Thoughts on a friend.

A guest post from Marjorie Ellis Thompson, a colleague on the Scottish National Congress Steering Committee. Marjorie lives in Edinburgh.

Jim Sillars’ letter regarding the Holocaust was deeply moving as I have no doubt it was intended to be. As a child I saw the Sound of Music and spent the next several decades learning everything i could about German history and the Nazi rise to power, including a special project on the Nuremburg Trials.

It’s one of the reasons I opposed nuclear weapons after coming face to face with them whilst working at Holy Loch in 1982. As fate would have it I met Walter Jakob Wolfgang, a refugee from the Holocaust in 1983 when I got my first job at CND. Walter was one of the organisers of the first Aldermaston March and a lifelong member of both CND and the Labour Party. He became famous after being dragged out of Labour Party conference aged 82 for shouting ‘nonsense’ during Jack Straw’s speech about the Iraq war. He was then arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act-a fact missing from his Wikipedia entry.

Walter’s father died shortly after arriving in Britain from an illness caught in what was then a ‘work’ camp prior to their transformation into death camps. Walter aged 14 had been briefly held in such a camp on a visit home from school in England but was released.

I often think of Walter, who died in May 2019. He never once weaponised the annihilation of his extended family as a justification for his beliefs-something I have often found with Holocaust survivors; it tends to be those whose families have fled from Poland or Russia from pogroms who utilise it in debates as David Aaronovich did once at the Cambridge union, ironically in a debate with Walter.

In later years when he couldn’t drive, a rota of his friends would take him to synagogue which he attended without fail all the way up until his death. It was Walter who told me that Judaism is a religion, thousands of years old and Zionism is an ideology just a 150 years old. He was very clear on this and on Jewish values.

Walter would have been horrified at the genocide now being conducted by the state of Israel. He would have been shocked and angered beyond belief at the vilification of Jeremy Corbyn, whom he admired greatly and who, along with me, was the last person other than hospital staff, to see him alive. Jeremy visited him in Kingston Hospital 3 times in the two weeks he was there, travelling on public transport without aides and without fanfare.

There has not just been a rise in anti semitism in recent months, there has also been a rise in Islamaphobia. 

Finally my enduring image of this conflict, the one happening now in real time, not the one invoked to justify the unbridled bloodlust of Netanyahu and the IDF, is of a tiny hand, a toddler less than 2 years old, clutching his father’s shirt as he lies dead in his arms. 

Yours faithfully 

MARJORIE ELLIS THOMPSON