1950

Summary

So wrote Primo Levi after he had returned from his imprisonment by the Nazis. The poem was addressed to those ‘who live secure in your warm houses’. While the Jews of the United States and the United Kingdom had suffered hardship and austerity, they remained at liberty. Thousands fought in the Allied armies to defeat Nazism. In the weeks before VE Day, the British and the Canadians had liberated Bergen-Belsen and the Americans had taken control of Dachau. While there were no gas chambers to carry out mass extermination in these camps, the landscape of bestiality was shown to London cinema audiences. The images of stacked dead bodies and living emaciated ones shocked all. While British soldiers wearing handkerchiefs on their faces shovelled the bodies into pits, the stench of death permeated those who bore witness – even on the silver screen. The Allies may have won the war, but the Jews certainly lost it.