(Jewish Group) Simon Schama on Auschwitz and the new anti-Semitism
“P.J.”
The letters were painted in ghostly white, a foot high on the wall, faded but legible beneath the veil of grime. I was seven years old when I noticed them, waiting with my father for the arrival of uncles and aunts at Southend railway station. What did the gnomic inscription mean? “Nothing; never mind,” he answered, but I remember the uneasiness written on his usually frank face. Later that day, when I asked again, he told me. The initials stood, he said, for “Perish Judah”. “Bad people, stupid people put them there; that’s why they’re rubbed out.”
I was struck (and scared) by the archaic ring of it, as if drawn from an Old Testament passage recording the proclamation of a Mesopotamian tyrant resolved to raze Jerusalem to the ground. My parents thought the graffito a relic of the Mosley years in the 1930s, when they and all their East End friends and neighbours had stood firm against the fascist march on Cable Street. But since the sighting was in 1952, I now realise there was another possibility.
Five years before, over a hot bank holiday weekend in August 1947, there had been a frightening outbreak of anti-Semitic rioting — especially violent in Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. The trigger had been the hanging in Palestine of two British army sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, by the Jewish paramilitary group Irgun Zvai Leumi, three of whose members had been executed by the British authorities. The Irgun had committed terrorist acts including the bombing of the King David Hotel. The Jewish press in Britain and community leaders expressed horror and repugnance at the execution of the sergeants. But their condemnation was drowned out in the press uproar.
The popular mood in that summer of bitter postwar austerity was in any case ugly. The usual mutterings about Jewish profiteering surfaced. But the targets in 1947 were modest Jewish high street shopkeepers whose premises were smashed up, windows daubed or shattered. Cheetham Hill in Manchester was carpeted with broken glass; the devastation severe enough to remind many of the Blitz. Just two years after the war had ended there was no shortage of those eager to hold all Jews responsible for the action of militant fanatics in Palestine. An anti-Semitic orator (and ex sergeant-major) called John Regan, speaking to a crowd of 700 in Eccles, bellowed: “Hitler was right. Exterminate every Jew — every man, woman and child.” “Hang all Jews” screamed another sign; there were similar anti-Semitic actions in Bolton, Holyhead, Hendon and, as it turned out, Southend.
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It's Simon Schama!
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