The two Israeli students and the pro-Palestinian protesters.

Two fine young men, a medical students and a business student gave a talk this week at Victoria University about their experiences as soldiers in the Israeli army during the 2014 Gaza war. The Australasian Jewish Students' Society (AUJS) organized this talk, something they were entitled to do as a university student club. Nevertheless this was clearly perceived by some as a provocative gesture. In a university environment a free flowing discussion and exchange of ideas should be encouraged, but this is not how some students, and regrettably, 30 university staff saw it. They demanded that the university stop the meeting, and the university to its credit refused to do this. Then they resorted to trying to drown out the meeting with their noise and invaded the meeting. Students, young, immature, and largely ignorant of world history, recent and distant, can be excused for jumping on whatever bad-wagon happens to be passing by. Perhaps as a callow youth I might have done this myself. But scholars, respected teachers like Dougal McNeill, should have known better. How can he, with his interest in Marxism, side with a hide-bound obscurantist, ruthless, autocratic regime, influenced by bigoted Islamic theology? Without doubt, a large number of Palestinians became casualties of war in Gaza, most killed by Israeli bombs and shell fire, though some killed by the Gaza militants, and a number were killed because the Gaza authorities deliberately exposed them to danger. It is also true that the casualties were disproportional, because the Israelis refused to be drawn into ambushes in closely built up areas and used mass destruction rather than expose their troops to lethal street to street fighting. Perhaps the war was preventable. There were negotiations to try to avert the war, but at the same time Hamas kept firing rockets into Israel, hardly the sort of action that would be conducive to peaceful neighbourliness. They also dug tunnels into Israel, one that would have opened into a kindergarten so that they could abduct the children. Not surprisingly, the Israelis perceived this as an unacceptable hostile act. It is not surprising either that the Israelis get tetchy about all attempts to murder Jews. The very rationale for the existence of Israel is that murdering Jews is not acceptable, Jews will never again be unresisting victims. But the conflict has very deep roots, going back to long before the Gaza war, the Israeli occupation and all the present grievances of the Palestinians. When Jews started to settle in the land of Palestine, they brought prosperity to a previously impoverished region. Jews created a market for Jaffa oranges and both Jews and Palestinians benefited from that. They all benefited from the industries that the Jews established. Yet the Arab response to Jewish settlement was to murder Jews. While the Jews of Europe were annihilated the Mufti of Jerusalem, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs, was Hitler's honoured guest. The Arab response to the partition of Palestine was to declare war on the new Jewish state. They waged a guerilla warfare against the new state before Palestinians thought of themselves as a national entity. Living under Jordanian rule they undermined the Jordanian kingdom, but continued their enmity towards Jews. There was no occupied territory before 1967, yet there was no peace. At no time did the Palestinians accept the existence of a Jewish state within Arab and Muslim lands. They were prepared to relinquish the prospects of a peaceful prosperous life alongside a Jewish state. They embraced a nationalist, chauvinistic ideology inconsistent with Arab or Ottoman history. True, the Zionist ideology was similarly chauvinistic, but that was a response to generations of persecution and the refusal of  Christian Europe to accept Jews as equal citizens with equal rights. There was no similar pressure on the Arabs of Palestine to separate themselves from the rest of the Arab world. In fact, they saw themselves as part of that Arab world, but did what they could to destabilize it. So Dr McNeill and your fellow protesters, think about the band-wagon you jump on and learn the history behind your cause.

Maria Dronke and I

When I was at Teachers' Training College in the early 1950s I had trouble with my vowels (I still have). There is no Hungarian equivalent of the New Zealand 'e', 'a' or 'o'. New Zealand 'e' is unlike the Hungarian 'é', 'a' or 'ó'. The New Zealand vowels ar really diphthongs and their middle is flatter. So Sunny Aimie, in charge of speech and drama, sent me to the great local teacher of elocution, Maria Dronke. Sunny Aimie later became Lawrence Olivier's assistant at Old Vic, and when she returned to New Zealand, the Director of the Downstage Theatre in its great halcyon days. Maria Dronke, a German actress, whose career was cut short by the advent of Nazism, was a startling beautiful, widely educated woman and I was quite overawed by her. She was the outstanding local theater producer and eloquent performer of recitations of poetry by the most celebrated poets around. She did her best to teach me how to open my mouth, hold my tongue, utter the sounds that vaguely corresponded to New Zealand vowels. She overlaid my Hungarian accent with her German accent, and perhaps made my words more intelligible. I knew of Maria Dronke before I had met her. Her son, Peter, my contemporary, but an awful lot brighter, was my tutor in my first year English 1 at university, when I came down to Wellington from Palmerston North. He went off to Oxford and then to Cambridge where he became the foremost authority on Medieval Latin poetry. When I worked for the Oxford University Press I had the privilege of selling his book, though I don't think that I sold vast numbers in New Zealand. I also vaguely knew Maria's daughter, Marie, we moved in the same broadly left wing, socialist circles, and knew her husband Conrad Bollinger, who was one of the elder statesmen of the socialists, and a scintillating, witty companion. So my world and Maria Dronke's ever so more sophisticated world, which I greatly admired, intersected time and time again. In 1970 I opened my bookshop in Lower Hutt. I had a vision of a bookshop that would be a haven for thinking, enlightened people, a place where the people who dropped in would be surrounded by the best in contemporary literature, a magnet for like-minded people. My models were Gordon Tait in Christchurch, Bob Goodman in Auckland, to a large extent Roy Parsons in Wellington, all refined, educated men with an air of scholarship about them. Little did I realize that Bob Goodman and Gordon Tait would go broke a few years later, and that Roy Parsons would survive by becoming the foremost purveyor of classical CDs. Nor did I take into account that what migh work in Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington might be harder to make a go of in Lower Hutt, that viewed itself as a dormitory suburb of Wellington with little to offer except for jobs in the freezing works, the railway workshop, the biscuit and car factories. When I opened my bookshop there were already two bookshops in Lower Hutt: Ackroyds, once a fine bookshop that fell on hard times (for reasons I don't need to go into here) and was taken over by Whitcoulls, and a Whitcoulls shop, more interested in getting the local school stationery business than in stocking a good selection of books. I was confident that there was scope for a real bookshop that treated books with respect, not just as yet another line of assorted merchandise. And indeed, in a very short time, my shop became a haven for scientists from the Wild Life Division and the Geological Survey of the old DSIR, who foregathered in my shop at lunch time to meet each other and occasionally engage me in stimulating conversation. The shop also attracted distinguished retired academics, some of whom taught me at university. Colin Bailey, retired professor of Education came. He addressed students on their first day at university, and I remember him telling us not to hesitate writing in our books, not think that we deface them, think of how exciting it would be to find a Bible, no longer pristine, with scribbles by one Martin Luther in it. Unfortunately, the last time I saw Colin Bailey he was a pathetic shrunken little man suffering from advanced Alzheimer disease. Stuart Johnson, retired senior lecturer, or perhaps by then, associate professor of English was a regular, and so was James Bertram, urbane, gentle, a fine scholar, but better remembered as a journalist who attained fame in revolutionary China as a friend of Chou En Lai. And Maria Dronke kept dropping in. She came with a companion. By then John Dronke had passed away, her wonderful husband, a judge in pre-Nazi Germany, who abandoned his native land and his career to save his Jewish born wife by moving to New Zealand, where he eked out a living playing the double-bass in the National Orchestra, and later doing menial legal work in the Ministry of Justice. Maria Dronke that walked into my shop was not the Maria Dronkle I once knew. She looked a little unkempt, somewhat bewildered. Her once brilliant mind and forceful personality were gone. But she came often, perhaps because I remembered her and gave her the welcome that such a distinguished star deserved. I don;t remember whether she ever bought any books, but she came because she felt at home surrounded by books, a reminder of her former life, a reminder of the world that she had lost. 

Policemen

Telling my story in the context of the Holocaust I often mention something that my aunt Marta told me. When we were marched from the international ghetto to the main Budapest ghetto, some time in November 1944, my grandfather approached the policeman escorting us and said to him that my aunt, Margitka, who was handicapped, would not be able to keep up with the column. The policeman told my grandfather not to worry, and he put my aunt Margitka at the head of column, so no one could go faster than she, and we all made it safely to Dob Ucca in the ghetto. I tell this story to show that a man, who was doing a distasteful job, escorting a large group of elderly Jews and children did what he had to do, but did it with a measure of compassion and humanity. I thought of this when I read Christopher Browning's story of the Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Ordinary Men. Some of these men were career policemen, some were assigned to this unit because they were too old to be in the army fighting on the front. Some were card carrying Nazis, but most of them were neither Nazis, not anti-Semites. One claimed to be a communist. They were given a distasteful task that probably none of them wanted, and none but a very few sadists relished. They were sent from Hamburg to Poland to murder Jews, the entire Jewish population of a small town, Jozefow, 1800 people, men, women, young and old, including children. Their commanding officer, 53 year old Major Wilhelm Trapp, a career policeman, explained the order that the men of the battalion were tasked with, and gave the men the opportunity opt out if they felt unequal to the task. Only a few of the men opted out initially, although many more found after the killings started and they were faced with the victims that they could not carry on. None of them were punished for this or faced consequences. After giving the order for the massacre Major Trapp broke down and cried. He also made sure that the men who refused to take part in the killings were protected. After the Jozefow massacre the men of the battalion participated in a number of other massacres, and hunted down Jews who somehow managed to escape. The men of the battalion were just a random group, many with limited education, but not selected for any cruel, blood thirsty streak. They were just ordinary men, who happened to be from Hamburg, Germany, but could have been from anywhere. Certainly the Ukrainians who helped them with their sorry task were no better, but perhaps the US Marines at Mai Lai, or soldiers from any other place, New Zealanders, British, Israelis, Syrians, facing battle conditions and an enemy that was demonized acted in a like manner. Who is to judge? It is understanding not judgement that is needed. Major Trapp's comment after giving his order to his troops was telling. 'If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth', he said 'then have mercy on us Germans'. He always avoided being present at the shootings. Yet after the war, of all the personnel of battalion, he was the only one to be executed in Poland.

Music as propaganda

From time to time we at the Holocaust Centre get questions from students about various Holocaust related topics and these usually are sent to me for reply. Recently I had a particularly interesting, challenging questions about the Nazi's use of music for anti-Semitic propaganda. I could not think of an instance of such use of music. Wagner attributed racial characteristics to music performed by Jewish musicians and music composed by Jewish musicians, but Wagner being a spineless opportunist, his comments on Jewish music have to be taken with a huge dose of salt. He did not hesitate to make use of Jewish musicians, accept the help of Meyerbeer, let Levy conduct his music, Jews were OK when this suited him. But does music have the power to influence masses of people? If so, how? I have been greatly moved by music, and I assume that the performance of Beethoven's Ninth when the Berlin Wall fell had special emotional meaning. I cannot think, however, of any Nazi music, perhaps apart from the Horst Wessel song that made any emotional impact on a large number of people. In fact, the Nazis were not good at using music, or for that matter, the Arts, for propaganda. Compare the the way the Soviets used music for propaganda, Shostakovitch’s Fifth, and certainly the Seventh, the Leningrad Symphony, Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky and Peter the Great, Khatchaturian's Spartacus, and innumerable other great works of music with what was produced in Nazi Germany. Very little of Pfitzner or Richard Strauss composed over this period stood the test of time, perhaps with the exception of Strauss's Die schweigsame Frau and that is hardly a work in support of Nazi ideology. Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is still performed, but poor old Orff was broke, unrecognised, he desperately needed the the recognition this work attained, and musically it hardly bears of the hallmarks of Nazi world view. It came close to being deemed 'decadent' with its primitive rhythms. There is virtually no music, composed in Germany during the Nazi era that is still in the repertoire seventy years later. And similarly if we compare German literature under the Nazis and Soviet literature of the Stalinist era there are no significant books published in Germany that can compare with the great Russian books of the period: Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don, Ehrenburg's The Thaw, or Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. The great German novel about the Nazi Era was written after the war, The Tin Drum, by a young member of the Waffen SS, Gunther Grass. All totalitarian regimes are ruthless and terrible, but they are not all the same.  

How great men shaped history?

Historians are divided, were always divided, on the role of exceptional great men in the fate of nations since Karl Marx promulgated his theory of Historical Materialism, which holds that material conditions and economic factors shape the structure and development of society. American historian, Arthur Herman, is an unashamed champion of the Great Men in History school of thought. His large fascinating book Gandhi and Churchill is subtitled 'The Epic Rivalry that destroyed an Empire and Forged our Age'. Herman is a great storyteller. His book reads like a grand novel with a vast cast of characters and a tragic narrative. He also asks wide ranging questions about how the sequence of events developed. The British Empire didn't exist as imperialists like Churchill understood it until a small force of British troops imposed law and order on India in the wake of the Indian Mutiny in 1857, and they did this to maintain the commercial interests of the British East India Company. India did not exist as a state until the Moghal conquerors unified the disparate communities of the subcontinent. Churchill and Gandhi were both charismatic leader with beliefs rooted in an idealized past. Churchill believed in the role of the British Empire, inspired by parallels with the Roman Empire, of imposing law, order and peace on less sophisticated, inferior people, people with dark skins like Indians and Africans. Gandhi, though entertaining great respect for the British Empire and its institutions, viewed imperialism as materialistic, without spiritual roots. He idealized the simple peasant life, the spinning wheel, the austere diet, and prayer. He was a follower of Tolstoy, Ruskin and the English set whom Orwell described a generation later as 'sandal wearers and fruit juice drinkers'. The peace loving India of pure spiritual values had never existed. There had always been bitter divisions between castes, and religions, with untouchables at the bottom of the heap. The British Empire had never been as benign as Churchill viewed it. Both Gandhi and Churchill lived in an idealized Victorian past, and at the end of their long struggle both ended in tragic failure. By opposing all concessions to British rule Gandhi's India fell apart amidst brutal massacres, with millions of people displaced. Churchill by opposing all concessions to India when there was still some scope for negotiation lived to see the ceding of the Indian subcontinent to ruthless opposing factions and the disintegration of the British Empire that he had held dear. Arthur Herman tells this story in the context of world history, the Boer War, the First World War, appeasement, the fight against Nazism and Japanese imperialism and the decline of Great Britain as a world power. This is historical narrative at its best.