It never stops being moving, seeing those two children waiting forlornly by the steps leading down to the underground lines at Liverpool Street station.
But there they are, a young girl and boy, always alone, with only their meagre belongings for company.
It’s a humble sculpture called ‘Fur Das Kind’ — ‘For the Children’ — that quietly asks us to remember the 10,000 or so Jewish youngsters that arrived at this railway station in 1939, fleeing the genocidal anti-Semitism in mainland Europe that murdered the vast majority of those children’s parents, along with 6 million other innocent Jewish people.
During the evening rush hour on Wednesday, that statue could barely be seen — lost as it was amidst the sea of Palestinian flags and protesters thronging the station.
Bella Wallersteiner, whose Jewish grandfather arrived at Liverpool Street during the Holocaust, pointed out on Twitter that “some Jews had to leave the station because they felt so intimidated.”
TV presenter Rachel Riley, awarded an OBE for services to Holocaust education, similarly described the scene and others like it as “intimidating and terrifying and designed to be”.
You can understand why Jewish people feel harassed and under threat — because they are.
In London, we’ve seen posters of kidnapped Jewish children torn down, songs like “from the valley to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which if logically interpreted would involve the destruction of Israel, chanted on the streets, and black paraglider symbols grotesquely worn as badges of honour.
That’s not about criticising the Israeli government — which is a perfectly legitimate thing for anyone to do, if they want to. No, this is something much darker, and deeply abhorrent.
Indeed, the Metropolitan police report that there has been a 1,350 per cent increase in hate crimes against Jewish people in the capital since the outbreak of war. Dave Rich from the Community Security Trust rightly points out that “other foreign conflicts such as the war in Ukraine do not trigger similar outbursts of hate crimes here in the UK. It is shameful and appalling that this still occurs in modern Britain."
Sadly, this disgusting anti-Semitism isn’t restricted to our shores. In Berlin, a synagogue has been firebombed. In Paris, Jewish homes have been marked with crudely daubed Stars of David. In Sydney, protesters yelled “gas the Jews”. And in Russia, a violent mob stormed Dagestan airport to attack passengers arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv.
It’s absolutely heartbreaking, I feel completely paralysed by the eruption of antisemitism in London
The late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks — one of the great public intellectuals of the past hundred years — once reflected that “anti-Semitism is a virus that has mutated three times in the course of 2,000 years, and we are living through the fourth mutation.”
The earlier mutations involved Jewish people being hated for their religion, and then their race — but the latest version is focused on Israel, and the denial of the nation’s right to exist.
Or as Sacks once wrote, more eloquently than I ever could: “The ultimate weapon of the new antisemitism is dazzling in its simplicity. It goes like this. The Holocaust must never happen again. But Israelis are the new Nazis; the Palestinians are the new Jews; all Jews are Zionists. Therefore the real anti-Semites of our time are none other than the Jews themselves.”
Feminist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali puts it more bluntly: “anti-Semites the world over have been emboldened by this crisis, and Jews are once again being blamed for their own massacre.”
You see this dynamic everywhere.
For starters, it’s in the way that the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 — the murder of babies and children, the torture and execution of adults — have been widely celebrated as “liberation”.
And then — beyond the rampant and overt anti-semitism we’re seeing — you see almost complete apathy as Hamas leaders like Ghazi Hamad make public statements like this one: “We will repeat the October 7 attack time and time again until Israel is annihilated.”
It’s absolutely heartbreaking, and I’ve got to confess that I feel completely paralysed by the eruption of antisemitism in London and beyond.
There’s a beautiful play by Arthur Miller called ‘Broken Glass’, about a Jewish man and wife living in New York during the 1930s. Suddenly the wife finds that she can’t move her legs or get out of bed — and it turns out that her affliction is entirely psychological, caused by her fear and sadness at the the growing violence against Jewish people in Europe.
After the Holocaust, our leaders vowed “Never again” — but in London and beyond, anti-Semitism is mushrooming yet again.
It’s not just Jewish people that ought to be standing up against this despicable toxicity — it’s all of us.
As the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wisely wrote: “Anti-Semitism is a hatred that begins with Jews, but never ends with Jews. And that is why we have to stand together.”
