The Silver Sword

"My next book is The Silver Sword , by Ian Serraillier. This is a book that I read as an eight-year-old. It’s a story about a group of children who are displaced in Europe in the aftermath of World War II . Like the Aeneid , this is first and foremost a gripping yarn about some people on the move, and it’s exciting, it’s moving. They’ve lost their parents and are trying to find them. There’s a lot at stake. I remember being gripped by this book and not being able to put it down. It takes place in Central Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Europe was in complete chaos. You had armies on the march throughout the continent, people who had fled because of the war. You had 12-14 million people displaced at that time. I think a book like The Silver Sword is a useful reminder that Europeans, in our very recent past, have been displaced, have been turned into refugees and been involved in a refugee crisis far greater than the one that we are in now. “If you have borders, you’re always going to have people trying to get round them.” That crisis was solved by a European continent that was far weaker than it is now. So as well as being a great story, The Silver Sword reminds us that in Europe’s own recent past, Europeans have been refugees themselves. Many more of them, in fact, than are coming to Europe today. We were able to find solutions to this much bigger crisis in a context where we had far fewer resources. That’s why I’ve included this book in the list — because it is an important reminder of how Europeans really aren’t that different to people coming to Europe today by boat or walking across the Balkans. The first thing is that we’ve forgotten that we were once in the same position, and that we were able to deal with big flows of people in a relatively short space of time. People don’t feel an ethical need to get involved because our memories of history are quite short. I think there’s also a difference between the situation now and the situation then, which is that the people who were displaced within Europe then were themselves Europeans, whereas the people who came to Europe last year are not from Europe and, therefore, there’s a fear factor and a wariness. And, resulting from that, there’s a feeling among some people, for example here in Hungary, that this is not Europe’s problem and that Europe shouldn’t be having to deal with this issue in the way that it felt motivated, in late 40s and the early 50s, in response to 12-14 million people being displaced within Europe at that particular time."