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| Stop! The noughties aren't over yet | Richard J Evans I don't mean to be a party-pooper, but if this decade ends tonight then we lost a year somewhere in the 20th centuryAll those of you in the Guardian offices and all across the media, and readers at home, who have been celebrating the end of a dismal decade and drawing up lists of its achievers and achievements, such as they are, listen up! I've got news for you: the decade doesn't end for another year.I know, I know: it sounds really silly: after all these are the noughties, so obviously, they began with the year 2000, and end with the year 2009; and next year we begin the teens, or whatever we are going to call them, which will be consist of the 10 years with 1 as the distinguishing digit. So what am I talking about?Well, it was not always so. What people in the most politically correct corners of academia call the Common Era, the system of counting the years that's generally accepted across the globe, is of course Christian in origin. Most of us still use the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (anno Domini, the year of our Lord) – and why not, indeed? That movie with Raquel Welch bouncing about in a fur bikini wouldn't seem the same if it was called One Million Years BCE, after all.So we divide time into the era before Christ came to live among us, and the time during which he has been living on Earth, in body to begin with, and in spirit ever since he was crucified (I'm summarising the reasons for counting the way we do here; I don't really believe this stuff myself, but the point is, the people who invented our system of telling the years really did). That brings me to the crucial point, which is: there was no year nought. We go straight from BC to AD without a gap. The year one is simply the year when Christ arrived; the year minus one is the year before that.So the first decade of the first millennium was 1-10, the second decade 11-20, and so on. The first millennium ended on 31 December 1000, not 31 December 999 (let's leave aside the arcane topics of when people thought the year began, how many days they thought it had, which year they thought Jesus was actually born in, and how they disagreed about these things, and just project our own method of counting back, for the sake of simplicity).Moving forward, we find that the 19th century ended on 31 December 1900, not 1899. The Victorians knew this well enough: they were still living in an overwhelmingly Christian culture, and they were aware of how to count. So if you look up what the newspapers had to say about the end of the 19th century, you will have to look up the last few days of 1900; if you try the year before, you'll draw a blank.Until very recently, people generally assumed, correctly, that each decade began with a year ending in 1; this is, for example, the year in which the British national census is held, so that the next one will be held in 2011 and not 2010.Sometimes it's argued that while we've been talking for a long time about the 50s, the 60s and so on, going from 1950 to 1959, or 1960 to 1969, we still use the old system for counting centuries. And yet hardly anybody marked the end of the 20th century on 31 December 2000. We'd already done this a year before.The conclusion is inescapable: the 20th century had only 99 years. And we can narrow it down a bit further. Some time in the 20th century, there was a nine-year decade.I'd be willing to bet it happened towards the end of the century. And the reason, apart from the general decay of Christian ways of thinking about time, is also pretty obvious: it's the digital age. Once we all started using computers, we had to get used to their way of working with numbers. Indeed, we got so used to it so quickly that we all panicked unnecessarily about the mythical "millennium bug", when it was widely feared that computers would be unable to cope with the transition from the 1900s to the 2000s. Most probably it was the 90s that had only nine years. Or maybe the 80s. But I doubt if it happened much earlier than that.Far be it from me to be a party-pooper with all this, and in any case, I realise it's a completely lost cause. Our habit of counting the years in decades, centuries and millennia beginning with a 0 is now firmly entrenched. And anyway, does it really mean anything? A decade or a century is a completely arbitrary period in real historical terms. We all know that the 60s really began, historically speaking, in 1963; and when historians talk of the 19th century, they usually mean the period from 1815 to 1914, the Congress of Vienna to the first world war (some prefer "the long 19th century", beginning with the French revolution in 1789). A decade can mean any period of 10 years beginning at any time, and a century in historical parlance doesn't have to consist of 100 years.Still, while you can all carry on celebrating the end of the decade, I'll be stubbornly keeping my champagne corked-up until 31 December next year.Richard J Evansguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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Memories of the Holocaust: Ben Helfgott 'When I heard what happened to my father, I was alone. I cried for 24 hours'One morning, four days Âbefore Christmas in 1942, Nazi soldiers went to the synagogue in the Polish town of Piotrków, where 560 Jews were crammed, and Âdemanded that 50 strong men Âaccompany them to the woods. The men were told to dig five pits and then shot. In one week in October, 22,000 Jews (out of a population of 25,000) had been sent from Piotrków to the Treblinka gas chambers, so the men were under no illusions what they were digging.The following morning, the SS took the rest of the people in the synagogue in groups of 100 to the woods. They were told to undress next to the pits and then they were shot. Among the victims was Ben Helfgott's 37-year-old mother and his eight- year-old sister, Lusia.Twelve-year-old Ben was working in a glass factory outside the ghetto and so regarded as "legitimate" by the Nazis. His 11-year-old sister, Mala, somehow escaped the roundup and his father had a permit to live in the Piotrków ghetto. But his mother and Lusia were seen as illegals and so went into hiding, fearing that they would be Âmurdered. Then the Nazis offered illegals like Ben's mother asylum. It was a ruse, but she and Lusia came out of hiding and were held in the Âsynagogue. It was hardly a place of sanctuary: for amusement, guards would shoot in through the windows, killing and wounding people.Ben's father managed to get a permit for the release of his wife, but could not organise one for Lusia. He begged his wife to come home, but she refused. She wrote to her husband: "You look after the two children and I will have to look after the youngest one."Nearly two years later, with the ÂRussian army advancing across Poland, Ben and his father, along with 300 other Jewish men, were taken from ÂPiotrków to Buchenwald concentration camp. It was the first of three concentration camps in which Ben was held during the war. Ben was 14 when he saw his father for the last time, before he was transferred from Buchenwald to Schlieben concentration camp, where hand-held anti-tank weapons were produced.What does Ben Âremember of those camps? "We didn't have any mirrors," he says. "So you thought it was the others who looked terrible, that you didn't have the Âswollen eyes and deep sockets that come from starvation." He remembers sharing a 2ft 6in-wide bunk with another boy. "There wasn't enough room to sleep on our backs. If you wanted to move in bed, you had to move together. So we lay there, eaten by bugs and lice, packed like sardines."Ben was finally liberated in ÂTheresienstadt in Czechoslovakia in May 1945. He then learned that his Âfather had been shot a few days earlier as he tried to escape from a death march that was headed to TheresienÂstadt. "I was suddenly an orphan. I had heard that my mother and little sister were killed two-and-a-half years before when I was still with my father and my sister Mala. We were able to comfort each other. When I heard what Âhappened to my father, I was alone. Theresienstadt was where I did all my crying. I cried for 24 hours." His father was 38 when he was killed.After liberation, Ben returned to ÂPiotrków with a cousin. "We thought we would be welcome, but we were Âracially abused and almost murdered by two Polish army officers." However, there was good news. Ben's sister Mala, and another cousin, had managed to survive. Later, Ben became one of "the Boys", the young concentration camp survivors who were brought to Britain. Mala was taken to Sweden and the siblings were only reunited in London in 1947.It was here that Ben built a new life. He learned English, went to Âuniversity to study economics, Âmarried, and he has a family of three sons, their wives and nine grandÂchildren. Today he is a Âretired clothing manufacturer.All that, though, misses an Âunexpected chapter in Ben's story. On a summer's day in 1948, the 18-year-old went swimming at Hampstead Heath ponds in London. He came across some weightlifters doing exercises. He asked whether he could try to lift some of the weights. One man said that he thought the weights would be too heavy for Ben, but he lifted 180lbs with ease. He went on to become the only known survivor of Nazi concentration camps to Âcompete in two Olympic games, Âcaptaining Britain's Olympic weightÂlifting team at Melbourne in 1956 and Rome in 1960, and winning bronze at the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff in 1958.What does he think are the prospects for Britain at a time when the BNP is making electoral gains? "The majority of Germans were decent Âpeople, but under difficult economic conditions they followed a demagogue. In Britain now immigrants are sometimes being made scapegoats for Âeconomic failure and the BNP is Âexploiting this situation."Ben also has hope. "The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust was set up by the government to make sure that we do learn the lessons. It's important to Âremember, not just for the Jews, but for everybody."HolocaustSocial historySecond world warguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |