Choice of words
Many thanks to Hannah Moritz for her eminently sensible Upfront (“Playing the Nazi card”, December 18).
Forty years ago, I spent six months in the company of a number of concentration-camp survivors with telltale tattoos.
One woman I met back then had a different story to tell. When Hanke and her family were being rounded up, a Ukrainian SS soldier (let’s not forget them) took a shine to a gold watch she’d recently been given for her 18th birthday.
When she refused to give it up, he beat her with a rifle butt and left her for dead in the street in the snow. She was rescued by Polish neighbours (gentiles) and spent the rest of the war in one of the ghettos, ready to jump out of her third-storey window if the Gestapo came calling.
At least she survived. Her entire extended family perished in the camps.
Godwin’s Law (from 1990) reads: “As an online
