Into February

This blog is  mostly about inequality and prejudice.  Holocaust Day has just passed.  My life has been studded with important relationships, family and friends, with extraordinary Jewish people, so (and especially at a time when denial is in the air) it is a powerful moment.  I was also privileged to do some work recognising the forgotten gay victims of the Holocaust with the National Holocaust Centre in Notts before I retired, so there are many links here for me.  Then, this weekend Marcus Rashford has been inexcusably racially abused (by so-called football fans)  And now LGBTQ+ month is starting.

So it was a telling coincidence that I had just finished reading House of Glass: the story and secrets of a 20th century Jewish family, by Hadley Freeman.  Reading is slow going just now when other tasks take twice as long one-handed, but this was a gripping book.   It had many personal resonances to people who have been important and still are to me, with links to Europe and the USA.  Hadley Freeman is a talented journalist who makes frequent connections between the biographies and story she is telling and the social, political and cultural settings her family inhabited across mid-century Poland and linking to our current life in France, with some moments typical of the worst of the Holocaust, descriptions of the deep ambivalence in France to Jews, with entrenched antisemitism on the one hand and courageous kindness on the other.  25 years ago Mary and I paid a memorable and moving visit to Sachsenhausen, one of the first German concentration camps just outside Berlin.

Friends here in France have close links to the precarious lives of Jewish people in Vichy France, also central to episodes in the book.  Freeman writes of her search for traces of her ancestors, travelling to places like Pithiviers  south of Paris, where there had been an internment camp for Jews in transit to Auschwitz.  But when she visited "it turned out we were making a pilgrimage to nowhere: if it weren’t for a stone memorial, its former location would look like just another French suburban street. All signs of the French concentration camp had vanished, hastily erased after the war when France tried to pretend that what had happened had not."  Later things changed - "the long-abandoned Pithiviers train station, where the Jews arrived before being taken to the camp, would be turned into a museum about the French deportations. France’s attitude towards its past is, at last, starting to evolve."  And one of her relatives escaped the Nazis during the war and had better luck, being housed and concealed in the sparsely populated countryside of the Massif Central we have often visited.  Here's the Financial Times review .

Before this I'd just finished another family saga, Kiss myself goodbye by Ferdinand Mount.  An outrageous tale, told like that of the Glass family with an investigator's relish, always another surprise round the corner.  But while the Jewish Glass and Freeman families probably had good reason to conceal their identities, the stories Mount tells of deception and concealment are scarcely credible.

Things are quiet here chez nous in Lunel to match the current grey, still weather, with these seemingly interminable restrictions compounded by the uncertainties of an epidemic we don't yet fully understand on the one hand and the logistics of vaccine delays and so on on the other.  Patience is vital with this as it is for the slow but steady healing of my broken arm, so of course there are some tense moments but on the whole things seem positive - physiotherapy on the arm seems to be helping.  On another pain front, sciatica, I was signed off with a new TENS machine from the pain clinic yesterday, and the combination of that and painkillers seems to be working well.  At times over the past month I've felt as if the two conditions were fighting like squabbling children for attention!

To end today, a couple of topical or lighthearted things found in newspapers

(talking of better manners in football)

The state of mind of French people [maybe in other countries too]:

 “I first met your grandpa in a place with tables, glasses and plates…”

“A restaurant?”

“oh, you know about them?”