Mary KennyA history of suffering teaches us to have empathy for modern refugees, writes Mary Kenny
The Germans, some say, have taken a welcoming attitude to refugees and migrants because, frankly, they need the labour. The Financial Times has pointed out that Germany’s birth rate is close to zero and thus Germany needs 350,000 immigrants a year, just to maintain a stable work-force (according to a report by the German research centre Bertelsmann Stiftung).
In 40 years’ time, one-third of Germans will be over 65 – where are the nurses, doctors and care-workers to come from?
This is an analysis which ascribes to Angela Merkel a somewhat utilitarian motive. Mrs Merkel is the daughter of a Lutheran minister, and I would suggest that a Christian conscience has played a part in her sense of compassion for those fleeing the collapsed states of the Middle East and North Africa. There are others who think that a German sense of guilt about the evil deeds of the Nazis is an element in Germany’s leadership in welcoming refugees.
Perhaps this is so, but I think there is another aspect, too. That is, the Germans have a collective memory of what it was like to be refugees themselves after the end of World War II in 1945.
When the Third Reich was subjected to total destruction – the Allies would never again allow Germany to claim that it had not been militarily defeated, as it did after 1918 – millions of ordinary Germans became homeless and embarked on long treks across the country.
By 1950, it was calculated that 12 million Germans had been displaced from eastern Germany – some from areas that had been occupied by the Nazis, but most from historical Germany beyond the Oder.
In his magisterial history set in 1945, Downfall, Anthony Beevor described the pitiful state of German refugees from Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia, fleeing before Soviet tanks. Pushing handcarts, pony traps and even prams, the refugees – mainly women and children – walked across snowbound territory, desperate and starving. Their underfed horses and oxen collapsed; many children died and innocent women of all ages were victims of horrendous gang rapes in Russian revenge for the Nazis’ crimes.
“At the end of January, between 40,000 and 50,000 refugees arrived in Berlin each day,” writes Beevor. By mid-February there were seven million refugees in Berlin.
Another author, Douglas Sutherland, recalled watching starving and orphaned German children trying to steal food: he had to stand by heartlessly because there was a strict rule of “no fraternisation” with Germans.
At this point, Ireland ran a campaign to save the German children and there is a touching monument in Dublin’s Stephen’s Green in commemoration.
The Germans know what it is like to be refugees, just as the Irish know what it was like to experience famine, and from these painful memories of suffering come pity and compassion.
Irish Republicanism’s new unlikely supporter
Politics certainly provide some interesting – even amusing – twists and turns. Her Britannic Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, led by Mr Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow chancellor Mr John McDonnell have expressed more sympathy for the IRA (and for a United Ireland) than any member of the Irish Government – or main Dáil opposition.
I presume An Phoblacht, the Republican publication, will now hail Her Britannic Majesty’s Loyal Opposition (of Englishmen) as among their adorable best friends. What a paradox!
Abortion is not a political strategy
A few years ago I encountered a young woman who was going through her third cycle of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), in what proved to be a vain attempt to conceive a child. She and her husband were a lovely couple and devoted to one another.
But she had to tell him that she had had an abortion as a young student and each time she faced the IVF procedure, she cast her mind back to that decision; it hurt to think about it.
Several Irish Times women journalists have been writing, over the past week, about their decisions to terminate pregnancies, and their colleague – the senior editorial voice in the paper, Fintan O’Toole – has congratulated them for advancing the abortion cause as a political measure.
Individuals must tell their own stories as they think best, but, leaving aside the moral issue, let’s be sensitive about how painful this subject can be for those who have cause to regret, and especially those who have missed their chances of motherhood because a past termination of pregnancy seemed so convenient.
Another childless woman said to me ruefully: “Sometimes I see mothers out shopping with their daughters, arm in arm, and I think: I might have a grown-up daughter now, to share so much with – if I hadn’t terminated that pregnancy. It’s my loss.”
Please remember the women (and men, too) for whom this subject is not a political strategy but a source of personal distress.