It’s Holocaust Memorial Day in Jerusalem and I’m standing semi-naked beside a metal detector at the Yad Vashem monument. A shaven headed, effeminate male guard pats me down rather too intimately whilst a tall, burly girl in army fatigues looks on, along with hundreds of other Jewish citizens. This is humiliation on a grand scale. If I were Palestinian and had to put up with this every day I too would hate Israelis with a passion.

‘Why are you here?’ the girl demands.

‘I was at Auschwitz last year and found it so terrible that I wanted to pay my respects.’

‘No. Here. In Israel. Why?’ I explain that I’ve just walked from Egypt to Jerusalem.

She laughs dismissively and repeats the question.

‘I told you,' I insist, 'I walked to Jerusalem. Through the Negev desert.’

‘The whole Negev?’ she sneers. ‘Impossible. Nobody can do that. Take off your shoes and money belt. Now wait here, there’s something wrong with your passport.’

After twenty long minutes four not very plain clothed police arrive to escort me to the memorial entrance.

‘I’d really like to know what this is all about,’ I ask as we walk.

‘The British Embassy told us that you’re a peace protestor, and we don’t want our commemorations disrupted at all.’

‘No,’ I say with my eyes fixed on them, ‘I have never been in any trouble. I am not a peace protestor’.

‘Really? Then why are you here?’

At that moment, as we walk between avenues of pine trees, the remembrance siren sounds for two minutes silence. We stop and stand motionless, looking up at the sky. Birds sing but no other sound can be heard. My thoughts drift back a year or more to Poland.

I’d arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp entrance gate early and stood alone. If it weren’t for the signs I wouldn’t have believed that I was in a place where over 2 million people had been executed. It was nothing like the books had told me. It didn’t stink of evil. The ground was sprouting flowers and the air was full of birdsong. The tales I’d heard about animals not living in the place were the usual journalistic lies. In fact, the birds sang louder than ever before. It was as though nature was shouting,

‘Hey, this had nothing to do with us. This was you, you, YOU!’

In the barracks mounds of human hair stood as evidence of the Nazi crimes, alongside thousands of shoes, suitcases and other personal effects. A picture of Hitler glistened with layer upon layer of spit. As the morning grew old I was joined by others. Japanese tourists told jokes in the gas chambers. Some Dutch ate snacks whilst leaning against the firing squad wall. British laughter rang throughout the underground dungeon where Nazi soldiers had first experimented with gas on Russians and Poles.

Three kilometers away sprawled the huge Birkenau camp. It had taken me thirty minutes to walk from the entrance gates to the gas chambers, most of which were now reduced to rubble, the entrances worn heavily by millions of feet taking their last steps. A small lake beside one chamber still had a slick on its surface, created by the ashes of burnt people dumped into its waters sixty years ago.

At the main gate I’d been sat out of sight collecting my thoughts when two German ladies, they looked like mother and daughter, had walked out of the camp. One had stopped under the famous sign that hung over the gate whilst the other moved forward, turned around and raised her camera. As she’d clicked, her mother had given a military salute. On a nearby wall a sign warned:

‘Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.’

I’d been stunned. After all they’d seen that day, how could they?

Signing the visitors’ book, all I could write was, ‘I have no words, anymore.’ I’d thought of the naked, disfigured dead bodies, not just in Auschwitz memorabilia but in modern news reports from around the world. I’d thought of people in my own area in England, fighting with Kosovans and other refugees, using bits of copper pipe and belts because gas chambers weren’t allowed, though I was certain they’d use them if they could.

The two minute remembrance silence ends. At the front gate I call the British Embassy.

‘Sorry, our computer has been broken down all morning, we can’t check about your passport.’ The truth dawns. There had never been a problem with my passport at all. With the computer down it’s a physical impossibility. The Israeli’s hadn’t wanted me in the Yad Vashem monument because, simply, I’m not Israeli.

At the moment set aside for respecting the victims of the holocaust I’ve been held captive by Jewish plain-clothes police, people who really should know better, and discriminated against simply because I’m different from them, a foreigner. How shameful.

I walk back into Old Jerusalem. Palestinian kids crowd internet cafes, playing virtual war games, as if the constant gunshots and blasts outside the doors aren’t enough to keep their attention. Jews and Christians jostle me, sneering ‘peace protester’. Muslims spit at me, shouting, ‘English, dogs of America.’ TV's show images of Gaza and Lebanon burning.

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