Pointing out that, on the day marking the 70th anniversary of the relief of Buchenwald death camp, 400 people fleeing from religious and political persecution were drowned when a boat capsized in the Mediterranean, Peter Unsworth asks whether anyone can tell him what we have learned during the intervening period (Cabbages and Kings, April 17).

Two statements spring to mind, the first being the observation at some time by a German, I believe, that the one thing we can learn from history is that we do not learn from history, and the other being Mark Twain’s typically pithy quip that history does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.

Whatever the validity and relevance of these remarks, and regardless of both the extent to which the current problem should be a European one and precisely whom anyone means by “we”, surely the rest of the continent ought to have grasped that far more assistance could and should be given to poor old Italy, which seems to be paying inordinately one way and another for its mere geographical location.

DAVID DIMENT
Riverside Court
Oxford