MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
BEFORE adjourning for the Christmas holiday the House of Commons made a most unusual demonstration. In reply to a question by Mr. Silverman, the Foreign Secretary had read in solemn tones the declaration agreed to by the United Nations con- demning the extermination of the Jews in Europe. Most Members had already read the official report circulated by the Polish Govern- ment, and many of them, a few days before, had been present in a Committee Room when further details had been given from authori- tative sources. The House was already aware that this was no mere formal pronouncement, no artificial gesture of propaganda, but a joint movement of indignant protest, fortified by unquestioned evidence and motived by the elementary principles of humanity. The occasion would in any case have been impressive, but what moved the House to a higher level of indignant sympathy were a few words spoken by Mr. James de Rothschild, the Member for the Isle of Ely. One of the most sinister of all the horrors of war is that it numbs sensibility and satiates conscience: immediate suffering is so apparent that imagination winces away from sufferings which are more remote ; distant atrocities are apt to arouse little more than a detached regret. Mr. de Rothschild has for many years been a popular and highly respected champion of the Liberal Party; in his comments and criticisms he displays generally the slightly aloof balance of a man of the world ; he represents the intellectual element. The few improvised words which he uttered that morning were doubly effective. The passionate emotion which he displayed startled the House into alert attention, and his reminder that " but for the grace of God " many of our own Jewish citizens might be suffering equal torture drove home the point that these great miseries were being inflicted upon people similar to those whom, in our own daily lives, we know ourselves.
* * * * The demonstration which followed was spontaneous and fitting. The whole House stood silently for a moment as if at prayer. Such a scene has not been witnessed within the memory of man, nor is it possible to dismiss it as a mere gesture of defiance 'designed to excuse or to conceal our practical impotence. It was more than that. It was a startling and unrehearsed affirmation of principle ; it was a pledge of intention. To our Jewish comrades it brought solace and encouragement ; to their persecutors, however much they may deride it, it will cause a certain uneasiness. It will oblige our Government to act with generosity towards such refugees as we may still be able to rescue and receive ; it will go far to dispel the froth of anti-semitism which always gathers on disturbed or poisoned waters ; and above all it reminds us of the true proportions of those principles for which we fight. For if " democracy " be a word so thumbed in the market-place that it has lost its image and super- scription ; if "liberty " be a term so ill-defined as to have but a blurred appeal ; there can be no doubt, no doubt at all, that " cruelty " is the greatest of all our enemies, and that in fighting cruelty we are, without thought of the past and without fear of the future, united in an ardent cause. It is thus necessary that we should examine this present cruelty, not with the aim of arousing hatred, but with the calm purpose of redressing a great wrong. Hitler has already laid down the axiom that a lie has only to be a huge lie in order to gain credence ; it would seem that to this he has added another axiom of conduct, which is the reverse of the former ; namely, that an act of cruelty, if huge enough, will never be believed. It is the calculated magnitude of his present cruelty which arouses scepticism. * * * *
Of the facts published by the Polish Government there can be no doubt whatever. In October, 1940, the Germans interned 433,000 Warsaw Jews in a special area or ghetto which they sur- rounded with a high wall. In March, 1941, Himmler visited Poland and decreed that 5o per cent. of the Polish Jews should be exterminated before the end of 1942. Massacres had already taken place at Vilna, Tarnopol and Cl-iohn. After Hinunler's visit the systematic extermination of the ghetto Jews was planned with bureau- cratic efficiency. On July 22nd, 1942, an order was issued for " the trans-settlement of the Jewish population of Warsaw," which provided that no fewer than 6,000 persons should be deported every day. Skilled workers were retained, but the remaining Jews were taken away in batches and packed into goods trucks, 120 people being crushed into trucks with room only for 4o. They were then taken to the execution camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, where they were stripped Ind murdered. By September 1st some 250,000 people had been deported. " For the month of September," runs the Polish report, " 120,000 ration cards were printed, for October only 40,000." In order to assist them in this mass murder the Germans have enrolled into execution squads the scum of the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine. These bands are called junaks and are able by indiscriminate murder to speed up the work of the more slowly moving bureaucratic machine. The details of these atrocities need not be mentioned, but the main facts are clear. They are these. In order to assuage his insane hatred of the Jewish people Hitler, with Himmler as his main agent, has carried out the murder of some 250,000 men, women and children in cold blood. He can plead no military necessity ; he can place no responsibility upon some sudden blood-lust among his troops ; in the whole of recorded history there has never been a massacre so needless, so scientific, so enormous, or so deliberate.
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I am glad that the effect of these revelations upon the House of Commons should have provoked a demonstration as unusual as it was solemn. It is true that by shouting and shaking our fisis from the other side of the wall we may only provoke our enemies to derisive laughter. It is true also that any threats which we may make, any statements of retribution, are unlikely to reach the ears of the junaks or arouse the apprehensions or consciences of their employers. Hitler himself is impervious to Christian feeling. He has himself repudiated " the Jewish Christ-creed with its effeminate pity-ethics " even as he has proclaimed " One is either a German of a Christian. One cannot be both." I have little hope that anything which is, done or said in Great Britain or the United States is likely to affect either the assassins or their leaders. Yet the German people as a whole do not, and will never, approve of such extreme cruelty and even in a dictatorship public opinion is of some account. It is by no means impossible, by informing the German people of what has happened at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor to associate such names with an uneasy feeling of shame. They will not believe it at first; but if we apply constant repetition, a pattern of doubt and questioning can be created ; and stories will drift back from Eastern Europe which will suggest to them that something horrible and degrading has in fact occurred. We can at the same time revise our obstinate policy in regard to refugees and inform neutral Governments that we shall be willing, in view of these events, to relieve them of some at least of the refugees who are fleeing from Hitlerism. Such are the positive steps which we can take. They are not much : but they are something.
* * * * Nor can the pity and terror aroused by these events fail to purify our own resolve and conduct. It may help us to approach the Palestinian problem with greater energy, imagination and unselfishness. It will certainly teach us to treat our Jewish fellow- citizens with deeper sympathy and to condemn all anti-semitic whisperings as ungenerous and uncivilised. And it will remind us that there are certain basic principles of humanity, which have nothing whatsoever to do with race or creed or class ; in regard to which we, the great peoples of the Anglo-Saxon stock, have reached a very high degree of consciousness and conscience ; in defence of which during these three sad years of struggle we have endured much tribulation ; and in the triumph of which assuredly we shall render impossible the recurrence throughout the earth of such shameful catacombs as those of Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.
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