1 Of course, I realised there wouldn't be room. The exhibition is just too small, too small to accommodate all the secondary-school students in Southwark and thus much to small to accommodate their peers in the other 31 boroughs. And what about the secondary-school children in the Home Counties and in the counties beyond. I know, I know. There just isn't room.
2 Yet as I left The Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum at the end of my most recent visit, I felt what I had felt during previous visits. Everyone should attend. As I mused, that sense mutated into a sense that a sufficient number should attend, such a number which would be sufficient to promote the exhibition when a promotional opportunity arose, such a number which would be sufficient to prompt a flow of first-time visitors.
3 For what it important, it strikes me, is that so gross an event, so terrifying an expression of the dark forces within us, should be publicised, should be visited, should not remain within the knowledge of just a few. For years, since those long-ago days, beginning in the sixth form, I have been reading about the Holocaust. Yet as I walked through the exhibition, and as I left, I wondered how it was that a whole population, in western Europe, could have consented to, could have collaborated with the application of the industrial power of the State to the extermination of a religious group within its boundaries.
4 Yet I know that the answers are readily available in books and elsewhere. A biography of Hitler will set out his thinking about Jews. Within the last year I have read a gripping, detailed account of the beginning and growth of the Nazi party between 1918 and 1933, the year in which the man who had been a corporal 15 years before was appointed Chancellor by a man who, those years ago, had been a field marshal. The following volume explains how the Nazi party, controlling the state power in Germany, having captured the hearts (and minds) of a sufficient number of the German people, set out systematically to extend its control over the thinking and daily working of the German people and to crush the instruments, people and organisation, of opposition. I have in mind, as I key these words, the picture of Hitler's entry into Vienna in March 1938 and the picture of elderly Jews, on their hands and knees, cleaning a pavement in the city. Cheers and jeers.
5 Yet, yet, how can it have happened.
4 Yet I know that the answers are readily available in books and elsewhere. A biography of Hitler will set out his thinking about Jews. Within the last year I have read a gripping, detailed account of the beginning and growth of the Nazi party between 1918 and 1933, the year in which the man who had been a corporal 15 years before was appointed Chancellor by a man who, those years ago, had been a field marshal. The following volume explains how the Nazi party, controlling the state power in Germany, having captured the hearts (and minds) of a sufficient number of the German people, set out systematically to extend its control over the thinking and daily working of the German people and to crush the instruments, people and organisation, of opposition. I have in mind, as I key these words, the picture of Hitler's entry into Vienna in March 1938 and the picture of elderly Jews, on their hands and knees, cleaning a pavement in the city. Cheers and jeers.
5 Yet, yet, how can it have happened.
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