WERE you one of the estimated millions who marvelled at the sheer, awesome power of the Tower of London Poppies?

Like me, did you stand and try and focus on one, single poppy, trying to imagine the face of the man that it may have represented, and then look at the 888,245 others, trying to make sense of it all?

If you wept at this stark representation of human life snatched away then imagine this; not one Tower moat filled with poppies but two, three, four.

Try and imagine six or seven. How long would it take you to walk round that? How much of the human tragedy could you bear? Difficult?

It is. Especially when you consider that to effectively depict in this manner the numbers of Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in the Holocaust you would have to visit EIGHT Tower of London Moats. And you would have to create yet more to take account of the innocent gypsies, gay people, learning disabled and all the other human beings who were mercilessly expunged by the Nazi killing machine.

On Tuesday we will attempt to commemorate these terrible events with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

There will be TV programmes. There will be poetry, prose and music. There will be an effort to try and get our heads round the horrific fate that befell millions of innocent, ordinary people, who were just like us until someone decided to eradicate them.

Because of what happened in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s it was decided that Jewish people – previously stateless – should have their own home and today Israel remains the only country in the world where Jewish people feel they will not be the victim of anti-Semitism. That’s why they go there. That’s why they defend it so fiercely.

You don’t always have to agree with everything the government of Israel does – and I don’t – but to not understand why they do it is to not understand history.

But now more Jewish people are moving there.

Anti-Semitic attacks in France are now so bad that immigration to Israel from that country is at an all-time high. Between Christmas and the New Year nearly 30 vehicles and some houses in an area of North London popular with Jewish people were targeted in a two-day vandal attack.

Only this week the Home Secretary Theresa May had to plead with Britain’s Jews to stay here, in the only country most of them have ever known. “Without its Jews, Britain would not be Britain,” she says.

She’s right.

The Jewish contribution to British life has been enduring and incalculable, from business to the arts, entertainment and our spiritual and philosophic life. More than anything, Jewish people have given the textbook example of what it means to assimilate; to be free to honour their own traditions while respecting everyone else’s.

I have interviewed thousands of people in my time, but I still consider the interview granted to me by Bournemouth’s own Walter Kammerling, the Jewish teenager who fled Nazi Europe, to be the most humbling.

Walter has told his story many times and with good reason – they tried to wipe out people like him and he is a witness to what it really means when anti-Semitism is allowed to take hold.

Listening to his story it’s obvious that it never starts off with gas chambers, but with relaxed attitudes to racism and bullying in the street. It starts off with an obsession with ‘the other’, pointing out so-called ‘racial’ or other differences, making those alleged differences an excuse for treating people differently and badly.

In her meeting on Sunday Theresa May held up the Je Suis Juif sign. She’s more right than she knows. More than 100 years ago my family came here from Eastern Europe to escape the racism and violence perpetrated on people who were Jewish. My husband’s family did the same. If you look back into your history it probably won’t be long before you find some Jewish ancestors sitting quietly in the background.

So while we may prate and debate and waffle on about racism; we may congratulate ourselves on ‘multi-culturalism’ and ‘diversity’ but if we cannot recognise and defeat anti-Semitism then nothing and no one will be safe. Because when it comes to racism, anti-Semitism is the granddaddy of it all. And as Memorial Day will show, we know how it ends.