Holocaust Memorial Day: Why We Must Remember

The 27th of January marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. It is also Holocaust Memorial Day – a time to remember the millions murdered in the Holocaust and in subsequent genocides – in Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur.

Avigail Simmonds-Rosten, Programme Manager at the Council of Christians and Jews, reflects on why we must not forget, and why our human propensity for evil must be acknowledged and resisted.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, Germany

I’m an Ashkenazi Jew. Had I been born 90 years ago, perhaps where my great grandparents were born, most of the people from the community in which I grew up would be dead by the time I was twelve. Today I live surrounded by Jews, in a thriving community of bustling life, strength and tradition. Perhaps the dust has settled, we can forget. After all, human beings are programmed to be able to live beyond trauma, selectively remember so that they can continue to function. The paralysis of trauma can put an end to the prospect of a liveable life. So why then do we push ourselves today? Why do we insist on remembering?

Remembering the Holocaust forces us to overcome the will to forget trauma. The Holocaust, for me, in the 21st century is a nightmare in which I run through woods I don’t know, trailed by people I’ve never met - and then I wake up. Every so often my mind wonders as to whom I would run to, who is the most righteous gentile in my life? I’ve been embedded with the memory of suffering I’ve not experienced, with a mind which today dwells on memories I don’t have. Many Jews young and old, know the Holocaust as a template of suffering, as the pinnacle of a perilous and antisemitic world. It is this, and more. The Holocaust is not merely an historical fact, it is a psychological hyperlink.

Remembering the Holocaust musters us to recall the scale of human indifference, the potential scope of cruelty, the depths of depravity - of which perhaps we are all capable. Millions were systematically scheduled for slaughter; surrounded by doctors, neighbours and colleagues. The juxtaposition of modernity and monstrosity can be puzzling. It was here when the trajectory of morality and industry parted ways, and the 19th century marriage of true minds was destroyed. In the shadow of the Holocaust we are reminded that tools service the will of those who use them, they are not themselves indicative of advance. We can think we are beyond the possibility of industrialised murder, but as soon as we do, we become blinded to the risk of the technologies we wield.

The Holocaust is a reminder of what people can get used to; what they can endure, and what they can commit. Men, women and children lived in the bowels of hell, were assigned numbers, enslaved, gassed, suffocated, burned, shot, hanged, raped and tortured - that is what human beings can live through, die through, hide through, suffer through, fight through. Survivors of the Holocaust witnessed inconceivable horrors. And yet, those horrors were indeed conceived, and what is more, carried out. One of the reasons Holocaust denial is so profoundly dangerous is that it signals a refusal to recognise the breaches of so-called ‘humanity’ for which humanity itself has been repeatedly convicted. It ignores the trends of disdain for life which mar human history.

The Holocaust, its origins, its operations - like all historical events - is unique. Each people, time and place create their own iterations of suspicion, fear and violence. Xenophobia is asbestos hidden in the walls and ceilings of societies - convincing us it is the very structure of our security, all the while poisoning us. A seemingly-endemic need to ‘other’, to dehumanise, and ultimately, to murder, has drenched the globe in waves of bloodshed. A pattern of disregard for those beyond our understanding, those with customs beyond our kin, with faces beyond our recognition, is a common thread. To pull at that thread is to unravel civilisations, to leave in their wake the Holocaust and so many other genocides. The fabric of a society in which such a thread is woven lies only a crisis away from becoming a rag.

Our job today is to sit and unpick a tapestry of hatred, to weep over the impossibility of the task, and to sit tomorrow to sew anew.

By Avigail Simmonds-Rosten, Programme Manager at the Council of Christians and Jews

For more resources to help Churches and Christians to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, head to the CCJ website: