Nazi Germany

The Silver Sword is a children’s book which is equally at home on an adult’s bookshelf. It is a story about family, about hardship, about war and its impact on the order of things. The Silver Sword is a novel by Ian Serraillier, a children’s classic, first published in the UK in 1956 by Jonathan Cape and then by Puffin Books in 1960

The Silver Sword

The story shows us a glimpse of human depravity, and of human goodness.

Re-reading this story after a gap of ovr 50 years, brought a new understanding. As an adult I now bring my own life experiences, but also a better understanding of a well-written story, but of equal importance is that of an understanding of history – in terms of my understanding of Nazi Germany, Western Germany after the war, but also of more recent history and the refugees who are trying to escape from the Middle East wars.

The journey undertaken by the Polish family named Brlick from Poland to Switzerland, the depths of despair, the hardships they face and the goodness they come across are just as liable to be applicable to those of the children we see in the camps in France, Italy, Cyprus etc.

The family ends up in four units; the father (Joseph) taken away to a forced labour camp for ‘re-education’, which is a joke gone wrong as he was a teacher who loved teaching and didn’t want to be curtailed by Nazi propaganda. The mother (Margret) was forceably taken away to work in Germany

We also then have the three children, Ruth of 18 years, Edek of 11 and Bronia 3 years old; the three children then spend the winter living in the cellar of a bombed house on the other side of Warsaw, and the summer living in woodlands outside the city

The father and mother gone, the children have to go on the run because Edek shoots and wounds a German soldier and the Germans thus take away their mother.

I don’t want to give more than this away except to bring into the story Jan, a young boy who has lost everything and everyone, and has learnt to survive on his own on the streets, and who befriends Joseph in his escape to Switzerland, which is where The Silver Sword comes in.

I highly recommend this story but also ask you to put it in context in relation to today’s refugee children. In 2015 it was estimated that there were more than 60 million displaced people in the world. This equated to nearly 1 in 100 people worldwide being displaced from their homes and in a lot of cases from their countries. Some areas have a higher rate than others; for example, more than one-in-twenty people living in the Middle East are displaced. Between 2008-2015, about 198,500 unaccompanied minors entered Europe seeking asylum – nearly half of which arrived in 2015 (FACTANK)

Unicef has stated that nearly half of all refugees are children. The following graph shows the breakdown

This is a global problem, which needs to be resolved by some joined up thinking and actions. Otherwise the story outlined in the Silver Sword will become the blue print (if it isn’t already) for the millions who have become without home. Kate Todd, The Guardian)

Further reading:

Wikipedia – The Silver Sword

Global Forced Displacement Reaches a New High

Global forced displacement hits record high

By ARON HELLER 01/10/14 11:49 AM ET EST

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel’s cultural and financial capital unveiled a memorial Friday honoring gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis, the first specific recognition in Israel for non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Tucked away in a Tel Aviv park, a concrete, triangle-shaped plaque details the plight of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people under Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. It resembles the pink triangles Nazis forced gays to wear in concentration camps during World War II and states in English, Hebrew and German: “In memory of those persecuted by the Nazi regime for their sexual orientation and gender identity.”
The landmark joins similar memorials in Amsterdam, Berlin, San Francisco and Sydney dedicated to gay victims of the Holocaust. While Israel has scores of monuments for the genocide, the Tel Aviv memorial is the first that deals universally with Jewish and non-Jewish victims alike and highlights the Jewish state’s rise as one of the world’s most progressive countries for gay rights.
“I think in Israel today it is very important to show that a human being is a human being is a human being,” Mayor Ron Huldai said at the dedication ceremony, where a rainbow flag waved alongside Israel’s blue-and-white flag. “It shows that we are not only caring for ourselves but for everybody who suffered. These are our values — to see everyone as a human being.”
Israel was born out of the Holocaust and its 6 million Jewish victims remains seared in the country’s psyche. Israel holds an annual memorial day where sirens stop traffic across the nation, it sends soldiers and youth on trips to concentration camp sites and often cites the Holocaust as justification for an independent Jewish state so Jews will “never again” be defenseless.
But after 70 years, Tel Aviv councilman Eran Lev thought it was time to add a universal element to the commemoration. Lev is one of many gays elected to public office in Tel Aviv, a city with a vibrant gay scene that has emerged as a top international destination for gay tourism.
“The significance here is that we are recognizing that there were other victims of the Holocaust, not just Jews,” said Lev, who initiated the project during his brief term in office.
As part of their persecution of gays, the Nazis kept files on 100,000 people, mostly men. About 15,000 were sent to camps and at least half were killed. Other Nazi targets included communists, Slavs, gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Unlike their persecution of Jews, however, there was no grand Nazi plan to exterminate gays. Nazis viewed being gay as a “public health problem” since those German men did not produce children, said Deborah Dwork, director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

“The idea was to change their behavior, not to eradicate them, not to murder them,” Dwork said.
The policy was far from sweeping — as evidenced by the rampant homosexuality among the ranks of the Nazi Party’s SA paramilitary wing, which helped pave Hitler’s path to power. The most famous gay Nazi was Ernst Röhm, one of the most powerful men in the party before Hitler had him executed in 1934.
Later, the Nazis outlawed homosexuality and the Gestapo set up a special unit targeting homosexuality. In the Buchenwald concentration camp, the Nazis carried out experiments to try and “cure” homosexuality. Those sent to the camps were forced to wear pink triangles, compared to the yellow stars that Jews bore on their clothing. Gay Jews wore an emblem that combined the two colors.
Today, Israel is one of the world’s most progressive countries in terms of gay rights. Gays serve openly in Israel’s military and parliament. The Supreme Court grants a variety of family rights such as inheritance and survivors’ benefits. Gays, lesbians and a transsexual are among the country’s most popular musicians and actors.
Moshe Zimmermann, a professor from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the memorial project’s historical adviser, said the Tel Aviv monument marked a big step in Israel by ridding itself from what he called a monopoly of victim hood.
“We are finally shedding the load of being the lone and ultimate victim,” he said. “We can learn from this that by recognizing the victimhood of others, it does not diminish the uniqueness of your own victim hood.”

Further reading:

The Silver Sword – Book Review

Tel Aviv's Gay Holocaust Victims Memorial Unveiled

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