One of the most remarkable pieces of television ever made was ITV’s documentary series The World At War. Its opening scene was spellbinding: footage of the deserted remains of Oradour-sur-Glane accompanied by Laurence Olivier ’s chillingly understated words: “Down this road on a summer’s day in 1944 the soldiers came.
"When they had gone, a community that had lived here for 1,000 years was dead.”
The camera then ascends skywards to show how a once-bustling French village had been wiped off the map, along with its people, by Nazi shells and bullets, and was now just an eerie wasteland of crumbled concrete.
It aired in 1973, when I was 15, and shook me to the core. When the series revealed footage of Belsen and Auschwitz, the shock turned to shame and despair. That humans could do this to fellow humans, a mere 13 years before I was born.
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Naively, I also felt a sense of relief that – because the world now saw these horrors, and because advanced technology meant that if such barbarism flourished again we could detect it – those images of wiped-out towns and starving children in advanced countries near us were history. How wrong I was.
For the past 22 months we’ve seen daily snapshots of the horror going on in Gaza – flattened homes, schools and hospitals, dying and starving children, emaciated refugees and rubble.
Accompanied by statistics telling us that, to date, at least 61,020 Gazans have been killed, 150,671 wounded and 1.9 million displaced.
But because Israel has banned foreign journalists from entering Gaza, we haven’t seen the full scale of the horror. Thanks to cameras on aid planes, this week, we did.
And they revealed another post-apocalyptic wasteland of crumbled concrete. Oradour-sur-Glane times one hundred. A community that had been there for thousands of years, gone.
This week also marked the 80th anniversary of America dropping the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, vaporising tens of thousands of people in seconds. ITV News spoke to a survivor, Satoshi Tanaka, who compared what he saw then to Gaza today.
“When I watch scenes of ruins, mothers and children fleeing in panic there’s almost something my body remembers. It is very painful,” he said.
For the record Israel has dropped an estimated 65,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, equivalent to more than four times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, and Gaza’s area is three times smaller.
Also for the record, Israel maintains that Hamas is to blame for this apocalypse after the terror group slaughtered 1,200 innocents and took 250 hostages.
And many in the West agree with them. Including most European leaders like Keir Starmer, who despite belatedly registering his “revulsion” and throwing out meaningless threats to recognise the Palestinian state, will not offer robust intervention because he is petrified of upsetting Israel’s biggest backer, the American President, who hopes to turn the concrete wasteland into Trump Riviera.
The World At War series ended with the same footage of Oradour-sur-Glane that it opened with, only this time Olivier uttered one simple word: “Remember.” Sadly, we didn’t.
Which is why future generations will watch graphic documentaries about the horrors of Gaza and wonder how, in 2025, after all we knew, people in countries like Britain simply sat back and watched this crime scene unfold on a daily basis. And many will say, with some justification, that our fingerprints are all over it.
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