My late father used to tell the dramatic story of his journey across Europe to see his parents as the Continent descended into war. This was in the days following the Anschluss, Nazi Germany’s 1938 annexation of its Austrian neighbour.
He was called Michael and had taken the train to his home town on the Hungarian-Czech border.
As he emerged from the station, he was set upon by group of Hungarian thugs from a fascist group later known as the Arrow Cross.
They saw a Jew and mercilessly beat him.
Several weeks later, he escaped to Britain in the belly of a boat from Ostend in Belgium, before eventually finding himself in the ladies’ waiting room at Victoria station.
There, he was approached by an elegant woman in a grey coat who informed him he was in the wrong place and asked about his destination.
Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister since 2022, belongs to the Brothers of Italy party. It traces its origins back to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini
My father replied that he was seeking to visit his elder brother Phillip, who was serving as a Rabbi in St Annes on the Lancashire coast. The lady’s response was to march alongside him all the way from Victoria to Euston station, three miles or so, and then help him buy a ticket.
The contrast between the violent reception in his home town and the courtesy he found in the UK instilled in my father a lifelong belief in the tolerance of the British people.
It was hard not to recall his story when the results from Europe’s parliamentary elections emerged on Sunday.
Once again, the hard-Right populist forces which inspired fascism — and eventually resulted in the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust — have been reawakened.
Eric Ciotti, the leader of France’s Les Republicains, said yesterday that he wants to form an alliance with Marine Le Pen’s far-Right National Rally party
When I voted for Brexit in 2016, my reasoning was both economic and political. The Eurozone’s one-size-fits-all economic policy had cast a pall over the Continent. Unemployment was in double digits and youth unemployment had reached 20 per cent or higher in some countries. My fear was that joblessness and unrest would unleash the forces of intolerance and racism that rained down in the 1930s.
My suspicion had been reinforced around a decade ago by a visit to Budapest as vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (the main representative body of British Judaism) to an assembly of the World Jewish Congress (WJC).
Outside the hotel, delegates were greeted by protesters who held up anti-Semitic banners and chanted Nazi-era slogans. The following day, I took a stroll along the banks of the Danube. A young man, who spoke good English, approached and asked if I was a WJC visitor.
He told me his father, an economist at the Hungarian finance ministry, had been made redundant — because he was Jewish. The young man wanted to know if the WJC could help him get a university place in London.
How could this be taking place in a member country of the European Union?
The answer is that Hungary has seen the rise of the hard-Right and openly racist Jobbik party. And, in response, prime minister Viktor Orban of the Fidesz party has moved to the hard-Right with them.
Hungary proved to be the canary in the mine — a forewarning that extremism and anti-Semitism were back.
Today, we find that voters from the Continent’s most powerful nations, Germany and France, have themselves tracked heavily to the Right.
The Swedish government, besieged by gang warfare and racist unrest in Malmo, is propped up by the Sweden Democrats, a hard-Right grouping. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s extremist Freedom party has emerged as a political kingmaker.
Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister since 2022, is now regarded as among Europe’s most powerful figures. Meloni who belongs to the Brothers of Italy (which traces its origins back to Benito Mussolini) has recently aligned herself with Hungary’s Orban.
Britain’s chattering classes and America’s coastal elites love to pour scorn on Donald Trump and the possibility that a convicted felon could reclaim the White House. But the surge in support of populist and nationalist parties in Europe is the greater threat.
The outrage expressed by European voters is driven by spiralling prices and migration. And by the high price of a green transition which can only lead to a further rise in the cost of living — and yet more anger.
So rattled is Emmanuel Macron by the surge in support for Marine Le Pen’s hard-Right National Rally party that he called a snap parliamentary election. He hopes that the shock of a potentially extremist outcome will bring French voters to their senses.
Demonstrators take part in an anti-fascist rally in Toulouse on Monday after the far-Right crushed Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance in the European elections
Violence broke out in response to the possibility that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party could come to power in France
Yet there is a huge risk that he is wrong — and that Le Pen could soon be running for the presidency as her 28-year-old protege Jordan Bardella is installed as prime minister.
While its leadership might seem more reasonable than in the past, much of National Rally’s party machinery remains rooted in a pro-Vichy, Nazi-supporting nostalgia.
The prospect of Le Pen rule will send shivers through a besieged French Jewish population, the largest in Europe, which is already caught in a pincer movement — between the rise of populism, some of it with an anti-Semitic slant, and Islamic extremism, which is open in its hatred of Jews.
Perhaps most worrying of all, though, are events in Germany. The country’s terrible history, the rise of Hitler’s National Socialists from small electoral beginnings to eventual power, is seared on the national consciousness.
No country has done more to commemorate its murdered Jews and the ghastly history of the Shoah (Hebrew for Holocaust) or to welcome back descendants of exiled families. But there is no mistaking the nastiness and racism of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which claimed almost 16 per cent of the vote on Sunday.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has made it clear that ‘the task must always be to push them (AfD) back again’. Quite right. The AfD is populated by Nazis.
While its leadership might seem more reasonable than in the past, much of National Rally’s party machinery remains rooted in a pro-Vichy, Nazi-supporting nostalgia
One prominent AfD member, Maximilian Krah, has recently stated that ‘not all SS members were criminals’.
Some Jews might be comforted that the main target of Germany’s far-Right are Islamic migrants.
They should remember the words of the German pastor Martin Niemöller: ‘First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.’ The rest is history.
The pro-Palestinian marches, boycotts of literary festivals and rocketing anti-Semitic assaults have deeply affected Britain’s Jews. One of my own grandchildren was verbally abused in the playground for being Jewish. Another is at a school where ‘kill all Jews’ was daubed on a toilet wall.
Many British Jews fear for their safety.
They can also be reassured, however, that when it comes to the ballot box, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have never come close to power in this country. We can be thankful that the tolerance and fairness my dear father found in Britain some 85 years ago still reigns here — in King, country and on the doorstep.
But I worry deeply about the future of the Continent, whose apocalyptic horrors he so narrowly escaped.