DEFINITION OF MY IDENTITY

Howard Spier 30 September 2010

Executive Editor

AJR Journal

Association of Jewish Refugees

Jubilee House, Merrion Avenue

Stanmore

Middlesex HA7 4RL

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Dear Howard

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DEFINITION OF MY IDENTITY

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I spent a little time on my New Pocket Oxford Dictionary, wondering how to accurately define myself.

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Started with 'exile: 'the state of being barred from one's native country.' Well, I didnt start barred, was taken by my parents in 1933 from Berlin to Welwyn Garden City, and I suppose I sort of 'became and stayed' exiled sometime between then and the end of the war, when I again ceased to be an exile, or at least remained a voluntary one.

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'Banished'? with the 'ed' sounded a la Shakespeare: '1) make (someone) leave a place, especially as an official punishment. 2) get rid of; drive away.' Again, fits only partially because we went voluntarily.

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'Emigrant: a person who emigrates. emigrate: leave one's own country in order to settle permanently in another.' That fits. Though the thought at one point occurred to my mother to return to her beloved Berlin.

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'Immigrant: a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country.' That's me.

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'Refugee: a person who has been forced to leave their country because of a war or because they are being persecuted for their beliefs.' Well, if fits roughly. I wasnt exactly forced, so early on in the dictatorship, but it was hinted. And it wasnt exactly because of my beliefs, but rather because of my origins.

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Holocaust survivor. 'holocaust: destruction or slaughter on a massive scale.' That applies. 'The Holocaust: the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime in World War II.' 'survivor: a person who has survived.' That applies. I have survived the holocaust. My father, my mother, and I, escaped before it got really nasty. Perhaps I am an escapee, an escaper, both in the dictionary. All honour to concentration camp survivors. I know one such. Rosy. A remarkable lady who lives in Paris. She is special.

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Yours

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Peter

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To explain. Two eternal themes run through the articles and letter pages of the AJR Journal: Is one, after 77 years, still a refugee? I maintain that one is, that I am: once a refugee, always a refugee. That's how one came to this country. That's the door through which one entered. That defines one. The Journal, on the other hand, now always prefixes the term refugee with an 'ex': In its aim at its version of political correctness it refers only and always to 'ex-refugees', as if one can discard the reason and process by which one arrived at Liverpool Street station on 5 October 1933, and can become indigenous, like landed gentry, a, to my mind, completely false logic.

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The other theme is the apparent need to grade refugees into those who suffered, and survived, concentration camp, and only these are allowed to call themselves Holocaust survivors; and those who didn’t, and aren’t allowed to call themselves Holocaust survivors. I find this unappetising. Comparisons are odorous! How can I compare my coming over to England as a child, with my mother, my father already being here to reconnoitre the new country, our leaving Germany long before the real insults, degradation, persecution, torture and killing had got started, with the unimaginable suffering of Rosy??? Impossible. And etymologically irrelevant.