22 Europe The EconomistAugust 24th 2019
T
erezin is anold garrison town in today’s Czech Republic that
was used by the Nazis as a Jewish ghetto during the second
world war. Some 33,000 Jews died in Theresienstadt, as it is known
in German, and over twice that number were transported from
there to death in extermination camps further east. Today it is an
eerie site: part town and part ghost-town, walls speckled with
commemorative plaques, train tracks overgrown. The ghetto mu-
seum contains drawings by children who were imprisoned there.
One by Arnost Jilovsky, born in 1931, depicts a wire fence with
wheeling birds and fluffy clouds beyond. Doris Weiserova, one
year younger, sketched butterflies fluttering through a flowery
meadow. Both died in October 1944 in Auschwitz.
The literary immortalisation of Terezin’s strange atmosphere
came in 2001 with the novel “Austerlitz”. Written by WG Sebald, a
German author, it recounts the narrator’s sporadic encounters
with Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian whose Welsh
foster parents concealed his true origins as one of the Jewish chil-
dren evacuated to Britain under the Kindertransport initiative.
Having for decades avoided 20th-century history, Austerlitz even-
tually traces his story back to Terezin, where his mother was in-
terned before being killed. In the ghetto museum he finally comes
to terms with the facts of the Holocaust. Pacing the streets outside,
he particularly notices “the gates and doorways... all of them ob-
structing access to a darkness never yet penetrated.”
Like many European countries, the Czech Republic contains
myriad historical markers documenting the evil of anti-Semitism.
One is a memorial in Prague’s main station dedicated in 2017 by
children of the Kindertransport to their murdered parents. Re-
minders of the lessons of history are plentiful for those willing to
learn. Yet a report last month by the Federation of Jewish Commu-
nities revealed a 189% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the
Czech Republic between 2015 and 2018. Returning from Terezin to
Prague, Charlemagne noticed a fresh crack on the Kindertransport
memorial. Someone had recently taken a hammer to it.
A poll by the European Union of 16,000 Jews in 12 member
states found that 89% thought anti-Semitism had risen in the past
five years, and that one in three had experienced harassment in the
past year. Sometimes resurgent anti-Semitism is violent andproud,aswith the beating with a belt of two men wearing skull-
caps in Berlin last spring. Elsewhere it wears a mask of false inno-
cence. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, maintains excel-
lent relations with his Israeli counterpart Binyamin
Netanyahu—yet he employs anti-Semitic themes in propaganda
against George Soros, a Hungarian-born liberal philanthropist.
The leaders of Britain’s Labour Party have for years tolerated anti-
Semitism in the ranks. All this in a continent awash with memori-
als of what happens when one turns a blind eye to bigotry.
There are two possible conclusions to draw. One is that Eu-
rope’s commemorations of the Holocaust simply need to be bigger.
But ten minutes by cab from the site of last year’s belt-beating in
Berlin is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a sea of
gravestone-like pillars taking up an entire city block. If promi-
nence were the key, this should curb the attacks. The more awk-
ward conclusion is that memorials are not enough—that, read
wrongly, they can imply that anti-Semitism belongs only to the
past, and engender complacency about the present. Mr Orban can
point to the cluster of iron shoes near the Hungarian parliament,
marking the shooting of Jews there by fascists in 1944 and 1945, as
proof that his country takes history seriously. Meanwhile, the
opening of Budapest’s newest Holocaust museum was delayed for
years over complaints that it downplayed Hungarian collabora-
tion with the Nazis.
Formal events and sites marking the Holocaust and other acts
of anti-Semitism are of course essential and moving. Terezin is
one of many examples. But the lessons to which they bear testa-
ment cannot just be compartmentalised as acts of penance sepa-
rate from everyday life. They must somehow impose themselves
outside of commemorative events and memorials. They must in-
vade the comfortable consciousness of ordinary citizens.Remembering, not just remembrance
A survey by Comres and cnnlast September found that 34% of
Europeans said they had heard little or nothing of the Holocaust.
Education and explanation are understandably at the heart of the
European Jewish Congress’s recently published action plan to
tackle anti-Semitism. It proposes a clearer definition of the phe-
nomenon, new guidelines for schools and more funding for teach-
ing and researching the Holocaust. But that will be an uphill strug-
gle. Ignorance and indifference are laying fresh tracks on which
anti-Semitic hatred can travel.
How to derail the train? Law enforcement must crack down sys-
tematically on anti-Semitic crimes. Leaders must shun politicians
who blur the boundaries between mainstream politics and anti-
Semitic filth. Educators and civil-society organisations must
spread the lessons of the past. All must play their part in bridging
the divide between memorials and everyday life. “Only when the
generation that survived the war is no longer with us,” said Angela
Merkel last year, “will we discover if we have learned from history.”
Sebald’s novel should act as inspiration. Austerlitz’s trip to Te-
rezin, to his first reckoning with his past after decades of denial, is
prompted by the resonances of the oppressive violence of the past
in the buildings he encounters on his travels. He is particularly ob-
sessed with Europe’s great train stations: places of happiness, but
also silent witnesses to exploitation and oppression, to soldiers
marching off to war, to exile and deportation. In Sebald’s Europe
the past cannot merely be contained by designated places of mem-
ory. It seethes and writhes insistently, barely below the surface of
everyday life. To learn the lessons, that surface must be broken. 7Charlemagne Ghosts of Terezin
It will take more than Holocaust memorials to curb anti-Semitism in Europe