Thomas Harding > Quotes

“Since he died some of the colours have disappeared. I have lost the violet of seeing him, the indigo of touching him, the blue of talking to him and the green of smelling him. But I can still see some of his colours. I still have the red of the feelings in my heart, the orange of his possessions, and the yellow of our memories.

Which is why it feels so confusing. He is gone, but not entirely. The white light is no longer with me, but a few of his colours remain; vibrant, illuminating. Sometimes I lose sight even of these colours. I search in the shadows, hungry for another glimpse, desperate that I may have lost them forever. This is my darkness.”
― Thomas Harding, Kadian Journal: A Father's Story

“To paraphrase Hannah Arendt—as portrayed in the recently released movie of the same name—the Nazi war criminal’s actions stemmed from her well-known phrase “banality of evil,” not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss’s case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler.

To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, “normal,” sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.

Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions. And we ourselves must be extra vigilant, particularly in this day of accelerated technological power, heightened state surveillance, and global corporate reach, that we do not delegate our thinking to others.”
― Thomas Harding

“Once a victim, always victim-that's the law”
― Thomas Harding, Tess of the D'Urbervilles; A Pure Woman Faithfully Prsented Volume 1

“The British government had become fearful of how its citizens would react to a wave of Jewish refugees from Germany, and had clamped down on immigration.”
― Thomas Harding, Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz

“In Britain, these Jewish refugees were greeted with a mixture of grudging acceptance by some and open hostility by others.”
― Thomas Harding, Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz

“From birth to death, man is haunted all the time with the fear that life is all a tragedy or a mockery,’ began the rabbi. ‘Man can either become submerged under this burden of existence and pass his days like the animal eating and working and sleeping without any satisfaction to himself but the performance of his daily routine. Or he can rise above the mood of resignation and seek and find the purpose of life in adding to the total of the world’s achievements.”
― Thomas Harding, Legacy: One Family, a Cup of Tea and the Company that Took On the World

“On 27 July 1972, six months after the Commons vote, Brian Salmon stood up to give the chairman’s speech at J. Lyons’ annual general meeting in the ballroom at the Cumberland Hotel. He now announced, with much excitement, that Lyons’ annual profits had increased to £11.1 million – double what they had been in 1968 – while turnover was up to £189 million, an increase of almost 90 per cent in the same period. Brian concluded by saying that the company’s ‘drive for continued growth’ would remain, and that Lyons would be ‘developing increasingly as a European business’. Following the advice of the leading London bank Rothschild, Neil now approached a number of European banks to raise the necessary finance to pay for his acquisition plan. Based on J. Lyons’ good name and its impressive property portfolio, the banks were only too happy to oblige. Most of these loans were taken out in foreign currencies as short-term bridging loans. ‘We judged it preferable to raise such funds in the Euro-dollar,’ Neil told his shareholders, ‘and whilst the terms prevailing were not attractive, we were advised that they would become so in due course.’ Thirty years later, the Blackfriar column in the Daily Express would describe this as ‘the worst advice Rothschild ever gave a client’.4”
― Thomas Harding, Legacy: One Family, a Cup of Tea and the Company that Took On the World

“The day before the wedding, Wendy practised her part with her brother, Peter, who was to give her away. He took her arm and guided her along the corridor that ran through their family’s small home at 19 Alvanley Gardens in north London. Both”
― Thomas Harding, Legacy: One Family, a Cup of Tea and the Company that Took On the World

“At the time there were no consequences to consider. It didn’t occur to me that I would be held responsible. You see, in Germany it was understood that if something went wrong, then the man who gave the orders was responsible.”
― Thomas Harding, Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz

“Pre-Gest-Tee’, a tea that supposedly helped the digestion, although, after a legal complaint challenging this claim, it was renamed ‘PG Tips’.”
― Thomas Harding, Legacy: One Family, a Cup of Tea and the Company that Took On the World