Opinion

Tom Kelly: Holocaust should remind us we need to give refugee children a place of safety and hope

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly is an Irish News columnist with a background in politics and public relations. He is also a former member of the Policing Board.

Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews during the Holocaust
Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews during the Holocaust Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews during the Holocaust

As I write this column, it is Holocaust Memorial Day. A day to remember the huge price paid by the international Jewish community during the great darkness of Nazi Germany.

I am still baffled as to how one of the most educated and cultured nations in the world embraced such a warped and wicked political ideology.

That this all occurred within living memory is even more startling.

Having visited Dachau and more recently the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, I am scarred by the inhumanity and savagery of Nazism. The images never leave you - nor should they. It’s beyond hatred; its heinous and evil. And yet somehow the barbarity prevails as different societies lose their moral compass. Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur are genocides which stain the whole of humanity.

Which is why on Holocaust day it is nothing short of stomach churning to see the British government backtrack on their commitments to rescue 500 isolated and unaccompanied refugee children from the squalid camps where they are interned across Europe.

These children have now become part of the bartering between the UK and the EU. The MPs who voted for this should hang their heads in shame. That the Tory party voted for this is unsurprising.

The DUP MPs who voted against the safeguarding of these children should explain themselves to the people of Northern Ireland. On what mandate are they acting? This vote is nothing short of disgraceful.

The so called Dubs Amendment, which was wedged into the Brexit Bill, afforded some protection to a limited number of unaccompanied refugee children. The vulnerability of these children cannot be overstated. Desperation can lead to ever more desperate actions. Imagine being an eight or nine year old alone in camps which are little more than tent jungles.

There are not many 87-year-olds prepared to champion the cause of refugees in a country momentarily rife with xenophobia and rampant English nationalism.

But Alf Dubs, the sponsor of the Dubs amendment, is no ordinary octogenarian. His back story is extraordinary. Alf was just a child when he escaped the Nazis by fleeing the then Czechoslovakia.

He did so courtesy of the Kindertransport organised by Nicholas Winton. Winton was known as the British Schindler and he rescued 669 children. One of those children was the six-year-old Alf Dubs.

Between 1938-39 Kindertransport saved some 10,000 Jewish children by giving them refuge in the UK. Alf still rememberers his two day train journey and how he didn’t touch the food package his mother gave him at the train station in Prague.

So when Alf Dubs speaks up for unaccompanied refugee children he does so not just with conviction but from considerable personal experience. He wears his compassion for these children on his sleeve. He can remember the fears, real and imagined, that ran through the undeveloped mind of an unaccompanied refugee child. Estranged by language, faith and ethnicity it must be a harrowing experience for those children today. The only thing they can hold on to is hope.

The executive administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should give those children such hope. They should prove that they/we are not governed by narrow-mindedness, prejudices and jaundiced views of refugee children.

The Italian government has said that some 6,000 unaccompanied children have gone missing from camps. Some into the clutches of sex traffickers, others into prostitution, some into forced labour. Is it really possible that so many children can simply disappear?

Is looking the other way an acceptable official policy when it comes to safeguarding refugee children? Alf Dubs was one such child and given the opportunity of freedom and a new life look what he achieved. Do those for whom he campaigns deserve any less?