Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day which is a memorial day which doesn’t seem to get the attention it deserves it despite it being probably more important than any other. 


It can be hard to process the sheer number of people that were murdered in the Holocaust. As a huge number it’s fairly meaningless but it’s individual stories to bring home the true atrocity.


Take the story of Vilma Grünwald who was 39 years old. She had been held at Auschwitz for seven months along with her husband and two sons (though they were held separately). SS doctor Josef Mengele spotted her son John walking with a limp and directed him towards the gas chamber. Vilma couldn’t let her son go alone so she immediately followed him. She managed to get a note to her husband who survived the death camp which is how we know this story.


When you read very human stories like this it feels horrifically more real. 


Back when I was 18 I visited Auschwitz and it was an experience that forever changed me. It taught me to live my life spreading love rather than hate and defined my philosophy that all humans are equal, no matter race, religion, sexuality, gender or anything else that supposedly separates us. I learned how the Holocaust began as a low-level dislike of a group of people and developed into murdering them in the millions. 


The project I was part of was all about learning the lessons from history and not allowing this sort of thing to ever happen again. I think I understood that to some level but as I saw and heard the terrible things that happened I don’t think I really believed that it could happen in a modern country. The events of the last few years though have made me realise that actually it really is possible.


You only have to look at how America manage to elect a president who spread hate and was openly racist and whose presidency ended with a group with his support storming a government building shouting about lynching people to see that the dark side that existed in Nazi Germany still exists in the world today. It’s easy to think of it is just a minority of people that have these extreme views but actually millions of people voted for Donald Trump despite the majority knowing exactly what sort of man he was. It doesn’t strike me as a great leap from the things that were happening at the end of the trump presidency to atrocities on an even more severe level.


It’s easy to say “well that’s America, that’s different, it’s not like that in the UK” but we’re not even that far away from it. As a society we have allowed the Windrush generation to be treated horrendously over the last few years and during the pandemic it’s been ethnic minorities that have had far higher death rates. My local MP was photographed wearing black face yet somehow still won by a huge majority. Boris Johnson has very openly made racist remarks yet the general public still allowed him to become Prime Minister. 


My point is that dark undercurrent that allowed Adolf Hitler to be elected which eventually led onto the Holocaust still very much exists today. It’s pretty much 100 years since the rise of fascism in Europe yet things haven’t changed at all. And that’s why I think Holocaust Memorial Day is so important because the lessons have not yet been learned and so we must keep remembering the horrors of the past and proactively work to stop them happening again.

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