‘What can we learn from the Holocaust?’

I have experienced a lot and managed to reach an advanced age. Written books, newspaper articles, and lectured for over 30 years. What I have always wanted to say, and still do, is: learn from others’ and my experiences. It is a difficult art, but it is the only way to be spared the pain that we were subjected to during the Holocaust.

A German countess, daughter of the Spanish ambassador whose home was a meeting place for Hitler’s opponents, said in 1948 that the world has learned nothing from either the murderers, the victims, or the onlookers. Our time is like a dance with death, and few are those who understand its strange rhythm.

The words ring true today more than ever. But we must never accept this or allow ourselves to become comfortable with it. We must not give up the fight, we must continue to spread knowledge, to help new generations grasp the rhythm, and thereby avoid the mistakes of older generations.

What is the rhythm? Charismatic leaders exploit the people’s discontent with present circumstances. They offer simple answers to complex questions, and a utopian future of eternal happiness. These false prophets sound so convincing that it is easy to become ensnared. Only far later does one notice that these promises came at a price. No hopes were fulfilled, and you lost both your freedom and your home. That which you felt discontented with at the beginning becomes something you now look back on with longing. The Germans exchanged the Weimar Republic for Hitler’s thousand-year dream, which led to ruin. Going back to 1914, we see how both German and French young men marched into war rapturously, only to, after four years in a ruined Europe, say with remorse, ‘No more war’. And today, we are once again discontented with the state of things — where will it lead us? Where and when did it really begin?

When we look backwards, back to the dawn of history, we see how times of violent wars have been followed by a calm, bright period, only to soon darken again and end in another war. Where can we find the origin of this pattern?

I think it began when there was first reason to use the concepts ‘us’ and ‘them’. And with that, we move back to primitive man who formed the first farming communities. Families lived separately, without contact with each other, and as they grew and felt a need for more space, they lifted their gaze to the neighbouring community. By conquering ‘their’ land, ‘we’ had space to breathe, and there was a period of calm before society grew once again. Man is selfish by nature — first there is ‘me’, then there is ‘us’, and the others are ‘they’, the foreign, those we do not know, those who do not concern us.

The years went by, the population of the earth increased, and while the human brain developed, our behaviour remained the same. With time, the increasing demand for living space gave birth to colonialism; it expanded ever more. To ease the conscience of the white, theories of race began to spread, taking Darwin’s findings among animals as their model.

What have I learnt that I want to pass on? First and foremost, that all human beings are alike. This I learnt the hard way, through experience.

When I was a child, it was natural that there were gentlefolk and servants. We were not rich, but there was always a maid who carried out the housework. She got up early in the morning to make a fire, so that we would not have to be cold at breakfast. I still remember the ice flowers on the window that slowly melted while the servant girl dressed me with gentle hands. I too made use of her, even though I had already become a teenager. It was the time in the camps that taught me that this had been wrong, and that we must never let it happen again. No one should have power over another, neither money nor ethnicity must be a reason to treat someone badly.

During previous centuries, some have acquired more land, and thereby more power. The powerful subdued the poor and the weak, and as a result people were sorted into categories of better and lesser. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the misconception began to spread that humanity could be divided into different races. It turned into prejudices that still remain today. Prejudices are difficult to fight — man’s inborn egotism means that we all want to feel like the best, better than others. There were many Swedes who were proud to count themselves among the Aryans when Hitler claimed that the Nordic-Germanic race was better than all the others.

Jews and Roma are two groups who have been targeted by prejudice since the beginning of time. Growing up, I had to live with prejudices against us Jews, and at the same time it was natural to me that Roma were inferior to us. It would be a long time before I came to recognise my own prejudice. By then I was already in Sweden, living in Dalarna, and had three little children.

One day, my two-year-old went missing, and no matter how hard I looked I could not find him. I became very worried, and went over to the neighbour who said, ‘There was a band of gypsies that passed through, perhaps they took him.’ I could not help believing her. Only when the child appeared from out of a blackcurrant bush did I understand that it was the old prejudice that was stirring up trouble when I took the neighbour’s words seriously.

It is important to recognise one’s own bias. One way is to, as soon as you feel a dislike for someone, ask yourself why? To scrutinise yourself and trace the origin of the feeling. Prejudices form the basis of feelings of hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Romanyism, and Islamophobia, feelings that can sometimes arise from someone in that group having caused us harm in the past. But you have to get to know a person to be able to judge her. We are by instinct afraid of the unfamiliar — it is a primitive feeling in man. In the beginning of time, when people lived in small farming communities, this was life preserving; the unfamiliar could be dangerous. But today it is counterproductive.

Each and every one of us has a responsibility, both to the society we live in and to ourselves. People were no different in the 1930s or 1940s than they are today, the same types live on. This is best observed in the schoolyard. There are the perpetrators, the bullies who deliver the blows, and the victims, and the ones who simply watch without stepping in, the bystanders. Hopefully, there are also some who come to the victims’ aid. That you should not be a perpetrator is self-evident, but neither must you be a bystander; it makes you just as guilty.

Today, we live in a democracy. Even though it is not perfect, there is no other form of government that is better. We must fight for our democracy every day if we are to keep it, otherwise it may easily happen that discontent with its negative aspects will produce a charismatic leader that will put Europe in danger once again. We must not sink down into defeatism, we must continue to fight, despite the negative picture that the world presents today.