Irish Examiner View: Survival best lesson by far

Like many of truths understood almost by osmosis, most of us recognise that perspective is important. We may do this without absorbing the phrase’s full meaning or the worthwhile comparisons that realisation can offer. And this seems a moment when perspective might be especially valuable, as it might even justify a flicker of optimism.

Speaking to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch yesterday offered a perspective that has real value, one shaped by the integrity of first-hand experience.

She suggested that the pandemic might help remind the world that “people are people”. Lasker-Wallfisch, who survived the camps because she was a musician and could entertain her persecutors, suggested the pandemic might also slow the rise of populism.

Some people, revealing more than they might know, might dismiss that suggestion as a glib, predictable response , but, as her experience of “populism” is so very different to anything we have experienced, it has real value.

The horrors of the Second World War have been invoked

so often that we have, as it fades from living memory, become almost dangerously blasé about its dehumanising savagery. Lasker-Wallfisch and her peers cannot be that. The perspective she offered this week is extremely valuable and pertinent, but her very survival seems by far the greater lesson.