Disrespecting the Holocaust

Jack Lubner looks at the inversion of the Holocaust found in Jim Allen’s ‘Perdition’.

“What you are doing is […] dancing on the graves of people who are no longer alive to defend themselves. I think it’s inadmissible myself.”

These were the words of the late Rabbi Hugo Gryn as he argued on television over the debut of a new play about the Holocaust, called Perdition. Gryn, an Auschwitz survivor, found himself having to defend his community against the charge that Jews were Nazi collaborators who were complicit in their own genocide.

The Royal Court Theatre found itself embroiled in controversy for its decision to stage the play, which has been described as ‘deplorable’, ‘a Stalinist lie’, ‘a complete travesty of the facts’ and ‘deeply antisemitic’. With just forty-eight hours to go before the premier, the Theatre axed the show, and despite frantic attempts to secure a new venue, nowhere else in the country would host them. But how did such a twisted and antisemitic reading of history nearly make its way

on to London’s West End in 1987?

Written by the late Jim Allen and directed by Ken Loach, the play attempts a fictionalised retelling of the libel trial of Rudolf Kastner. Kastner had played a leading role in the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, a Jewish organisation which sought to save Hungarian Jews from the advancing Nazi forces in 1944. Faced with the impending annihilation of Hungarian Jewry, Kastner desperately attempted to plead with Nazis in Budapest to allow him to save as many Jews as possible; an offer they accepted in exchange for the ex- propriation of Jewish possessions. Yet the Nazis’ offer was a ruse and after allowing 1,684 Jews to escape, they swiftly deported half a million Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz, accounting for over two thirds of Hungary’s entire Jewish population. Having survived the Holocaust, Kastner moved to Israel where, in 1953, he sued the author of a leaflet which portrayed him as a Nazi collaborator. In the first hearing, the judges ruled in favour of his accuser before the entire decision was overturned in 1958 by the Israeli Supreme Court, exonerating Kastner. Kastner himself never lived to see his name cleared; he was assassinated by a right-wing extremist less than a year before the final ruling. The tale of Kastner is complex and painful. It is difficult, perhaps im- possible, to truly imagine ourselves in such a situation. Unimaginable hardship. Impossible choices. Or at least, that would be my reaction. The same cannot be said for Loach and Allen. Perdition instead sought to invert the moral lesson of the Holocaust, using it as a stick with which to beat the very Jews who had been murdered under it. Heavily distorting the facts of the case, Allen bizarrely used the Kastner trial as a polemic against Zionism, arguing that Zionist leaders like Kastner had intentionally sent their fellow Jews to the slaughter because it would later help them establish the State of Israel. To be clear, for all the play’s purported “criticism of Zionism”, the play was squarely targeted at Jews. This much is clear from the many, shocking lines from the script, including “[Hungarian Jews] were murdered not just by the force of German arms, but by the calculated treachery of their own Jewish leaders”. Yet, it was clear from the pre-production stage that the play’s judgements on Hungarian Jewish leaders were built on a bed of inaccuracies and untruths. The eminent Holocaust historians David Cesarani and Sir Martin Gilbert reviewed the script, with the latter historian concluding that it contained over 60 historical falsehoods, including “inaccuracies on almost every page of the script”. Neither the historians nor the Israeli Supreme Court found any evidence to support the contention that Kastner or other Jewish Zionist leaders had intentionally enabled the Nazis, let alone as part of any “Zionist plan”. This begs the question of why Allen and Loach, who had no academic training in Holocaust history, were so determined to push ahead with the play in the face of major concerns from academics and the British Jewish community. The answer is perhaps straight- forward, for Allen gives it himself. Writing about Perdition, Allen characterised it as “the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written, because it touches at the most abiding myth of modern history, the Holocaust”. In his eyes, the Holocaust “myth” was that Jews had been exterminated by the Nazis, when in fact, he believed that “Jewish leaders collaborated in the extermination of their own kind” and wrote the play to “prove” his point. In other words, Perdition was pure Holocaust revisionism. To a reasonable person, it would then be clear why so many Jews and historians were so disgusted by the play. Not so for Loach. Rather than engaging with the very real criticisms of the play, he simply regarded the play’s cancellation as evidence of the “strength and power of the [Zionist] lobby”. Never mind the fact that the Royal Court’s own director stated that he cancelled the play because he believed that “going ahead would cause great distress to members of the community”. Perhaps the scent of conspiracy was too appetising. As the play’s director, Loach staunchly promoted it for years to come. In a letter to The Guardian defending the play in 2004, his main reflection was that “the charge of antisemitism is a time-honoured way to deflect anti-Zionist arguments”. It takes a certain kind of person to view Holocaust revisionism as mere anti-Zionism. Perhaps then, it is not surprising that when, at Labour Party Conference in 2017, Loach was asked if it is acceptable to question whether the Holocaust happened, he simply responded by saying that “history is there for all to discuss”. Perhaps it is even less surprising that Loach himself was expelled from the Labour Party in 2021 after continuing to support other members who had been expelled for antisemitism. But we must remember to not lose sight of the core of these events; the Jews themselves who were affected by it. After sitting through twenty-five minutes of Jim Allen arguing for Perdition’s Holocaust revisionism, Rabbi Gryn was asked to give the last word on the television programme, as a Hungarian survivor himself. He said, “A desperate situation, desperate men, doing whatever they could to try and save people and failed. And there is no reason to rejoice over that.” As true now as it was in 1987, that really should be the last word on this appalling episode.