Vanishing Witnesses – World Holocaust Day and the importance of remembrance
Dear all
In Monday’s assembly, we commemorated World Holocaust Day. 27th January was the day in 1945 when the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated. Around 1 million people, the vast majority of them Jewish, were murdered in gas chambers or died from starvation or disease there during one of the darkest periods of human history.
A copy of the assembly reading is pasted below:
‘The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish people by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis and their allies operated over 44,000 camps, ghettos, and other sites used for detention, persecution, forced labour, and mass murder. Children, in particular, had the slimmest chances of survival – of the six million who died, around 1.5 million were young people. It is now 81 years since the end of the Holocaust, and those who survived it are growing fewer in number. A study updated last year revealed that only around 220,800 Jewish Holocaust survivors were still alive, living in over 90 countries. Their median age was 87, the youngest being 78, with a small number who are over 100 years old. 96% of survivors alive today were children during the time of the Holocaust. In the words of Malka Schmulovitz, a survivor who now lives in Florida and is 109 years old, ‘we are running out of time’. We are, it is clear, in the period of time now when witnesses of the Holocaust are vanishing.
Survivor testimony remains at the heart of Holocaust education, but there are other ways to remember. The Holocaust Educational Trust is one of many organisations worldwide that have catalogued stories from that dark period of human history; museums around the world provide documentary and visual reminders and explanations, such as the Imperial War Museum Holocaust Galleries in London. Other forms of remembrance include Stolpersteine, which means ‘stumbling stones’. These are brass plaques placed in the ground across Germany, Austria, and other European countries that mark the last known residence of individual victims. And, of course, Auschwitz itself stands as perhaps the ultimate reminder of where prejudice, division, and hatred led in the 1930s and 40s.’
On Tuesday, many people will have said the words ‘we must never forget’. They are important words. But while millions of people will have paused to think about that dark period of human history, our world does seem to be forgetting the lessons it taught us. In 2024, there was a 113% increase in hate crimes targeting Jewish people in England and Wales. In October, we saw the death of two Jewish men in Manchester following an attack on the Synagogue in which they were worshipping, and just last month 15 people were killed and 40 wounded in an anti-Semitic mass shooting on Bondi Beach, in Australia.
Other hate crimes have also increased – a 19% increase in crimes targeting Muslims and a 6% increase in recorded race hate crimes were also published in October last year.
World Holocaust Day reminds us where hate and prejudice, in whatever form they come, can lead. The Holocaust ended at Auschwitz, but it came after a period of economic and social discontent fuelled and harnessed by the Nazis over a 15-year period, alongside the marginalisation of other groups.
Best wishes
Michael Bond
