NICK FRIEND: We are nine months on from the discovery of anti-Semitic messages sent by Rafiq in 2011, during which time the former Yorkshire off-spinner has attempted to educate himself on Judaism; he reflects on the hurt caused by those comments
In January, Azeem Rafiq attended the 75th annual lunch of the Anne Frank Trust to commemorate the anniversary of her diary's publication. He did so carrying an overriding sense of embarrassment.
The Duchess of Cornwall was its guest of honour and Joanna Lumley the guest speaker. Rafiq was a candle-lighter, playing his part in a remembrance ceremony for the lives lost in the Holocaust and, on a greater plain, for the victims worldwide of genocides and hate crimes.
A few months earlier, Rafiq claimed – to significant, far-spread surprise – that he hadn't been familiar with the persecution of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis until meeting Lily Ebert, a Holocaust survivor, last November. Understandably, that admission came as a particularly jarring revelation that feels difficult to square: a British-educated man of the 21st century who had never heard of the Holocaust.
"My PR guy said to me: 'Are you sure?'" he tells The Cricketer.
His encounter with Ebert was only taking place because of anti-Semitic messages a decade old uncovered in the aftermath of Rafiq's appearance before the DCMS committee. Some argued that he should be discredited and could no longer be the whistleblower he'd become. Others considered the discovery of his own comments to prove his point about prejudices in the game and "how far we've got to go and what a big problem the game has in accepting minority groups and discrimination". Certainly, what they did not do was delegitimise his own suffering. "One doesn't cancel the other out," he puts it.
Rafiq's response, though, has been to own a situation from which he knew he couldn't shy away, and it is why this conversation can take place now, discussing Judaism at length with a Jewish interviewer.
"When they came out and I spoke to my team, I remember it very clearly," he says. "I knew it was going to be horrible for me – and deservedly so. But if you look at the bigger picture here, it brings another minority group into the conversation that have not been treated well enough."
Rafiq - second from left - returned to Headingley earlier this year for the Test match between England and New Zealand (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
Rafiq is in no doubt: he is a better person not only for having faced the music, but also for having corrected a blindspot in his education. In May, he took part in the March of the Living between Auschwitz, the labour camp, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where more than a million people were murdered across a four-year period.
Rafiq touches on the Community Security Trust as well, a charity set up to protect the Jewish community in Britain, with whom he has been in touch. He is thankful, too, to Alex Sobel, the MP for Headingley – "one of my biggest supporters" – and a Jewish man himself.
"I've had a lot of people across different organisations," he says, listing several of those to have reached out from the community since last autumn. And Rafiq is fervent in his gratitude to the many Jewish people who forgave him for his anti-Semitic slurs and accepted his mea culpa.
As it was put at the time by Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews: "Azeem Rafiq has suffered terribly at the hands of racists in cricket, so he will well understand the hurt this exchange will cause to Jews who have supported him. His apology certainly seems heartfelt, and we have no reason to believe he is not completely sincere."
Of course, van der Zyl can't speak for everyone, and there will be those for whom that is not yet the case. Rafiq understands and accepts that prerogative. On whether he is aware of the gratitude back towards him from those organisations – for making good on his word "to front up" and not "defend the indefensible", as he wrote in the tweet that marked the start of his response – he is less comfortable.
"That's the least I could have done," he explains. "I hurt you guys, and that hurt me. The evening that it all came out, I felt like I'd let everyone down. I'd hurt the Jewish people, and that didn't sit right with me. That's the absolute least I could have done.
"People will have their opinion, and they can continue to have that. But I've built friendships with organisations and individuals that will be there for a lifetime. I think it's just the absolute minimum I could have done to apologise, and I will continue to do that."
Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, speaks during the event to mark Holocaust Memorial Day and the 75th anniversary of the publication of Anne Frank's diary (Chris Jackson/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
There are those who have criticised Rafiq for going public with his anecdotal displays of outreach. They will suggest he could have attended the March of the Living in private and could have met with Holocaust survivors behind closed doors for his own education. They will question why Rafiq felt the need to conduct interviews with the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News in the immediate aftermath. But, in reality, had he done all those things on the downlow, he'd have faced the opposite questions in response. Why had he not reached out? What had he done to prove those were no longer his views? Rather, he has set a bar for making amends in his efforts to educate himself.
"All I ever asked anyone else to do was to accept it, apologise and work out how it's not going to happen again," he says. "That's all I asked anyone else to do. I've done it with an open heart, and I've done it because I wanted to do it."
His message for those who haven't seen Auschwitz is to visit. "One thing I would say is, for anyone who can, please go. It's not easy, but it's so important to know what the people went through.
"Once you've been there, it leaves a mark on you in a way that nothing else can. It was heart-breaking in so many ways, understanding what actually went on and why it went on, and how humans could do this sort of thing to each other."
It was the March of the Living organisers who first floated the idea, and he had committed to travelling to Poland before realising that the trip would coincide with the final week of Ramadan.
"I was nervous about what I was going to see," he admits. "I was scared. But until you go there and start to see things, hear what happened and listen to the survivors, it hits you in a way that is so hard to describe. The mass level of atrocities, and how many lives were murdered. The way they were murdered.
"I found it incredibly difficult as a non-Jewish person who didn't have my extended family murdered. But we had a bus of inter-faith people, and for the Jewish people it must have been so heart-breaking – you're walking on the land that your family was murdered on.
"And yet, somehow someone from your family survived – and that's why you're here. Confronting that must be really difficult.
"I took my sister with me as well, but my heart broke to see how some of the Jewish people on our bus were feeling."
Roses hang from the fence at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp during the week of March of the Living earlier this year to honour victims of the Holocaust (Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images)
The leader of the group on Rafiq's bus has been doing the job for seven years but only last year found out that her family had been killed there. By his own admission, the systematic brutality of it all has not fully processed in his mind. He recalls the sight of rooms full of victims' shoes and hair, and he lets out a gasp as he attempts to describe them. Those sights began to build a mental image of the sheer scale of the atrocities.
"When we did the walk on the last day between the camps, there were only 3,000 of us. But you turned around and you saw a sea of people. Put that into some sort of context – that used to be millions."
To make that trip as Rafiq did – with no prior knowledge – must be particularly surreal, though no less harrowing. "Not to have a picture of what it was going to look like, I think that helped me absorb the information right where it happened," he says. "My overriding feeling was this: why? Where was everyone else? This didn't happen over a week or two months. Where the hell was the rest of the world?"
He says that the first he knew of the Holocaust was in listening to Ebert at Kinloss Synagogue as she rolled up her sleeve to show him the fading serial number tattooed on her forearm that acts as a permanent reminder of the dehumanisation at the hands of the Nazis.
Ebert was born in Hungary but has lived in London since the 1960s and during lockdown – with her great-grandson, Dov Forman – co-authored Lily's Promise: How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live.
Among many poignant quotes in the memoir of Eddie Jaku, another survivor and a remarkable activist for peace, who died last October in Australia aged 101, is this one: "In my mind, this is really the best revenge, and it is the only revenge I am interested in – to be the happiest man on Earth."
Rafiq is desperate not to conflate – let alone compare – what he has been through with the incomparable experiences of those who suffered at the hands of genocide, but one of his major takeaways from the March of the Living is an inordinate respect for the dignity and grace of those willing to share their horror stories.
"Not only having to live with it, but how they talk about it is an example to us all," he says. "They are an inspiration, and I can get a lot from the way they carry themselves."
Prince Charles speaks to Lily Ebert, alongside a portrait of her commissioned by the Prince of Wales to pay tribute to Holocaust survivors (Arthur Edwards/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
There is an additional significance now, as the years tick by and the number of remaining survivors diminishes further. It will never feel believable that the Holocaust took place only a lifetime ago, but in the near future that will no longer be the case. "We had that conversation," says Rafiq, "so, I feel incredibly honoured to have heard from so many." As a consequence, he is working with March of the Living to encourage more people to make the trip – and to do so while there are still survivors to speak with first-hand experience.
He built a relationship with Agnes, a Hungarian survivor on his bus. They have exchanged email addresses. "What a lovely lady," he adds. Rafiq was wary of overburdening her with questions and taking too much of her time, but he is keen to reconnect and talk further about how she found the strength to preach positivity, having seen the worst of humanity.
"They are incredible people in so many ways, and that is one of them: how they've experienced that and yet they can still sit and talk about it and the positives of their lives.
"Listening to them speak and how clearly they spoke about their experiences is something I will probably relate to on a daily basis."
Because, for Rafiq, his reality as a figurehead for change in English cricket is still nascent, and he knows that what comes with his own journey is a need to share – and reshare – the experiences of his career, even if they evoke painful memories. For how much longer he wants that to be his calling is both contrasted and intertwined with a sense of duty.
"It's not healthy," he says, knowingly. "It's incredibly challenging, it's incredibly draining. But I have to do it. I have a responsibility to a lot of people, who get in touch and have suffered in the same way as I have. It's important that they get closure in the way that I am still searching for. If I have to continue to do it, I will continue to do it because I know how much of a difference it is making to people at ground level.
"I didn't speak out as a British Pakistani Muslim; I spoke out as a human – a broken one at that. I think it's helped the cause. I don't know where I will end up, but I couldn't care less. It will hurt if I'm nowhere – of course, it will – but actually if I can make a difference to people's lives across the board, I can go into my grave with some sort of pride. And that will be enough for me."
Participants take part in this year's March of the Living (Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images)
What has "stood out" more than anything to Rafiq in getting to know the Jewish organisations he reels off is the work they do across the board around discrimination of all kinds. He has suggested that the Anne Frank Trust "and their ways of education" are considered by cricket as the game looks to improve: "I've been part of their youth conference and quite a large percentage of the kids there are people of colour and Muslims. There are people from all faiths on their workforce; it's such an integrated, lovely organisation for humans and bringing everyone together."
Rafiq has maintained since his anti-Semitic comments were first uncovered – centred on the millennia-old tropes of stinginess and greed – that they stemmed from a place of ignorance rather than hatred. "You know," he says, "the caste that I come from, the same connotations are attached to us, which again I didn't know about. To give you a flavour of my upbringing and background, I literally just played cricket. I didn't do anything else other than play cricket.
"I've tried to look back at why I might have made the comments that I did. Until I went to the Jewish community with the Jewish Chronicle, I didn't know there was a connotation to what I said. My comments didn't come from a place of cultural knowing. But they did hurt. If I had spent time with Jewish people or learnt more about what they were about, I'd have known that and would never have said that."
Rather, he cannot recall having played with or against Jewish cricketers and spent the crux of his childhood immersed in the pathway bubble, before captaining Yorkshire's T20 side at 19. A special report by The Cricketer earlier this year supported Rafiq's assertion on that subject; there has hardly been a Jewish player in county cricket in recent memory, and there are just two Jewish amateur clubs nationwide remaining on a dwindling circuit. He asks why that is, a complex question explored in detail through the piece referenced above, but without a nailed-down answer.
"We share a feeling and a hurt, and that binds us together," says Rafiq, reflecting on the connection between oft-discriminated-against minority groups. During the Test match at Lord's between England and New Zealand, he met Rabbi Nicky Liss – present on behalf of the Chief Rabbi as an authority on the game – who was in attendance to celebrate the opening of a multifaith room.
"I think for the game as a whole, we need to spend more time together – in each other's faces – learning about each other's culture and religion," says Rafiq. "Then, I don't think you go down that road or make comments like I did.
"Eoin Morgan said it: players need to realise that they're more than cricket players, and the sport needs to realise its purpose is more than winning a game of cricket. Ultimately, you have a responsibility to the whole community that you're serving and the society that we live in."
If you are interested in participating in March of the Living – or for more information – please contact cassie@marchoftheliving.org.uk
Welcome to www.thecricketer.com - the online home of the world’s oldest cricket magazine. Breaking news, interviews, opinion and cricket goodness from every corner of our beautiful sport, from village green to national arena.