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Geoff Paterson's avatar

A scene from "Judgment at Nuremburg" comes to mind. The American prosecutor, played by Richard Widmark, implores the husband of a witness he wants to testify at the trial, angrily telling him "They must not be allowed to get away with what they did!". To which the husband sadly says "And in the end, do you really think they won't get away with it?". Such it is with history.

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Liz Ryan's avatar

It's interesting that none of these Stolpersteins have yet been placed in the Channel Islands, the only part of the UK to have been occupied by the Nazis.

Since the end of the War, the British government has systematically repressed information about what happened there -- on the not entirely unsensible grounds that public knowledge about who collaborated and who did not would lead to a culture of reprisals amongst the tight-knit families living there.

This policy (possibly not coincidentally?) appears to have given at least one very prominent political figure in the Islands a free pass.

This odd silence encapsulates entirely the tension between Forgetting and Remembering. The wartime generation were in some ways very big on forgetting and moving on. When they remembered, they mostly celebrated -- the courage, the sacrifice, the sense of a shared struggle. It was an attitude perpetuated by the deeply selfish Boomers.

It falls to our X generation and later to remember in a more complicated way. And a kind of 'reverse flip' (European history = all bad) isn't good enough. I guess the struggle to find an adjustment that both honours the past and is something that allows us to live in sanity, on good terms with ourselves, will continue to generate some excellent writing though.

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