Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is a hugely important day. It’s Holocaust Memorial Day. I think I should start with a few scary statistics:
  • About 11 million people were killed in the Holocaust. 6 million of them were Jews.
  • The Nazis killed approximately two thirds of all Jews living in Europe at the time.
  • 1.1 million of those murdered in the Holocaust were children.
Obviously, the Holocaust was a terrible thing. But I always struggled to really understand it. As a teenager it seemed to very long ago, done by people far away. That was until I ended up visiting Auschwitz, the biggest of all the death camps.
The main site of Auschwitz has an odd feel. It is a very recognisable location and you know terrible, unthinkable things have happened there. But the gas chambers were torn now before the allies reached there and all you can see is a large open area full of sheds.
DSCF0055
The moment that really affected me was when I was in what is now a sort of museum. In it are piles are objects that belonged to the Jewish victims who were taken there. Crutches, suitcases, shoes, glasses, hair. You can’t help but look at these things and think of the people they belonged to. A large statistic of dead people is horrible, but it becomes a true tragedy when you can really understand that those 11 million Holocaust victims were 11 million individuals. The chances are a large number of them were quite like you- perhaps they did the same job, or had similar taste in fashion or were the same age.
A statistic is faceless, the people it represents are nothing more than a number. But they were millions of beautiful, intelligent, funny, imaginative, wonderful human beings. And we should always remember that.
DSCF0064
These are all photos of genuine victims of the Holocaust. The faces behind the numbers.
Photos of the Victims
I think it is really important to consider how such a thing could have happened. After all, the Holocaust only began due to a dislike of a group of people. I was watching a programme about Adolf Eichmann the other day, the man who organised the “final solution”. This excellent quote came from it:
For each of us who has ever felt that God created us better than any other human has stood on the threshold where Eichmann once stood.
The day I visited Auschwitz, my whole life changed. I was acutely aware at how humble the beginning of it all was and that quote really sums up my feelings. I live my life thinking and treating every human being as an equal, because we are.
I think it is more important than ever to remember the Holocaust. The people who lost their lives for no good reason deserve to be remembered. And here in the UK, and throughout Europe, support for far right political parties is growing. I’m not saying that UKIP or anyone else want to start a new Holocaust, but modern politics is worryingly mirroring what happened in the 1930s. We have a duty to all human life to ensure nothing even remotely like the Holocaust can ever happen again.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventure of the Great Reset

Image
In which I reflect and regroup... I am not going to lie, 2024 has been tough so far. You begin a year with such high hopes and sometimes the year decides to take those high hopes and crush them in the most brutal way.  I'm currently enjoying the tranquility of the summer holidays and a rest that has perhaps never felt quite so well-earned. Perhaps the best piece of advice I was given during the many training sessions I have had over the last few years is to make the most of the resets in your life. That might be small resets, as small as a few seconds in the middle of the day or they might be bigger resets like six weeks off work.  Part of this reset has been getting outside. The year so far has not been helped by the endless miserable weather. We always like to joke in the UK that it rains a lot but this year has taken that to the next level. We often think of climate change as meaning we will get hotter weather but it just means that the weather will change and will get more...
Read more

Best Picture 2024

Image
The 2024 Oscars ceremony is mere hours away and I've finally finished writing my annual post about this year's Best Picture nominees. This is my sixth year doing this and once again I've seen all the nominees. Let's take a look! American Fiction Thelonius 'Monk' Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright who is perhaps best known as Felix Leiter in the Daniel Craig Bond films, is an intelligent African-American professor and writer whose high-brow books sell poorly. Frustrated, he writes a satire of "black" books which is unexpectedly taken by the publishing world to be a serious piece of literature. It's a hilarious film with Wright having lots of fun taking on Monk's alter-ego. At the same time though it's also a clever critique of the sort of media that is consumed by white people to make them feel better about racial issues and the film points out that black people can have normal lives beyond ghettos and gangs- the film itself also tells an ord...
Read more

1000 Miles

Image
Famous Scottish duo The Proclaimers once sang the words "I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more just to be the man who walks a thousand miles to fall down at your door". These lyrics are now part of my plan for 2019. Well, the falling down bit isn't part of the plan but with dyspraxia the likelihood of falling down at someone's door during the next twelve months is not out of the question. I have never tended to set traditional resolutions but I do love a challenge. # walk1000miles is a big challenge run by Country Walking  magazine. The rules are fairly flexible but the idea is simply to walk 1000 miles in a calendar year. 1000 miles is about the distance between the UK and Poland. Now I actually do a fair amount of walking and have hit my 10,000 daily step target every day for nearly three years now. Walking a total of 1000 miles would probably not be a huge challenge if I counted every bit of walking I did, including the many miles of chasing chi...
Read more