Never to be Silent

Most days, she sat at the entrance to the apartment building in Haifa and she smiled. It was practically a full-time occupation and she did it beautifully.

She spoke Yiddish and didn't seem to recognise any of my beginner's Hebrew. Most of the time, we let it go at "Shalom" but sometimes because her happiness was infectious, we'd talk at each other for a bit.

One evening after I got home from work, she rang my doorbell and I wondered where this was going to get us. She cheerfully bumped me aside, no harm done, neither of us being what you'd term angular. She made her way, smiling and chatting, into my living room, out on to the balcony, upped the shutter, slid it open and reached out to retrieve her bra which had obviously fallen from her washing line above mine.

I lived on the ground floor and was thereby saved the embarrassment of retrieving dropped undies from the neighbours lines, subject instead to the more dicey dash through the scrubland and olive trees where the mongooses dwelt.

As she reached outwards, the sleeve of her blouse drew up her arm a bit and on her arm I saw the camp numbers. She saw my stunned expression and I instantly reached for my face and tried to put the smile back on, making tut tut noises. Apologising, comforting.

What do I know of the Holocaust? Nothing. Unless you can reach out to a parent or a grandparent or a great-grandparent who is not there because of it, then I think perhaps you know nothing.

To sit through nine and a half hours of Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah, and learn how those who stood by and let it happen had ordinary faces like your aunties and your uncles, is not knowing. But when you take your first trip through Europe and find how quickly those countries and places materialise before you, that is closer to knowing. And when, pushing your child into the world, the learned memory comes to you of how they tied the birthing mothers' legs together and studied how long it took them to die, that is perhaps close to knowing.

In this week when the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps has been remembered, the newspapers have been showing maps of Europe. Not the happy colourful Europe of last May, with the joyful challenge of memorising the names of the 10 new states of the European Union, but instead the dark Europe with the dreadful names; Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Mauthausen.

Though the Jews demand that the Shoah stand alone, it is hard not to add the name of Darfur to the awful litany. And the ones that happened in between.

Flying home with my daughter from Israel on a gorgeous July day in 1995, I sat on the plane and knew, knew, knew, courtesy of any cable news you wished to pick, that below us in the fields outside Srebrenica, the killing and the rape and the torture had begun.

"And what did you do Mummy when that was happening?" she may well ask in time about the single greatest massacre in Europe since World War II. "I bought you a Barbie in Tel Aviv airport to get you through the flight and looked out at the clouds and hoped to God you would never ask me that question."

It gives you a new understanding of how your own parents felt when you went racing home from school to tell them about the gas and crematoriums and stopped, shocked to the core to find that they knew about it.

And indeed what do we do in our own lives to stand against the insidious jokes that render some less worthy of respect than others or the ignorant, ill-informed remarks that condone racism? And what do we do when our colleagues become dispensable and the commandants commence their dirty work and the weakening one begins to look lost and alone and the safe ones think, "it's not me, thank God" and move to widen the distance?

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation" wrote Elie Wiesel, who as a teenager survived Auschwitz, where his mother and sister perished, and Buchenwald, where his father died. "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."