We are on the brink of a new era, if only…

So, 2023 turned out not to be the year when British democracy was renewed. It will not be renewed in 2024 either, or any time soon, for that matter. If you want to feel optimistic about something, you had better look elsewhere. Britain’s Eurovision chances look promising this year…

While much of the world celebrated the end of a year that will be remembered chiefly for its unflinching child-killing brutality and the West’s equally unflinching complicity in it, the British government was putting the finishing touches on its latest clever policy announcement.

From 1 January 2024, the Prime Minister tweeted on New Year’s Day, most foreign students studying in Britain would be unable to bring family members to the UK. ‘In 2024, we’re already delivering for the British people’, Mr Sunak boasted of his latest attempt to appeal to British ethnic nationalists and appease party funders with a vested interest in Britain’s decline (Russia’s influence on the 2016 Brexit vote remains uninvestigated despite Putin celebrating it as a major foreign policy success and millions of pounds of Russian money passing into the hands of the Conservative Party and its politicians).

Leaving aside the obvious cruelty of the policy (another vote winner!), this is another excellent example of a purely performative policy that benefits no-one and stands to seriously disadvantage the British economy and its universities, many of which depend on their income from foreign students. In fact, around a fifth of British universities’ total income comes from overseas students who make a net contribution to the UK economy in excess of 40 billion. Losing even a fraction of this income could put some institutions in a precarious position.

Sunak and his government know this, of course. But they either don’t care or do not expect the policy to be fully or properly implemented. The point, as ever, is not to address the real problems Britain faces but, rather, to stir the pot, provoking nationalistic fervour among their party’s increasingly rabid core supporters while fanning the dying embers of Brexit in the hope that something will catch on fire. Anything that stokes division and discord is good, right? There’s an election coming up, after all.

Fortunately, for international students, other countries are available. The British aren’t so fortunate, at least not since the Tories ended freedom of movement (Huzzah!).

This sort of performative politics is nothing new, of course, but I do think that, by now, we should be better at spotting it and calling it out. So much media attention is given to exploring purely performative policies and giving them credence in the minds of a public that should know better.

The government’s policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda is another case in point. This is the government’s de facto flagship policy. It is the one to which ministers have given most attention and the one to which the Prime Minister most often addresses his remarks. It is important, they say, to cut migration (even if it means treating asylum seekers as illegals). It is a priority of the people (in fact, only a third of British people polled support it, predominantly Conservative supporters). Yet it is a wholly impractical and, frankly, horribly cruel policy that is, in the end, obviously and unalterably unworkable. It also has little or nothing to do with any real-world challenge that Britian as a country faces.

Who would have thought that a plan to deport thousands of asylum seekers to a country with a sub-optimal infrastructure and a dodgy human-rights record some 4,000 miles away would be impractical or face legal challenge? The government certainly did. On the basis of Rwanda’s current undertaking to accommodate 200 migrants per year it would take the country 165 years to absorb the 33,000 refugees currently scheduled for deportation by the Home Office. But, of course, the policy was never really meant to work, and the scorn poured on it by critics is just grist to the government’s mill.

The point of the policy is not to ‘stop the boats’ or reduce migration numbers, but to create division, to start fires, because that is what consolidates the Conservative vote and keeps the party viable as a mainstream political proposition. From the government’s perspective, the Rwanda policy has already been a stonking success. It has provoked criticism from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who raised concerns about the ‘externalisation’ of asylum obligations and the consequent risks to refugees, and from Human Rights Watch, which has said that Rwanda should not be considered a safe third country given ongoing human rights violations. Most recently, the British Supreme Court ruled the Conservatives’ plan unlawful because of the risk of harm to asylum seekers, prompting the government to introduce new legislation declaring Rwanda safe in order to circumvent the ruling. Leaving aside the obvious absurdity of legislating a country ‘safe’, all of this serves the government’s larger objective of fuelling opposition to ‘meddling’ international courts and human rights law. The government has already indicated its willingness to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. All for a policy that everyone knows will not work.

But, of course, it doesn’t really matter if a policy never comes fully to fruition. The government can always pretend that it has. Just this week, Home Secretary James Cleverly claimed falsely (lied, in old speak) that the UK asylum backlog had been cleared, in line with a long-standing policy promise, despite the government’s own figures showing that 98,599 applicants (a third of them eligible for deportation to Rwanda) remain in the asylum system awaiting an initial decision on whether their claims are admissible (more than at the time the promise was made). The government claimed that its pledge concerned only ‘legacy’ cases (people who arrived before 2022) but its own figures show there are more than 4,500 cases even in that backlog still awaiting initial decision. Why worry about the failure of a policy when you can simply pretend that it has worked?

So, if the policies aren’t real, what is it that Conservatives actually do in government?

Well, other than ‘taking the tough decisions’, pursuing the ‘people’s priorities’ and being ‘a safe pair of hands’, the answer seems to be, in the main, enriching their friends and themselves while deepening the impoverishment of working-class people. It does not seem inappropriate to describe this as ‘class war’. Wealth has been funnelled to the super rich on an unprecedented scale, with the rest of us having to make do with a smaller and smaller share of national wealth. It’s hard to believe that before Thatcher gained power in 1979 Britain was one of the most equal countries in the world. Now it is among the most unequal in the developed world.

While Conservative austerity has crippled public services and left the National Health Service in a state of permanent crisis, turbo-charging child poverty and levelling down life expectancy for the poorest, the wealthiest have had a bonanza. Between 2020 and 2022 alone, when the COVID-19 crisis was at its height and the police were kicking in doors and breaking up children’s parties, billionaire wealth increased by almost £150 billion. In 2023, according to the Equality Trust, the richest 50 families in the UK held more wealth than half of the UK population, comprising 33.5 million people. If the wealth of the super-rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, the Trust says, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP. At the same time, Britain has seen the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars.

And while ordinary people adjusted their behaviour for the greater good and kept essential services ticking over during the pandemic crisis, the government waived procurement rules so they could funnel yet more public cash to the already wealthy. The smell of public money prompted a feeding frenzy among the rich, and especially those with an existing link to the ruling party. VIP lanes were created for the supply of urgently needed protective equipment and companies set up five minutes ago with no office or staff were preferred to companies with years of experience. Exorbitant quotes with staggering profit margins were readily accepted. Much of the equipment supplied turned out to be unusable. Transparency International UK found that a fifth of government COVID-19 contracts triggered red flags indicating possible corruption. A New York Times investigation of 1,200 UK government COVID-19 contracts – worth a total of $22 billion – found that around half went to companies run by friends and associates of Conservative politicians, or with no experience in that area. Many of these ‘friends and associates’ became very rich. Luxury yachts were bought. Offshore trusts were created. The money disappeared. Lawyers were instructed. No one was arrested. No one is ever arrested.

This is very serious stuff. Corruption at the top. No government could survive this, you would think. But this is Britain, where the people who own the country also get to run it (stick around long enough and you will get a go) and do not have to answer to anyone, even the law. Things just carried on. Power passed to a new, unelected and entirely unqualified Prime Minister. Then to another. Memoirs were written. The Queen died. A new King was installed. Flags were waved. The national anthem was sung. Knees were bent. Cronies were honoured. Chums were appointed. The absurd circus continued.

Britain remains undemocratic at its core, and this is how the ruling party likes it. Parliament’s unelected second chamber is now stuffed with donors, political favourites, media cronies and crooked politicians. Legitimised corruption, the New York Times called it, quite properly. It was no less democratic, and I dare say a good deal less corrupt, when its was exclusively populated with hereditary peers. The House of Lords is one of the pillars of Conservative Britain. A second might be said to be the royal family, a beloved national institution that also hoards much of the country’s wealth (the King is one of the country’s biggest landlords), resists taxation and even scoops up the assets of the ordinary dead.

The third is the system of private schools (termed ‘public’ schools in Britain, without a hint of irony – or perhaps the irony is privately savoured, a kind of delicious joke), which ensures that privilege is passed on from generation to generation while state school kids scramble around for a few crumbs from their table. They are the reason our politics and media and every other important institution have come to be dominated by the wealthy and their privileged perspective. That is what they are for. While the income and position of private schools have been protected and strengthened by successive governments, state school funding has been cut, along with pretty much everything else. While the rich get a rounded, liberal education intended to support a happy, flourishing life, and access to elite universities, most of the rest of us are prepared for a joyless life of endless work and debt with no prospect of commutation. We get an education fit for an object, a unit of production, not a human being. We get an education that erodes our sense of self-value and belonging, that makes us distrust ourselves and where we come from, that turns us into things. That is what state school is for.

But, you might say, aren’t these the institutions that make us what we are and made us what we were? Aren’t they the stuff of Britain’s glorious empire, forged on the playing fields of Eton. Well, not really. Maybe for Boris Johnson and his oafish ilk. Certainly not for me. I grew up on different playing fields, without servants or a trust fund, or influential parents able to give me a leg up. I grew up among people who were sharp and funny and defiant and hardworking and deeply sceptical about the legitimacy of any form of authority. I grew up not singing the national anthem or tugging at my forelock or wanting or expecting something for nothing. I grew up in a different Britain. And I miss it.

This is a general election year, of course, at least if the Prime Minister is to be believed (spoiler: see above). A change of government is probable. Labour, led by Keir Starmer, is likely to be in power by the end of the year. But will this result in meaningful change for the British people? Starmer has done his best to dampen expectations, certainly, recognising that the best way to get elected in Britain is to promise to be almost but not quite as bad as the last lot. Few people know what he really stands for, if anything. But, again, the British don’t like conviction politicians, preferring opportunistic, uncharismatic balloons of hot air like David Cameron.

Maybe Starmer is playing a clever game. Maybe he had his fingers crossed when he bent the knee to media vampire Rupert Murdoch and purged the Corbynite left. That hope, I suppose, is what keeps traditional Labour voters and progressives in the party on board. But, very sadly, they are likely to be disappointed. Changing anything in Britain means changing pretty much everything, including the institutions that keep us trapped in the fever dream of a long-disappeared imperial past. I don’t think Starmer has an appetite for that. He is a tinkerer not a reformer. He has not done enough to challenge the narratives of the ruling party, which will, to a extent, tie his hands in office. And while he is likely to foreground a return to ethical politics and a rejection of Johnsonian cynicism and venality, he has provided no evidence of a supporting vision to sustain this. Introducing new codes of conduct won’t be enough to restore trust in politics, nor should it be. It won’t get foreign money out of British politics or end cronyism or corruption or give marginalised people a voice in how things are run.

The Conservatives are the natural party of government in Britain, or in England at least, which, of course, electorally dominates the other countries in the union. They are in power most of the time. They dominate the House of Lords and the newspapers and most of Britain’s key institutions. They are the party of empire, the royal family and Eton and all of that. They control the narrative, even in opposition. They are in power even when they are not. Britain’s archaic electoral system is part of the problem and seriously limits the prospects of progressive politics. The departing party can constrain what any new government can do in office and can just as easily break everything up when they return to office, as the Tories did in 2010, under the cloak of austerity and the financial crisis, which they, with chilling electoral effect, blamed on excessive domestic public spending.

There are good ideas within Labour on social policy and education. But real, lasting change means changing how things are done, and most especially Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, which routinely awards unchecked executive power to a party with a minority of the vote and puts a tiny minority of swing voters at the centre of the national policy debate, while most people are effectively ignored and marginalised. Introducing a system of proportional electoral representation would change this and could be the start of a serious re-examination of the institutions which continue to dominate British politics. It would end Britain’s Punch-and-Judy style of politics and ensure every vote counts equally.

Britain needs more than a change of government, that much is clear. But a new government could initiate the kind of deep-rooted institutional change the country really needs. That demands bravery and boldness, as well as a willingness to govern differently. But it also means envisioning a politics that is not dominated by the grand old parties and embracing a political future in which people not parties have the power. It’s hard to see Starmer or any leader of either of the two main parties legislating for their own eventual obsolescence, even if that is what the country needs.

Station to station

King Charles III, the newly minted (in every sense) king of England, made his first state visit this week, not, as planned, to France, where police have been smashing their batons into the faces of people protesting against a rise in retirement age, but to Germany, which seemed altogether nicer. He met a few hundred people, some of whom waved flags, spoke a bit of German in the Bundestag, shook some hands, went to Hamburg, mentioned the Beatles, laid a wreath, looked sad but didn’t say sorry, shook some more hands, advocated climate action, then flew home in a private jet made of solid gold while the heralds of the lord blew their trumpets and flights of angels guided him on his way. I may have made the last bit up (it was an RAF VIP Airbus A330).

He gave a nice speech to the Bundestag, albeit one largely devoid of serious content (‘Bitte den Brexit nicht erwähnen!’). Nevertheless, I found myself unexpectedly moved, as Charles reminded his audience of the complicated history of the two countries and of the duty we all have to learn from the past in realizing the future. He also highlighted the many cultural affinities between Germany and Britain, and, indeed there are many, as he noted, from Kraftwerk and Shakespeare to Monty Python and Henning When – and, of course, Dinner for One, the much-quoted British comedy sketch that millions of Germans watch every year as part of their New Year celebration (even though, until recently, it had never been shown on British television). I am a little ashamed to admit that, as an ex-pat living in Hamburg, I had a tear in my eye. For a moment, I forgot to notice just how little he was saying.

After his visit to Berlin, Charles came to Hamburg, visiting the Kindertransport commemorative statue at Dammtor railway station – the counterpart of the one outside Liverpool Street Station, in London, which he was instrumental in commissioning – and the St. Nikolai war memorial, a church destroyed by allied bombing raids in 1943 which demolished much of the city and killed tens of thousands of people. The church was kept in its bombed-out state as a kind of warning from history, not only of the brutality of war but of the necessity to live with the past, however painful. This is an important lesson (largely well taken in Germany), and it is one to which Charles referred in speaking of the danger of our failure to properly reckon with the past. A failure to confront the past is typical of the new authoritarianism and the ‘strongman’ leaders who trade on fake nostalgia for a past that never existed. There was some irony, however, in this warning coming from the head of a state that is increasingly unable to talk intelligently about its past or even to acknowledge large parts of it (the bits where we killed and enslaved people and pinched all their stuff).

Dammtor was the departure point for around 1,000 of the 10,000 Jewish children who fled mainland Europe for the safety of Britain between November 1939 and August 1939 to escape the Nazi terror. The monument – called ‘Der Letzte Abschied’ or ‘The Last Farewell’ – commemorates the Kindertransport and depicts the moment of separation and departure. There are two groups of children, one, presumably, destined for a new life, the other for extermination. One of the two children advancing towards the train track and the hope of a new beginning is half-turned, arm outstretched towards the others. A teddy bear is tucked under her other arm. The ones who remain have Jewish stars stitched into their clothes. They have suitcases too. One lies open, containing only a broken doll, its arms pulled off. A violin case is on the floor, smashed open and empty.

It’s a hugely poignant depiction. Few of the Kindertransport children saw their families again. In most cases, their parents and older brothers and sisters were put into trains and transported to camps where they were murdered. I walk past the memorial sometimes (I work nearby). White roses, a potent symbol of resistance to Nazism in Germany, are often placed on the statue or dropped into the suitcase.

At the request of Jewish organisations, the British government agreed to allow Jewish children up to the age of 17 into the country, provided they could fund their own passage. Visa requirements were lifted, and the government actively publicized the programme. Once they arrived at Liverpool Street Station in London, the children were placed with family members, if they had any, or with foster families or in boarding schools. Thousands of families in the UK opened their doors to these children. It was an act of humanity in the face of profound inhumanity. In time, many of the rescued children made important contributions to their new society, raising families of their own and making their contribution to public service. One such was Lord Alf Dubs, born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to a Jewish father, who became director of the Refugee Council and, as a politician, one of the UK’s most vocal advocates for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.

It was fitting, therefore, that Charles should visit this monument as part of his visit to Hamburg. His wife, the Queen Consort, placed her own white rose on the monument. It’s important to remember and to honour these acts of decency and compassion; acts that transcend nationalism and partiality. But it is far better, of course, to honour them in the way we live, the laws we make and the societies we create, rather than simply through acts of symbolism, important though these are. How a country treats refugees and displaced peoples generally is an important test of its humanity. It is a test that the UK government is currently failing.

Instead of offering a haven to refugees, the government has been using refugees to stoke fear and manufacture a crisis, using something close to hate speech to appeal to the ethnic nationalist base that voted for Brexit and helped put them into power. While ministers bang on about cracking down on the people smugglers who take people across the English Channel in boats, the real target is the people in the boats. Around 45,000 people came to Britain using this route in 2022, and the vast majority of them – around 94 per cent according to the Home Office – went on to claim asylum. The majority were, like the Kindertransport children, fleeing conflict. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, forced global displacement is higher than it has been at any point since the Second World War. The government knows all of this, yet is determined to create a crisis, closing legitimate routes to seeking asylum in order to paint genuine refugees as ‘illegals’ seeking to ‘invade’ the UK. The xenophobic language is quite deliberate, the sign of a desperate government attempting to hold on to power by reopening the divisions that got them into office in the first place.

The government likes to pretend that its plan to send some asylum applicants to Rwanda to have their claims processed, in defiance of the 1951 Geneva Convention and in spite of fears for their safety in the country, is intended to deter people arriving in the UK through ‘illegal, dangerous or unnecessary methods’, such as on small boats. The Prime Minister even has the slogan ‘Stop small boats’ emblazoned on podiums from which he speaks (it is one of his top five policy pledges). But the truth is that the government has deliberately created the crisis. Of course, the numbers of people arriving in small boats is going up because the government has blocked other routes. There was no small boats problem before this. And, of course, asylum centres are full because the government is preventing community integration and access to the labour market and has slowed down application processing. In short, the UK government is engaging in the most cynical manipulation of some of the world’s most vulnerable people for short-term political gain. Little wonder that Lord Dubs has described the government’s policy on refugees as ‘shameful’. One outcome of the government’s strategy was the recent attempted attack on asylum seekers at a hotel in Knowsley, in the northwest of England.

The growing numbers of people forced to leave their homes and seek refuge elsewhere is going to increase. It will be one of the defining challenges of the coming decades. We can choose how we react to this challenge, either humanely, in the spirit of the Kindertransport, or inhumanely, as a means of dividing opinion and shoring up political support from the racist far right. It is sad to see what we are becoming. While Charles speaks the language of unity and comradeship, and celebrates our shared humanity, his government is acting ever more illiberally in denying the most vulnerable people their basic rights, while spreading moral panic about the issue. But, of course, this is just one strand of the government’s drift towards authoritarian rule. Curbs on public protest and the introduction of voter ID to suppress part of the vote are further examples of solutions to non-existent problems that just happen to further erode people’s democratic freedoms. Democracy is meaningless if people don’t have the opportunity to intervene, resist and challenge. Britain has never been a paragon of democratic virtue, as the presence of a born-to-rule unelected head of state would suggest, but it has had its moments. That we are failing to live up to the best of them could not be more obvious, and all the pomp and pageantry in the world cannot hide it.

‘Everybody is equal. Nobody should have to be afraid’

As Amnesty International reports that the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place for refugees and migrants – and extremist groups in the UK attempt to exploit the appalling events in Woolwich – it seems timely to remind ourselves that the rights of people fleeing conflict and persecution deserve to be protected – and need to be defended. This is an interview I did with Holocaust survivor Paul Oppenheimer a few years before his death from cancer in 2007, aged 78.

Paul Oppenheimer was four years old, about to start school in Berlin, when Hitler came to power in 1933. In 1936, like many other Jewish refugees, he fled Germany, moving, with his mother and younger brother, to London. They later rejoined their father in Holland, where Anne Frank’s family were to be near-neighbours. In May 1940, the Germans invaded, and Paul and his family were sent, first, to a transit camp, and, then, to the extermination camp Bergen-Belsen, where both his parents died. Forty years passed before he was ready to tell his story and to lend his energies to supporting the work of the Beth Shalom Holocaust education centre.

In the 40 years that followed his liberation from Belsen, Paul Oppenheimer kept his experiences to himself. But meeting other survivors of the Nazi concentration camp where both his parents died prompted him to tell his story. After 10 years of educational work, he is convinced that it is only by learning the lessons of the Holocaust that we can hope to prevent it happening again.

He was born in Berlin in 1928, to middle-class parents, Hans and Rita. ‘My parents were Germans and I was also German,’ Paul says, ‘my parents were Jewish, and I was also Jewish. All the troubles that we encountered subsequently with the Nazis were entirely due to the fact that we were Jewish. If we had not been Jewish, we would have had a very different life.’

Paul and his family were what were called ‘assimilated Jews’, non-observant Jews who took no part in Jewish religious life. Once the Nazis had achieved power, life became gradually more difficult for them and for all other Jewish people in Germany: ‘Most wanted to get out. The biggest problem was to find another country that would take in these “refugees” from Germany – nowadays they would be called “asylum seekers”.

‘We were fortunate. We had an uncle and aunt who lived in London. They offered to take us in. So, in March 1936, when I was seven-years-old, we left Germany and we came to England. My father stayed behind in Berlin. We’ve never been able to find out why he didn’t come with us.’

While in London, Paul’s sister Eve was born, and her British citizenship turned out to be of the utmost importance to his story, almost certainly saving her life and the lives of Paul and younger brother Rudi. In September 1936, Paul’s father left Germany, to work at the Amsterdam branch of Mendelssohn’s Bank. Once established, he wrote to his family in London suggesting they join him.

‘We went to live in Holland. Those were the best days of my youth. But, on 10 May 1940, the Germans invaded. Once they had taken over, they started to persecute the Jews in Holland as they had in Germany. We were segregated into citizens and subjects, we had to go to a Jewish school, we had to wear the yellow star, we were not allowed on the tram or the bus, we had a curfew in the evening, we had to live in Amsterdam, we had to hand in our bicycles, our money, our stocks and shares. It just got worse and worse. Once all the Jews in Holland lived in Amsterdam, they started the deportations, to what turned out to be Poland.’

In June 1943, Paul and his family were deported to a Dutch transit camp, called Westerbork, from which weekly transports to the extermination camps Auschwitz and Sobibor departed. Of 100,000 deportees, less than 1,000 survived. ‘We remained at Westerbork for a long time and the reason was our sister Eve, because she was British. The Germans had a plan whereby they wanted to do an exchange. They knew there were Germans living in England during the war and wanted to get these Germans from England back to Germany to help with the war effort. In return they offered the British Government British nationals and their immediate relatives. We became know as “exchange Jews”.’

Because of Eve’s British citizenship, Paul and his family remained at Westerbork much longer than was usual and when, finally, they were transported to Bergen-Belsen, it was not by cattle truck but by passenger train. They lived in Belsen as ‘privileged prisoners’, not required to wear the black and white striped uniforms the other prisoners wore. Instead, they wore civilian clothes with a yellow star, though they slept in barracks like the others, and ate the same rations. Their part of the camp became known as the ‘Star Camp’.

Given only a cup of ersatz coffee, a bowl of turnip soup and a piece of bread a day, starving and exhausted prisoners succumbed to illness. Dysentery, pneumonia, TB and, worst of all, typhus were rife. In January 1945, Paul’s mother fell ill and, without doctors, nurses or extra food, died shortly after. She was 42 years old. Two months later, his father, 43, died from typhus, just one month short of liberation. At the time, 600 people were dying in Belsen every day, including Anne Frank and her sister Margot. Paul, Rudi and Eve spent more than six months in the camp, emerging from it as ‘starving, exhausted skeletons’.

After liberation, Paul and Rudi returned to Holland with Eve who, as a British citizen, was able to return to London with her uncle. Paul and Rudi spent six months in an orphanage before receiving their visas to come to England.

During the next 40 years, Paul made a new life in England, but spoke little of his experiences, even to his three children. Putting his experiences to the back of his mind, he forged his new life. ‘Nobody ever asked us about it, nobody seemed to be interested in it, we didn’t particularly want to talk about it, so we forgot about it. But, for a variety of reasons, in the last 10 or 15 years, we’ve come back to remember the story.’

The catalyst was the award of an MBE, for his work on road safety for the motor industry. ‘All these reporters from the Solihull News and the Solihull Times came to the house. They wanted to know where I had been during the war. When I told them that I had been at Belsen, they forgot about the MBE. One of the photographers told me that there would be a reunion in Belsen that year. He asked me whether I would like to attend and, after speaking with my family, we decided to go.’

Meeting with other survivors of Belsen brought a lot of old memories back to the surface, and, when he returned to England, Paul took the opportunity of becoming involved in educational work, talking to schools and adult groups and working with the Beth Shalom Holocaust Education Centre. Unlike most survivors working in education, he does much of his work with adult groups. ‘Other survivors do schools, because there are organisations to set that up. I’m not aware that any of them do adult groups, but this is something I have done right from the beginning. A rotary club first asked me to give a talk, now, whenever I speak, two more people ask me to give another talk.’

Many of those attending the talks are older people, with their own stories: ‘People don’t talk about what happened to them. A lot of people have very interesting stories, people who lived through the Blitz, who were evacuated, all sorts of things happened to them. But they don’t talk about it.’

‘The message is that we should never let this happen again,’ Paul says, ‘I finish off by telling the students why we go around telling this story. It’s because people haven’t learned anything from our experiences. And the same sorts of things are happening again, or have been happening all the time, in Cambodia, Rwanda, in Bosnia and Kosovo, in East Timor, where people are being hunted down just because there is something different about them, their religion, the colour of their skin.

‘We want people to learn that everyone should be equal, that nobody should have to be afraid. I end [my talks] with the quote: “He who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it.” I say that I hope you will learn the lessons of history so that you and your children will not have to repeat our experiences.’

This interview was first published in Adults Learning. For more information about Beth Shalom and its educational work visit www.bethshalom.com. The centre publishes Paul Oppenheimer’s book, From Belsen to Buckingham Palace.