The dignified silence

The last occasion Dr Vrbova saw her father was in Budapest, whither the family had fled because of the comparatively mild regime of Admiral Horthy. But Horthy was replaced by Hitler because he was not anti-semitic enough, and the subsequent regime grew much more murderous. The last time Dr Vrbova saw her father, he said to her, ‘You must forgive me that I have always made the wrong decisions, and brought you into danger. Your mother wanted us to emigrate, but I had too much trust in my fellow citizens…’ With dignified poignancy, Dr Vrbova, who was 17 when this happened, writes, ‘Somehow I knew that this was the last time I would see him.’ And it was.

Theodore Dalrymple on the callousness of decadent Western youth who revel in self-pity and narcissism, and who are completely ignorant of what it truly means to suffer.