“I’ll pick up my Tie Pin upon my return from Germany.”

Late July, I wrote a post condemning the spending of some £100 millions to excavate and build yet another Holocaust Memorial, slap bang in the centre of  London. My opinion, stated at the base of my writing, was to ditch plans to build this excavated monstrosity, and go instead with the visionary idea of:- 

“What we do need is to send copies of ‘The Scourge of the Swastika’ to every school, college and University, and make them part of the Syllabus, along with a devastating video named ‘Holocaust: Night will Fall’, and the instruction should be that EVERY student should watch it, in class or hall.

In sending those two items, a simple, terrible, truthful book and a truly authoritative video, to every educational establishment in Great Britain & Northern Ireland; the youngsters who would read those truly terrible yet dispassionate words are the ones who need reminding that a modern European Nation State, along with the vast majority of its inhabitants, both civilian and military, knew what was happening, and did nothing. 

I read this morning of the opening of the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Gallery, and read of the Tie Pin which sounds a louder warning tone than anything possibly planned for the new Holocaust Memorial, to be sited right next to Parliament.

The Tie Pin is accompanied by the sad, terrible but truthful words from a Barclays Bank branch where a man named Marek Kellerman had deposited the pin for safe-keeping in 1939:-

Marek Kellerman was a brush merchant from Bratislava, Czechoslovakia.In 1939, he deposited this tie pin in a branch of Barclays Bank while in London on business. He never returned to collect it. Nothing is known of what happened to Marek, and all attempts to trace him have been unsuccessful. There are many like him.