The longest journey.

When I was very young about 5 years old there was a programme called "All Our Yesterdays". From recollection, it showed newsreels dating from 25 years ago in that week. Mostly, it showed grainy, jumpy, black and white film of furred and cloche hat-clad ladies launching ships, and long-dead nobility riding in open carriages, waving to respectfully cheering crowds lining the streets.

One evening, it was different. There was no jerky, stiff-upper-lipped nobility, or tributes to British craftsmanship sliding proudly into the sea. Instead, I watched puzzled as skeletons, dressed in striped uniforms, staggered towards barbed wire fences and hung on, looking out at me. There were children (as far as could be ascertained) as well as adults of indeterminate sex.

I recall that somebody in the room with me suddenly realised what I was watching and tried to switch it off. Another stopped them, saying that even children had to learn what the world was like. We went on to watch as the camera panned to mountainous piles of bodies. I do not recall any of the narration, only the hushed, horrified tones. But this was the film of the opening of that most notorious of concentration camps, Belsen; that it could be described in any terms remains a wonder.

Over the coming years, I learned more about the horrors of the concentration camps. To my shame, I learned abut the role of my Roman Catholic Church, and how Vichy French soldiers, perhaps not at the behest of the then Pope, but certainly with no hand raised to stop them, clubbed Jewish mothers with rifle butts to force them to let go of their babies. In my then primary school, I was told that the Jews must suffer "because they murdered Jesus Christ". I remember even then thinking that the merciful God I had been taught about could not have condoned the suffering I had seen for any reason, not even the loss of His Son. When I was studying O Levels, our RS teacher told us that it was believed that Jews must suffer persecution "because it was ordained". I argued with him, saying that if Christ's suffering and death had been foretold in the Old Testament, then the Jewish peoples were carrying out God's Will when they called for the release of Barrabas rather than Christ, and should be revered not punished, because how else could God's Will have been served and our souls saved? I was hushed up quickly and became notorious.

Two years ago, as I write, my daughter, studying for her GCSE history examinations,

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