Ruth Dudley Edwards: ​Republicans honour their dead even when they have done evil acts, we don’t honour sufficiently the people who took the morally brave path

“Man's inhumanity to man/Makes countless thousands mourn!” wrote Robert Burns 240 years ago. That’s the history of the human race, it is our present and it is, alas, our future. But so too, is its capacity for love, for selflessness and for heroism.

And that is why to keep hope alive, we should keep telling the stories of ordinary people who were faced with extraordinary choices and took the right path.

I have just spent a weekend immersed in the story of what happened to three siblings of a Jersey family during the Nazi occupation.

I used to hear something about them from their great nephew, my close English friend Paul Le Druillenec, who had become involved with my Northern Ireland activities, fearlessly accompanying me to parades even in dangerous times.

In 2000, when the Real IRA was a serious threat, I asked him — an accountant — to become a trustee for the families taking a civil suit against the Omagh bombers. He not only agreed immediately, but allowed his London address to be used in crowd-funding appeals and with his staff handled the hundreds of cheques and postal orders.

Last month, Jersey issued a set of six stamps honouring women of achievement, showing two of Paul’s great aunts, Ivy Forster and Louisa Gould, both of whom were betrayed to the Nazis by neighbours.

Both had been secretly harbouring Russian prisoners who had been abused and enslaved by the Germans, and were imprisoned for contravening rules about, for instance, listening to the radio.

Ivy was the lucky one. She served her sentence in Jersey because a sympathetic doctor claimed she was too ill to travel, and post war went into politics and became the first woman elected as a member of the Jersey parliament.

Her tough, big sister Louisa, who had defiantly taken risks to the point of recklessness, in 1942 had taken in Fyodor Buryl, known as Bill, a prisoner on the run.

A widow, one of her two brilliant sons had been killed in naval action, and she saw this beaten, hungry runaway with nowhere to go as ‘another mother’s son’ and made him a member of the family. She ended up being murdered in a gas oven in Ravensbrück concentration camp: survivors remember her courage and determined good spirits.

I have read far too much about the horrors of the world for my own good, but the story of what Ivy and Louisa’s brother Harold Le Druillenec, imprisoned for listening to Louisa’s radio, endured in Wilhelmshaven and Bergen-Belsen, haunts me still. (To read more on Harold Le Druillenec's experiences, ‘The Man From Belsen’, click here)

Starved and tortured and disease-ridden like everyone else, this schoolmaster’s job towards the end was to shovel hundreds of bodies of the dead or dying into pits. He weighed 90 lbs and could not walk but was saved from imminent death on the day Belsen was liberated.

The only British survivor, he recovered to give testimony in courts, and after months of recovery and nervous collapses, would end up a headmaster. He was, though, always subject to nightmares.

These three are a source of pride to Paul and his son. They have had some — but not enough — recognition.

Still, in 2010 in Downing Street, Gordon Brown presented medals to Harold’s widow and the descendants of Ivy and Louisa as three of the 29 British Heroes of the Holocaust. And now there are the stamps.

Republicans honour their dead, even when they have committed evil acts. We not only don’t honour sufficiently the people who took the morally brave path.

We often choose lazily not to counter the vicious propaganda used by bad people to distort history.