We must fight the spectre of fascism as it looms over Europe again - Dani Garavelli

In a Glasgow Waterstones last week, Henry Wuga - 98, with an irresistible smile and a red bow tie - faced a rapt audience gathered for the launch of Chitra Ramaswamy’s Homelands, a book about his life and their unlikely friendship.

Together, they told how he travelled to the UK on the Kindertransport: the operation that rescued thousands of Jewish children from Nazi-controlled territory on the eve of WWII. Then aged 15, Wuga was taken in by another Jewish immigrant on the city’s southside. Later, he met and married his wife Ingrid and they set up a thriving kosher catering business.

The Kindertransport is often held up as a humanitarian model. And it is true that, without it, many of those children would have been sent to concentration camps where millions died.

Yet - as Wuga and Ramaswamy explained - the mission was driven by volunteers and succeeded despite, rather than because of, the British government. Although it agreed to waive visa requirements for children, it refused to do the same for their parents who were left behind. And the Kindertransport was only allowed to go ahead because of guarantees the refugees would not be a “burden” on the state.

Henry Wuga

Once in the UK, they continued to be treated with suspicion. After the war broke out, Wuga, still in his early teens, was falsely suspected of communicating with the enemy and interned in a series of camps. Sometimes he was locked up alongside Nazis. In one camp, the conditions were so bad some prisoners took their own lives.

There was a collective intake of breath when Ramaswamy spoke of this, in part because the lack of compassion was so chilling; but also because this episode from history felt eerily current. We were hearing it at a tipping point where it no longer seemed impossible that such things could happen again.

Eighty years after Wuga's internment, we are witnessing the fetid fruits of a hostile environment policy which has othered refugees and asylum seekers, presenting them as scroungers.

Ramaswamy acknowledges the parallels in her book. She writes about the Go Home vans which toured parts of the UK threatening asylum seekers with arrest in 2013. And she reminds us Brexit took us out of a European Union born from the embers of the war; a union designed to protect against future atrocities.

The terrifying thing is that, since Ramaswamy sent her final draft to her publisher, the situation has escalated. We now have a war in Ukraine and a UK government once again dragging its heels over taking in refugees. While other European countries immediately waived visa requirements for those fleeing Russian genocide, the Tories refused. As with the Kindertransport, the party’s Homes for Ukraine scheme - which allows householders to sponsor named refugees - passes the responsibility for rescuing the dispossessed from the state to charities and individuals.

With little official oversight, some of those who came to the UK on the Kindertransport were abused and exploited. We are so much more aware of safeguarding these days. And yet anti-trafficking charities say one unaccompanied child a week goes missing from hotels where asylum seekers are accommodated. Those same charities warned Homes for Ukraine was ripe for abuse. And, sure enough, within weeks it emerged men registered with the scheme were offering female refugees a room in exchange for sex.

Meanwhile, not content with putting the Royal Navy in charge of policing migrant boats in the Channel, Home Secretary Priti Patel is now committed to sending asylum seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda, a country whose human rights record has been criticised by the UN.

The plan - which has an initial price tag of £120m - has outraged Labour, charities and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. It is so flagrantly immoral, not to mention expensive, it has even shocked some Tories, including Theresa May who opposed it on the grounds of “legality, practicality and efficacy”. May was the Home Secretary behind the Go Home vans; this is how far we have sunk.

Patel, backed by Boris Johnson, is determined to the point of despotic. She has dismissed criticism from within her own party and invoked the rarely-used “ministerial direction” to overrule concerns from department officials. All this despite the fact the Rwanda plan is said to breach both the Refugee and the Geneva Conventions.

Worse still, the Tories have rejected a House of Lords’ amendment to the Nationality and Borders Bill which would have required parliament to approve any offshoring agreements before they came into force.

The Lords have been trying to temper the worst of the Conservatives’ excesses. One of the most vocal peers is Lord Alfred Dubs, also a Kindertransport refugee, who has called the Rwanda plan “state-sponsored trafficking.” The Bill is still being batted back and forth between the two houses.

Unfortunately, we know from Partygate that the government believes it is above the law, immune to democratic principles and scrutiny. Wuga, of all people, understands the danger posed by such a government. When someone at the book launch asked him how he felt about what was happening today, he was distressed..

In the Waterstones audience were a handful of young people he first encountered when speaking at their school. He has given many talks at many venues. He has borne witness to his experience as a refugee and to the Holcocaust again and again, at a cost to himself, in an effort to prevent history from being repeated.

Wuga cannot keep doing it forever, though. As the spectre of fascism looms over Europe again, it is up to the rest of us to shoulder the burden, and take up his fight.