable humanitarian effort the difference that one devoted, principled individual can make in changing and improving the lives of others'.

Let us leave the last word to Winton himself. In a letter written in 1939 he said the following. "There is a difference between passive goodness and active goodness. The latter is, in my opinion, the giving of one's time and energy in the alleviation of pain and suffering. It entails going out, finding and helping those who are suffering and in danger, and not merely leading an exemplary life, in a purely passive way of doing no wrong."

That's not a bad lesson to take away in the week we commemorate the Holocaust.

Posted at 13:07 30 January 2009 by Dominick Chilcott  |  Comments[1]

My inauguration day

Although millions of people around the world and on the National Mall watched President Obama's inauguration, it was also an intensely individual and personal experience. Everyone who was there will have some kind of story to tell of the day they saw history being made. Here's mine.
 
I left my house in north west DC to walk to the National Mall at 08h30. That was a bit casual. Most of my friends and colleagues were already there by then. In my pocket was a ticket for the blue zone, a gift from a generous Congressman. 
 
The city had changed character for the better that morning; very unusually, there were lots of pedestrians and almost no cars. Everyone was walking in the same direction with the same purposeful stride. It was freezing cold. Underneath thick cord trousers, I wore long-johns and under my top coat I had on a blazer, short-sleeved jumper, thick cotton shirt and a thick cotton T-shirt. A wooly hat, gloves and a shnoo (is that the right word for a circular scarf?) completed the inauguration look. Despite all those layers, I was still grateful to pass a waiter, outside a Starbucks, handing out free cups of something red and hot (which was very welcome but sadly not mulled wine).

Soon the tributaries of people converged into streams and then rivers of well wrapped folk of all colours and varieties. At one point,  I became surrounded by tall men, sporting fezzes and jackets with the baffling slogan 'Moorish Gatekeepers for Obama'.  The crowd was already pretty big and making one's way through so many people was tricky. But it was all very good humoured. Eventually, I got to the right place and found a very long queue for blue ticket holders wrapped around a massive, concrete office building. I joined the back of the queue and waited. It was about 10h10.

As one does, I began chatting to the couple next to me in the queue. She was a state senator from Arizona and he was a public official. Lifelong Democrats, they were making the 4,000 mile round trip to celebrate an historic day. And there were plenty more, like them, who had travelled immense distances. Which made it all the more disappointing that the blue zone queue was moving so slowly. The official music programme began at 10h30. We could just about hear the military band from where we stood, bent almost double against the biting wind, conscious of the minutes ticking past. The delay appeared to be caused by the time taken to screen people at the security checkpoint. With about 20 minutes to go before the inauguration proper, people began to lose patience and queue discipline evaporated. I managed to get into the wide end of a V shaped wedge of people, moving forward towards the blue zone gate at a glacier-like speed.

The press of people meant it was difficult to go backwards and impossible to go forwards through the crowd. There were thousands of us blue ticket holders, many of whom had travelled huge distances to witness the inauguration, and where we? Stuck in a mass of people, tantalisingly close to the National Mall but out of sight of it and the action. The crowd began to chant 'Let us in' but without much expectation that anyone would. Some wag, echoing Reagan's appeal to Gorbachev, called out 'Mr President, tear down this gate'. By now the inauguration had started. We knew this because someone behind me had a portable radio. Was that Aretha Franklin singing 'My country 'tis of thee'?

Just after 12 noon, we heard the sound of gun fire and cheering. That meant President Obama had sworn the oath. This apparently prompted the police to decide that enough was enough and close the gate into the blue zone. That wasn't a good moment. A small African-American boy, pushing his mother in a wheel-chair, had tears of frustration rolling down his cheeks. There were plenty of fed up faces, though no real anger. The discipline and stoicism of the crowd was remarkable.

Then we had a stroke of luck. The police removed one of the barriers that had been hemming us in and we spilled out to one side, in the direction of the National Mall. And when we came to the road in front of the park, we saw signs of a people's revolution. The security checkpoints had been abandoned. The waist high fences had been tramped underfoot. It was possible to walk anywhere and everywhere. So I made my way into the crowd as Obama began his speech. I had a clear, if somewhat distant, view of the Capitol building and could just about make out where Obama must have been standing. The sun was out. The capitol looked resplendent, draped in huge flags. And the mostly silent huge crowd stood still, listening to their new president's words.

It was a rather strange Narnia wardrobe-like experience, going suddenly from a confined, shaded press of frustrated folk, seeing nothing and hearing little, to this wide, sunlit expanse of enrapt people, focussed on one man, some distance off, but clearly audible through the array of speakers, telling us that we had to put away childish things and become more responsible. It felt almost as if one were dreaming. 
 
President Obama's speech was definitely the best attended inauguration speech in America's history. And actually, it was quite hard to concentrate on the words of the speech when the significance of the occasion was so massive. Afterwards, I found it quite hard to remember what the president had actually said. I needed to read the text.

If getting down to the National Mall was difficult, it was far worse making one's way back. But despite the hopelessly inadequate checkpoints, the abject failure of the authorities to manage the movement of so many people, despite the long and pointless queues, the bitter cold, the interminable waiting and all the associated frustrations, it was worth it.

It was worth being there to see Barack Obama become president. He showed Americans how far they have come from the days of slavery (begun during the colonial period), the civil war and the civil rights movement.  His election constituted unaswerable proof that Lincoln's vision of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people had not indeed perished from the earth but was more real than ever before.
 
One of the phenomenal aspects about President Obama is that the whole world, not just Americans, feels we own a bit of him.  He is someone with grandparents who still live in a Kenyan village, with an Indonesian-American half-sister married to a Chinese-Canadian and with Christians and Muslims in his immediate family. His very being seems to symbolise the diversity of mankind in a globalised age. He really does make us dare to hope for a better world.

Later that evening, my wife and I had dinner with American friends in DC. Among the guests were two New Zealanders who had also had tickets for the blue zone. They had got to the queue for the gate at about 08h00 but had nonetheless failed to make it past the security checkpoint and onto the National Mall in time. They must have been in the same press of people as me. But like the rest of us that evening, as they told their inauguration tale, they were smiling broadly.

Posted at 15:34 23 January 2009 by Dominick Chilcott  |  Comments[0]