Fifty-six thousand runners completing the London Marathon yesterday may well have gasped the words ‘never again’ as they staggered across the finish line. I have never been a runner, but I imagine that even those who willingly endure the 26.2-mile ordeal must feel not only a profound sense of accomplishment but also, at the very least, a fleeting pang of regret.
How could a giant like Nike fail to recognise the most solemn and famous usage of those words?
Yet when I saw the Nike advertisement – hoisted from a crane like an executed Iranian dissident, swaying precariously in front of that modern-day emblem of our capital city, the London Eye – bearing the slogan “Never again. Until next year,” my mind immediately traveled to darker places. What, I wondered, has a running race to do with the Holocaust?
Only last week, my essay commemorating Yom HaShoah, the Jewish Holocaust memorial day, was published in these pages.
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