I watched The Eichmann Show on BBC Two for the first time last night: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b050d2t9 It's the riveting dramatization of the quest to televise the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. I was particularly mesmerised by the expressions on Eichmann’s face when a succession of survivors of the Holocaust gave accounts of the horrors they had experienced. After seeing it, I was reminded of an incident during my time as a social researcher.
It’s the early Nineties, during the heyday of City Challenge, the jolly jape invented by Michael Heseltine to force Councils to compete for a share of the Tory Government’s meagre pot of urban regeneration money. I’m in Hulme in Manchester, a decaying crime-ridden Council estate, one of the largest and worst in Britain, and a winner of the aforementioned City Challenge. I’m in a particularly bad part of the estate, there to give a presentation to local tenants of the results of a door-to-door survey of residents’ priorities for regeneration. It’s one of a series of disappointing presentations – disappointing, because hardly anyone turns up to them. And on that particular evening, only one person does turn up. He’s an elderly Polish gentlemen, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Out of courtesy, the Council staff and I agree that I should go ahead and give my presentation to this lone man, which I duly do to an otherwise empty hall.
The old man listens attentively to what I have to say, smiling and nodding throughout. Afterwards, he shakes my hand and thanks me for letting him hear the results. I like this quiet, dignified gentleman very much. The Council staff make sure he has a cup of tea and a biscuit. Then they escort him back safely to where he lives, one of the many half-empty, brutal, concrete high-rise blocks that dominate the estate, the blocks that the original wanker of a posh architect christened “streets in the sky”. But it’s the place he calls home. It’s been his community for over three decades, a community that has been systematically destroyed by the jakeys and dealers, the scroungers and scrotes, the thieves and thugs, not one of whom could begin to imagine the suffering he has gone through in his life.
It’s the early Nineties, during the heyday of City Challenge, the jolly jape invented by Michael Heseltine to force Councils to compete for a share of the Tory Government’s meagre pot of urban regeneration money. I’m in Hulme in Manchester, a decaying crime-ridden Council estate, one of the largest and worst in Britain, and a winner of the aforementioned City Challenge. I’m in a particularly bad part of the estate, there to give a presentation to local tenants of the results of a door-to-door survey of residents’ priorities for regeneration. It’s one of a series of disappointing presentations – disappointing, because hardly anyone turns up to them. And on that particular evening, only one person does turn up. He’s an elderly Polish gentlemen, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Out of courtesy, the Council staff and I agree that I should go ahead and give my presentation to this lone man, which I duly do to an otherwise empty hall.
The old man listens attentively to what I have to say, smiling and nodding throughout. Afterwards, he shakes my hand and thanks me for letting him hear the results. I like this quiet, dignified gentleman very much. The Council staff make sure he has a cup of tea and a biscuit. Then they escort him back safely to where he lives, one of the many half-empty, brutal, concrete high-rise blocks that dominate the estate, the blocks that the original wanker of a posh architect christened “streets in the sky”. But it’s the place he calls home. It’s been his community for over three decades, a community that has been systematically destroyed by the jakeys and dealers, the scroungers and scrotes, the thieves and thugs, not one of whom could begin to imagine the suffering he has gone through in his life.