It looks as if snow
is only for kids
from private schools
Barney MacFarlane
It’s worse with Corden in it
Let me introduce you
to the internet version
of the pub bore
Quintin Jardine
Catalonia and language
Jill Stephenson
It is a golden rule of question-setting in exams – if one that is often broken – that questions should not begin with ‘Do you agree…?’.
There is a reason for this: asking if someone agrees with you is a way of leading them to think that they should. In any case, it is quite unnecessary. A simple question generally suffices.
To take one at random: Should Scotland be an independent country? That stands on its own perfectly well without people being made to feel that they should (or should not) agree with Alex Salmond.
I quite see that the devices that I preferred for exam questions are probably not appropriate in this instance. They would read: ‘To what extent should Scotland be an independent country?’ or ‘How far should Scotland be an independent country?’. The difference is that in history exams we try to avoid giving people the chance to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but require them to construct an argument. The referendum is about a clear yes or no. It is about an individual’s opinion on the subject, not about whether s/he agrees with anyone else.
The question should read: Should Scotland be an independent country?
Unlike many publications SR doesn’t have an online comment facility – we prefer a more considered approach. The Cafe is our readers’ forum. If you would like to contribute to it, please email islay@scottishreview.net
Tomorrow is Holocaust
Memorial Day. These
people are part of it
Bob Cant
When liberation came in April 1945, it was more difficult for survivors
than anyone had imagined. Many died of disease and some died of inability
to absorb the wholesome food they were given.
Many men who were sentenced to imprisonment found that, on completion of their sentence, they were sent to a concentration camp. Between 10,000 and 15,000 men, deemed to be homosexual, were transported there. There was a strict system of monitoring the reasons why people were sent there and homosexual men were required to identify themselves by wearing a pink triangle. They were not targeted for systematic extermination in the way that the Jews and gypsies were, but their low survival rate suggests that they may have been subjected to particularly harsh treatment; whereas 35% of prisoners who were Jehovah’s Witnesses died in the camps, the death rate for homosexual men was 61%.
Buchenwald had a programme to develop methods to eradicate homosexuality through use of hormone implants; there was also a scheme whereby prisoners with pink triangles who agreed to be castrated would be transferred away from the camps to factory work. Pierre Seel records how he was beaten and raped – on one occasion with a piece of wood. On another occasion he and his fellow inmates were required to watch while his 18-year-old lover was stripped naked, had a bucket placed over his head and was then ripped apart by guard dogs; classical music provided a background to this butchery.
When liberation came in April 1945, it was more difficult for survivors than anyone had imagined. Many died of disease and some died of inability to absorb the wholesome food they were given. Some homosexual men were astonished to find that, far from being treated on the same basis as other survivors, they were sent back to prison to complete the rest of the sentence that had been imposed on them under the terms of Paragraph 175.
Many were rejected by their own families and communities of origin; the destruction of the pre-war gay culture meant that there was nowhere safe for them. No-one who had been sent to the camps because of his homosexuality ever received a penny of compensation. My fellow historians for the most part ignored the homosexual wipe-out under Nazism. Paragraph 175 was only repealed in 1994. Solidarity with homosexual survivors of the Nazi regime was in very short supply.
There are no happy endings in this particular tale but I was very moved by the story of Rudolf Brazda, the last known gay survivor of the camps; he died in 2011 at the age of 98. He spent three years in a camp and in the chaos of the final days he survived because a friendly guard hid him in a pig sty for 14 days until such time as the Allied troops arrived. He went to France where he worked as a roofer and in 1950 he met a new lover at a costume ball.
They were together for 50 years and it was only after the lover’s death that Brazda came out about his experiences in the camps. When he was invited to Berlin to visit the recently opened memorial to gay victims of Nazism, he flirted with the openly gay mayor of the city. Small comfort indeed but it was clear that the Nazi attempts to terrorise him and de-sexualise him had failed to break his spirit.
Bob Cant is the editor of Footsteps and Witnesses: Lesbian and gay lifestories from Scotland
