Neutrality was a doctrine of moral bankruptcy, but other states must also share the blame, writes MICHAEL O'LOUGHLIN
‘WE SHOULD no longer be in denial that, in the context of the Holocaust, Irish neutrality was a principle of moral bankruptcy.”
So said Minister for Justice Alan Shatter at the opening of a moving and illuminating exhibition on the Shoah in Europe in his department last week, in the run-up to Holocaust Memorial Day yesterday.
I was not the only member of the audience who was stunned by this dangerously simplistic approach to European history and the significance of the Holocaust.
We may well accept that neutrality was a doctrine of moral bankruptcy. But in this Ireland was certainly not alone.
Living in the Netherlands in the 1980s, I regularly had to put up with taunts about Ireland’s neutrality. As I am not particularly in favour of Irish war-time neutrality (with many members of my family having served in the British forces), I found it hard to defend.
However, as I came to learn more about Dutch history and the Netherlands’ behaviour before and during the war, I was able to make the riposte: the Netherlands was neutral too.
The Netherlands tried desperately to maintain its neutrality until the day it was invaded by its neighbour.
Certainly, as the Minister rightly pointed out, Ireland behaved disgracefully in its treatment of refugees, both before and after the war. But what about, say, the Netherlands?
After the infamous Kristallnacht on November 9th, 1938, many German Jews saw the writing on the wall and tried to flee. The Netherlands, desperate to maintain good relations with Germany, reacted by closing its borders, declaring Jewish refugees undesirable aliens, and building a huge camp to house them, conveniently located near the German border. This camp, Westerbork, was gratefully taken over by the occupying Germans, who used it as a holding and transit camp for sending Jews from the Netherlands east to the death camps.
About 107,000 Jews, including many members of my wife’s family, as well as Roma and communists, passed through the camp en route to their deaths in Auschwitz, Sobibor and Bergen-Belsen. All with the co-operation of the Dutch police.
To be fair, there were a great many individuals who acted bravely and morally.
As the great Dutch poet Roland Holst pointed out, the Netherlands went some way towards redeeming itself on February 25th, 1941, when the Dutch Communist Party led a strike by dockworkers in protest at the rounding up of Amsterdam’s Jews. It was brutally suppressed.
Incredibly, this is one of the very few instances of organised mass resistance to the deportation of Jews by any European country. This is in itself a remarkable fact.
“Moral bankruptcy” was therefore not just an Irish failing, but also shared with the Dutch, the French, the Polish and the Baltic states, all of whose disgraceful treatment of their Jewish populations, both during and after the war, is now well documented.
In fact, it is hard to find a single country which saved itself from moral bankruptcy by declaring war on Germany in order to save its Jews from the Holocaust.
Unfortunately, there is no doubt that Holocaust education is particularly important in Ireland.
For one thing, it is hard to deny that a certain low-grade anti-Semitism seems to still exist in pockets of Irish society. But that cannot be counteracted by simplifying what is a very complex historical phenomenon, which in a way lies at the heart of the postwar European project.
In countries like Poland and the Baltic states, the wounds of history are still raw, as they seek to establish narratives of their own past which deal with degrees of collaboration with and resistance to Nazism and communism.
Given the choice, some Jews understandably chose the Soviet side as being preferable to the Nazis. The people they fought against, Nazi collaborators, are now in some cases being rehabilitated as nationalist heroes. In this minefield of conflicting loyalties and narratives, the Holocaust and its aftermath is still problematic.
As the late historian Tony Judt, pointed out, the Holocaust has, for better or worse, acquired a significance in Europe which goes beyond the experiences of the individual groups who were its victims, or indeed perpetrators.
As he puts it in his magisterial Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945: "Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket."
To become truly European, we need to be profoundly aware of the barbarism which the new postwar Europe was born out of, and its roots in authoritarianism and nationalism.
And we need to be constantly on guard for its resurgence. We are currently seeing an example of this in Hungary under Viktor Orban, whose Fidesz party is in alliance with the far right, neo-Nazi Jobbik movement.
Fidesz, interestingly enough, is a sister party of Fine Gael in the European People’s Party.
Perhaps, in the spirit of Holocaust remembrance, the Minister might devote his next speech to that subject?
Michael O’Loughlin is a critic and poet