Rubies and Lemons

  Roma and Sinti Gypsies in Radom, Central Poland.      I have read a great deal about the Nazi period and I have seen a lot of documentary film footage about this evil. But I was completely shocked and surprised by my emotional reaction to the exhibition about the Holocaust, at London’s Imperial War Museum.      The exhibition is staged across eight or nine rooms on the fourth floor of the building. It is, appropriately, dimly lit. It consists of photographs, film footage, objects and audio recordings of survivors.      In the first room there are films of happy, prosperous Jews in Germany in the years before the war: here they are in parks, at functions, in family groups. They are laughing and touching and kissing and hugging and eating and drinking and having the time of their lives. All this was to change, of course.      In the next room we see images of the pathetic moustachioed Austrian, the failed artist, just released from prison for plotting to overthrow the government