Of pushbacks and one thousand days of hell

When I was much younger and most certainly much less cynical than I am today, I read a historical novel about a family of Jews in Nazi Germany. The story detailed the heartache and agony the family went through as atrocities against the Jews escalated and they desperately tried to leave the country, only to be stymied by the indifference of the world at large to their plight and by the immigration quotas in place in countries such as the US and the UK.

When news of the Kristallnacht pogroms reached the ears of European and American leaders, their reaction was not to recoil in horror and reach out to help the victims, but rather to tighten their immigration controls in order to prevent a flood of refugees. Their reaction was related to the political realities of the day (as politicians' reactions usually are) and the fact that their voters in the large part harboured xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments.

According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia in late 1938, 125,000 Jews lined up outside US consulates hoping to obtain one of the 27,000 visas under the existing immigration quota. By June 1939, the number of applicants had increased to over 300,000. Most visa applicants were unsuccessful.

"In a highly publicised event in May-June 1939, the United States refused to admit over 900 Jewish refugees who had sailed from Hamburg, Germany, on the St Louis. The St Louis appeared off the coast of Florida shortly after Cuban authorities cancelled the refugees' transit visas and denied entry to most of the passengers, who were still waiting to receive visas to enter the United States. Denied permission to land in the United States, the ship was forced to return to Europe. The governments of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium each agreed to accept some of the passengers as refugees. Of the 908 St Louis passengers who returned to Europe, 254 (nearly 28%) are known to have died in the Holocaust. 288 passengers found refuge in Britain. Of the 620 who returned to the continent, 366 (just over 59%) are known to have survived the war." (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005139)

The family in the story in the end only managed to find safety for their children, who entered Great Britain as two of the 10,000 children saved through the Kindertransport (Children's Transport) program. Their parents and in most cases the parents of the other 9,998 children who were saved through this programme were left in Nazi Germany and were most probably killed in the death camps.

I found the story heartbreaking and in the naivety of my youth, I was convinced that the only reason the family did not find help was because the world was not aware of what was happening in Nazi Germany. It was impossible for "young me" to imagine that people would just have stood by and watched as millions of people were carted to their deaths.

The fact is, however, that that is exactly what happened. Six million Jews, one million of them children, were killed in over 4,0000 facilities set up by the Nazis in a network spanning all of German-occupied territory. The world stood by and watched, waving its hands in horror at the thought of accepting more refugees or allowing "illegal immigrants" to breach its shores.

There were no online comment boards at the time, but had there been, I am sure that people would have posted feedback peppered with phrases like 'ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS' or 'PUSHBACK' in big bold capital letters just like they do today.

Now the leaders of these same countries hypocritically visit places like Auschwitz and bow their heads in apparent sorrow in front of the mountains of spectacles confiscated from the victims killed in the camp, or the massive mounds of hair shaved off the heads of Jews just before they were sent in to take a "shower".

I wonder if in 50 years' time our leaders will be making similar pilgrimages to shrines in Syria? Will they bow their heads in shame when faced with the evidence of hundreds of thousands of people massacred by a maniac tyrant obsessed with retaining power at all costs? Will they talk about red lines that were drawn in the sand, only to be rapidly erased when their existence became inconvenient for the Western world?

This time, however, the Maltese of the future will not be able to read about it dispassionately as we do in the case of the Holocaust. We will not be able to claim that it had nothing to do with us, that it had not been in our power to help, or that we did not know what was happening in Syria.

Over 126,000 Syrians were massacred over the last 1,000 days as the world stood by and watched. Photos of hundreds of children killed last August after a chemical attack on the Sunni suburbs of East Damascus were beamed to our television screens and featured heavily in newspaper articles. There were a few days at the end of summer when it was impossible to log onto social network sites such as Facebook without being confronted with photos of dead children in Syria, each one more gruesome than the one before.

However a few weeks later, when Syrian refugees got onto boats to try to find safe asylum in Malta, many Maltese were up in arms screaming that these people were illegal and that they were not wanted. Even more shocking is the fact that reports emerged that the Italian and Maltese government wasted precious time arguing about the rescue as hundreds of refugees drowned.

This time it is not the St Louis and the coast of Florida, this time it is little boats on the coast of Malta. We are witnessing a genocide and we are behaving in exactly the same way the Americans and British people reacted in the 1930s and early 1940s. We have the opportunity to save lives and make a difference, but instead we are sinking into a morass of xenophobia and anti-Islamist sentiment.

It seems that it is true that humans never learn. History is repeating itself on our doorstep and we are simply sitting back and watching.

Claudine Cassar is the Executive Chairman of the Alert Group of Companies - www.alertgroup.com.mt