what nazism and communism have in common

     It is genuinely a complete honour to be associated with the Foundation, to be associated with this prize, to share a platform with Roger Moorhouse and to talk about these incredibly important subjects. Most of all, it is a complete honour to have the opportunity to present prizes to these wonderful essayists, the recipients of today’s awards. I’m delighted to have been asked to do that.

     I am the grandson of a man, Alfred Wiener, who believed very passionately in the power of truth. In some ways it was the great disillusionment of his life because he started, in the 1920s, collecting everything that the Nazis did. He had become convinced that they were a great danger to German civilisation, not just Jews, but German civilisation. He collected every pamphlet and every newspaper. He collected records of everything that they said. He used them sometimes in court cases against people like Julius Streicher, whom he assisted in sending to jail for his propaganda work in Der Stürmer.

     He believed very passionately in those things but it didn’t stop his wife and children ultimately being arrested and my mother and her sisters and my grandmother being in Belsen concentration camp, which my grandmother did not survive. The truth is that for all his belief in the power of the facts that he was establishing, it didn’t save his family.

     But at the same time, he was right about the power of truth in restoring western democracy after the war and in pursuing the Nazi criminals in court. My grandfather was one of the providers of much of the information that was used in the Nuremberg trials and later in the Eichmann trials. Even in journalistic inquiry, when it was thought that Josef Mengele, the “Doctor of Death” in Auschwitz – the man who was the medic on the ramp at Auschwitz, having conducted many medical experiments against Jews, infamous medical experiments – it was said that he was in Argentina but no one knew what he looked like. But Alfred was the one person who had a photograph of Mengele.

     So, to present a prize that is about recording the truth, writing the truth down, learning and understanding the truth, well, that is something that deeply affects me as a member of my own family.

     Alfred had come back in 1918 from the war and he was already convinced that what you saw on Kristallnacht would happen. He wrote a pamphlet saying that unless we did something – unless the Germans of good disposition did something – we would talk to our descendants of bestial murder. Imagine the effect that had on me when I was writing the book that I wrote on his life and on my grandparents and my parents – and I was being assisted in this by my son – to read Alfred’s warning that we would talk to our descendants of bestial murder. He predicted this and then began to work very hard against it.

     He had to leave Germany in 1933 – before some of the incidents that you have written about – because Göring had found out about his secret archive and insisted that he destroy it. He went to Amsterdam which was neutral. He eventually had to leave there because of Kristallnacht because Alfred was the first person who had collected the eyewitness statements that were made around that time by people of their experiences in Kristallnacht. They made the mistake of associating those documents with his secret archive. When the Dutch discovered it, they worried that it would undermine their independence. He had to leave for London. One of the reasons why Toby Simpson, the director of the Wiener library – Alfred Wiener being my grandfather and the founder of the library – one of the reasons it is based here is because after Kristallnacht my grandfather had to leave Holland.

     But that is only one part of my family’s story. I’ve got another part which is seemingly unconnected.

     My father was born to a very wealthy man in 1938 who, when my father was nine years old, built a beautiful house on the hill in the city of Lvov in eastern Poland. You now know that place as Lviv. Lviv is in Ukraine because in 1939, when the Nazis invaded half of Poland, the Soviets by agreement with the Nazis invaded the other half. Doing Roger [Moorhouse] a return favour, he has written a wonderful book on that called The Devils’ Alliance about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the secret arrangement they had to divide Poland between them. My grandfather was living in Lvov, the victim of the Soviet takeover of that city. They turned it into Soviet Lviv, Soviet Ukraine. They arrested everybody who had the slightest element of civic standing: they were a head teacher, they were a business person, they were on the city council or they ran a shop. They arrested everybody who had a stamp collection and therefore had relationships with people in other countries. They arrested everybody who was speaking Esperanto on the grounds that they were involved in an international conspiracy.

     Hundreds of thousands – maybe more than a million – Poles were sent to either the Gulag or to state collective farms. When I read about the Gulag for the first time and I noted it down for the notes for my book and I returned to those notes later when I was writing it, I thought I’d made an error. I had noted down that 25% of people a year died in the Gulag. My grandfather had been sentenced – my grandfather Dolu [Adolf ‘Dolu’ Finkelstein] – had been sentenced to eight years for the crime of strengthening the might of capitalist Poland. As it turned out, this was completely true – this 25% – when I checked it, however horrifying that figure was.

     I say [that] these are two parallel stories [are] connected, of course, by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But [they are] connected by something else: connected by ideology; connected by the idea that there was a simple view or will of the people that these leaders could interpret and was being undermined by some alien force. That there was an elite that was running the country and it was being subverted by, in the Soviet case, they thought it was the bourgeoisie and it was the working class who established the spirit of the country; in the Nazis’ case it was the Aryans and it was the Jews who were undermining the spirit of the country. They decided in the Nazis’ case to arrest all the Jews, some of whom were shopkeepers, and in the Soviet case to arrest all shopkeepers, some of whom were Jews. Part of this elite was my mother, who was ten years old, and my father, who was ten years old.

These ideas therefore have much more in common than separating them. They were both attacks on the basic pluralist instinct that we share the world with lots of people and no one body embodies the will of the people. But maybe that phrase, the idea of a ‘will of the people’, is itself an intellectual error. They shared a methodology, that of murder. In the Soviet case, they arrested my grandfather, sent him to the Gulag and sentenced him to eight years of hard labour. It was obvious that he would have died while doing that if Hitler had not invaded the Soviet Union. In the Nazi case, they used the more direct method of taking my great aunt and sending her to Sobibor. Within three hours she and her husband and my mum’s first cousin Fritz had been killed. Millions of people in both cases: different methodologies, but at the bottom of it, the same murderous instinct in pursuit of the same methods.

That, I think, is the importance of this Foundation: that it understands that what unites totalitarians is more important to comprehend than what divides them, than what is distinguished between them. That it attempts to trace the history of these disastrous ideas and that it does so without fear or favour. It allows people from all sorts of political backgrounds to do the one thing that my grandfather insisted upon which was comprehension, which was understanding. My grandfather once said, ‘I am prepared to forget, as long as everyone else remembers.’ What this Foundation is about is the act of memory. Everybody here who has joined in this exercise is honouring that memory and therefore doing important public service. Because of that, I am honoured, myself, to be associated with it. Thank you very much indeed.