Ghosts from the past

Yesterday I met a man who was, essentially, a ghost from the past.

He was born in Berlin in the early 1930s, a year or so before the Nazis came to power. He briefly lived in London in the mid 1930s, before settling in the Netherlands. When the Netherlands fell during the summer of 1940, he moved to Amsterdam. He is Jewish, and as a result settled in the Jewish area of that city.

He told of how he used to play in the park up the road, all the boys at one end, all the girls at the other. One of those girls went on to become the most recognisable face and voice of the greatest horror of the twentieth century. He said that, had he realised she would become so famous, he would have gone over and said hello.

Eventually, he was taken to Bergen Belsen, a name which sends fear into any person with knowledge of history. Somehow, he survived there for nearly a year. As the war was coming to an end, and the Nazi regime was collapsing, he was taken from the camp, and moved around Germany, to be used as a bargaining chip by the Nazis in a last desperate bid to make peace with the Western Allies.

And finally, he was found by some Soviet soldiers. The horror was over. He still had the rest of his life ahead of him. And now, in his twilight years, he has decided to tell his story, so those of us cosy in our existence realise that this could happen again, and it must not be allowed to.

Yesterday, I met a man who survived the Holocaust, the horror of horrors from the last century.

Yesterday, I met a man who had essentially met Anne Frank.

Yesterday, I saw a bunch of twelve and thirteen year olds sit and listen animatedly for over an hour to this guy and his story.

Yesterday, I had a reminder of why I love history, and why I love teaching it.

The past is, as LP Hartley told us, a foreign country. Yesterday, I was lucky enough to meet a traveller from it.