I’ve been deeply troubled in recent days at a spate of incidents of that have made me wonder just how little the attitudes of many have changed since the end of the Second World War and the revelations of the atrocities of the Holocaust. 

Three separate incidents in very disparate parts of the world have coincided with my completion of a novel based on the memoirs of the husband of the only relative from my family in Lithuania who actually survived the Holocaust.

Miriam told me that 41 of our extended family died at the hands of the Nazis and their more than willing local Lithuanian collaborators. That is an awful toll on one family, but is in no way out of the ordinary when measured against the experiences of other Jewish families from mainland Europe during those terrible years of madness and the ultimate example of man’s inhumanity to man.

When Miriam herself tragically died in 1996 as the result of a traffic accident whilst visiting our family in England, she was the last link with Lithuania save for a collection of family photographs taken at various times leading up to the war that were handed to me by her devastated friends in her adopted home town of Stockholm where she was finally laid to rest. It was a very difficult time for me as I loved Miriam very much and, after the death of her husband, she had planned to join me in the move to Israel. Having survived the worst that mankind could throw at her it was the cruellest of ironies that she never made it to end her days in Israel with me.

On the homepage of my blog I have published a gallery of those family members. I’ve published them so that those people that visit the site can at least bear witness to the fact that these tragic figures once existed in a European country that was overtaken by craziness and evil, by deranged people who deemed them unworthy of remaining alive any longer. From the grandfather figure to a baby carried in the arms of Miriam’s brother, (one of the few people I can identify), to uncles and cousins and more. They were all gassed, or shot, starved to death, or died in any other number of unspeakable ways.

My family was not one of means. They were a simple peasant class family living in a poor village called Vilkija, and in the surrounding area. If you’ve seen the movie ‘Fiddler on the Roof’, then it’s probably fair to say that until 20 years before they were exterminated the family had lived a similar life to Tevye the Milkman and his brood. Indeed, Miriam’s family name was Milchikeh, which means ‘milkman’, for that had been the trade of one of her grandfathers.

If my great-grandmother (Miriam’s aunt) hadn’t had the presence of mind to leave home at the age of 16 (after yet another pogrom - slaughter of Jews -in the area), and board a cattle ship to England in 1899 to escape what she rightly foresaw as a desperate future for Jews in Lithuania, then the probability is that I and my small family in England (as I know it), would never have survived to this day.

And yet only this week, even though everyone knows of the certainty of the death of the six million Jews of Europe, we have had three appalling incidents to remind us that many people have learned nothing and still hold those same prejudices.

At the start of the week the UNHWA reported that they have been forced to remove even the mention of the Holocaust and the lessons to be learned from it, from the syllabus of UN schools in both the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and more predictably, in Hamas-controlled Gaza. Even though I am a staunch advocate of the peace process with the secular Palestinians in the West Bank, it saddens me deeply that this week (and not for the first time) the Palestinian leadership had declared that “the Holocaust was a big lie” and described the teaching of the Holocaust as “a cultural crime”. The UN-sponsored schools appear all but certain to remove the Holocaust education so as not to offend their hosts and cause antagonism.

It was also revealed this week that Germany’s largest insurance company Allianz, are still finding ways not to pay out on the life insurance policies of the many hundreds of thousands of Jewish policy holders who saved with the company prior to WWII. Relatives of the murdered Jews have been campaigning for over 60 years for compensation, but so far only a pitiful 3% of all claims have been settled and it is reported that the German insurance giant is refusing to hand over $20 billion that they were obliged to pay under the terms of the policies they sold to German, Austrian and other Jews from central Europe. Clearly they are hoping that if they continue to stall for another 30 years or so the immediate relatives of the deceased will themselves pass away and the matter will fizzle out. I certainly hope not.

Then there was John Galliano’s drunken Parisian diatribe, apparently (it now seems) the third time in recent months that the fashion guru has made terribly offensive anti-Semitic statements and expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler. The chief designer for French fashion giant Dior was surely going to have to go anyway after his comments were filmed and displayed on YouTube, but it appears the stand taken by Israeli American Oscar winning actress Natalie Portman was the final blow to the reprehensible Galliano and forced Dior to move quickly and show him the door.

Portman, one of the few Jewish Hollywood stars who has the guts to speak out in support of Israel and Jewish causes, regardless of the effect it might have on her career, immediately made it clear that she was disgusted by Galliano’s comments. The Dior model said, “In light of this video, and as an individual who is proud to be Jewish, I will not be associated with Mr Galliano in any way. I hope at the very least, these terrible comments remind us to reflect and act upon combating these still-existing prejudices.” A few hours later Galliano was fired and could now face criminal charges for his vile outbursts.

I shalln’t even comment on the Iranian insistence this week that the recently revealed 2012 Olympic logo is a subliminal Zionist message and should be changed.

I hope next week to talk about something rather more uplifting, but felt that these three incidents were more than worthy of comment.