Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January, is the day each year when we remember the six million Jewish people who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust in the Second World War. On HMD, we also remember other groups of people who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis including Roma and Sinti people (sometimes referred to as ‘gypsies’), disabled people, gay people, Jehovah Witnesses, political opponents, and many others
Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) this year marks 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. The terrible events of the Holocaust are widely documented and are well known to many. 80 years on from the end of World War 2, the stories of how the Nazis and their collaborators murdered some six million Jews regardless of their race, country of origin, or status in society, are still talked about and remembered.
In recent years, our criminology and sociology pupils have had the opportunity to visit Sachsenhausen Memorial Camp where more than 200,000 men, women and children were kept during the Second World War. The experience is always a moving one and in today's Whole School Assembly, we learned more about HMD through Teacher of Theology and Philosophy, Mr Cartwright.
He said:
'Today, Monday 27 January, is a day which every year since 2001 has been Holocaust Memorial Day. This is a day where the world remembers the Holocaust, the systematic and state-sponsored murder of approximately six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “For a Better Future.” This is because, just like it was the choices of individuals to carry out the millions of murders in the Holocaust, is it is also the choice of individuals – of us – today – to make the world a place where people of all races, religions and backgrounds can live together in peace and community.
The Holocaust is one of humanity’s most tragic episodes, and today marks a significant anniversary in its history. It was on this very day, 80 years ago, 27 January 1945, that Soviet soldiers liberated the last remaining Nazi extermination camp, where Jews and others from all over Europe had been imprisoned and murdered. It is a place so infamous that it hardly needs introduction – Auschwitz. It is worth stressing here how recent the Holocaust is. Many of us will have grandparents who were alive during the Holocaust, and who may even remember it in the news. There are still survivors of the Holocaust who are alive today to tell their story, such as Harry Spiro - a reminder that this is not ancient history.
If there are one or two images that most people associate with the Holocaust, it is these two, both taken from Auschwitz, in modern-day Poland. In the top left are the gates to the original work camp called today Auschwitz I. The words above the gate translate from German to “Work will set you free”. This is a cynical, cruel reference by the Nazis to how prisoners were worked to death in Auschwitz, and that there was no hope for freedom. The second picture is of the gatehouse to Auschwitz II. It was in this gatehouse that newly arrived prisoners whom the Nazi officers selected for immediate death would have their belonging taken from them before they were murdered in the gas chambers. These two pictures represent the fates of the prisoners of Auschwitz, a place that would be the site the murder of over a million Jews by the end of World War 2.
As shocking as the reality of Auschwitz is, the most uncomfortable truth about the Holocaust is that it was a crime committed by human beings on fellow human beings. As part of their strategy to get into power in Germany, the Nazis whipped up fear and hatred of Jews, blaming them wrongly for the economic and political problems facing Germany in the 1920s and 30s. They used racist stereotypes to portray Jews as outsiders in Europe. In reality, Jews have lived in Europe for nearly two thousand years, and many Jews considered themselves, then as now, European as well as Jewish. Take for example this young Jewish girl, Berta Rosenheim, pictured on her first day at school in Leipzig in 1929, four years before the Nazis came to power. She is holding a Schultüte, a traditional German gift given to pupils on their first day at school in Germany. When the Nazis enacted their antisemitic laws, they attempted to deny people like Berta part of their identity, to destroy ancient communities, and to use the very worst parts of human nature to serve their own power.
In our world today, with so much conflict and division, and with the rise of antisemitism and Islamophobia, Holocaust Memorial Day is an timely reminder of how fear and hatred of those whom we don’t understand drives us apart. But it is also a story of the resilience of humanity, of our ability to affect the world around us with our choices, both positively or negatively. The recent tragedy Holocaust was not inevitable, and we each have a responsibility in our lives to use our conscience to work for a better future.'