Remembering Auschwitz on Holocaust Memorial Day

This year, Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Today's services of remembrance honour the six million Jews - two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population - murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, as well as millions of others - political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, gays, blacks, those with disabilities.

But no memorial service, no book or film or TV documentary, can adequately commemorate what happened during the Holocaust: the systematic and targeted persecution and killing of Europe's Jews. The humiliation, torture, starvation, and annihilation of an entire people in a world scarred by prejudice. The Holocaust didn't begin with Auschwitz, it began with hate. It began with the separation in people's minds of 'us' and 'them', of stigmatising Jews because they were considered different. Jewish property and businesses were vandalised, Jews suffered public humiliation in the streets and town squares, their children were forced out of their schools, and parents forced out of their homes. Eventually Jews became dehumanised to such a degree that they could be killed like vermin, gassed using a pesticide, Zyklon B.

Eighty years on, we see the same process of stigmatisation. It has become acceptable political discourse to dehumanise migrants. Our politicians exhort, "Stop the Boats!" and "Send them Back!" Minorities are increasingly coming under attack - be they Jews, Muslims, migrants or members of the LGBTQ+ community. Political parties and other organisations espousing far-right views are on the rise across Europe and the Americas. It feels like the lessons we thought we had learned from the Holocaust are being forgotten, and soon there will be no survivors left to remind us.

The words of a plaque on the site of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau are more poignant than ever: "For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity". 

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2018. The tour, conducted by a guide whose great-grandfather had survived the camps, was haunting. Appalling, gruesome, sickening….there are no words that can do justice to the horrors perpetrated there. The visit is something everyone should experience. It records events that should never be allowed to happen again. And yet humanity periodically forgets. Since then, ethnic cleansing has been perpetrated in former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Darfur, in Myanmar. Right now, there are accusations of genocide in Gaza and Ukraine. 

Even more shocking to me than the Nazi concentration camp was the sense of absence in the Polish cities I visited. In Krakow and Warsaw, the pre-war Jewish communities made up around a quarter and a third of the population, respectively – around 60,000 Jews lived in Krakow and 400,000 in Warsaw. In Krakow, the loss is palpable. Several vestiges of the old Jewish quarter remain – synagogues turned into museums; a cemetery where one wall has been built using fragments of gravestones shattered by the Nazi occupiers; shop fronts adorned with the names of their Jewish former owners. Indeed there is something of a revival of Jewish culture and heritage, with concerts of klezmer music, a Jewish festival and the Israeli ‘Hummus and Happiness Bar’, as well as a museum of photographs documenting the area’s Jewish life and loss.

In Warsaw it is the dearth of remnants of the Jewish community that is so chilling. The Germans razed the city to the ground as they fled the approaching Soviet troops. This makes the tiny fragments that remain all the more shocking: a single street that survived the demolition of the ghetto, pockmarked with bullet holes; a narrow fragment of ghetto wall; a synagogue that miraculously survived – one of over 400 that used to exist in the city; metal strips traversing the pavement at intervals, marking where the wall stood from 1940 until the ghetto was liquidated in 1943, when its inhabitants were herded onto cattle trucks and sent to the death camp at Treblinka.
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And, in the sparkling new Jewish museum, exhibits marking hundreds of years of Jewish life in Poland come to an end not during the war, but afterwards, when the remaining few Jewish survivors returned to their villages to be welcomed not with sympathy and understanding, but with rampant anti-Semitism and fresh pogroms. The foundation of the state of Israel provided the escape that the remaining Jews needed, and they fled, en masse, in 1948.

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