Holocaust

Yom HaShoa is Israel and the Jewish people’s day of remembrance for the Shoa, or Holocaust. It falls this year on 8th April. Its official Hebrew name means ‘Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day’, emphasising how we should remember not only the six million Jews who were killed by the Nazis, but also the heroes like those who rose up against their persecution in the Warsaw Ghetto. There is also another group of heroes we should remember. Their actions provide a model of human decency we should all seek to emulate. An apparently disparate group from varied backgrounds, they are known as the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ – special people who have been recognised for saving the lives of Jewish people.

Pretzsch is a normal small town on the River Elbe, 35 miles north east of Leipzig, with little or nothing to suggest its dark past. Eighty years ago, in the spring of 1941, it became a mustering point for a cadre of men who would perform ‘special tasks’ during the forthcoming Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Over the spring and early summer months, around 3,000 men arrived in Pretzsch. Quartered in SS accommodation, the men eventually learnt they would be part of four Einsatzgruppen — special task forces — who were to move behind the German front line. Their task was framed as maintaining security and eliminating resistance.

How should we remember the Holocaust? In the next decade or so, many of the last living Holocaust survivors will pass away. It will then fall to us later generations to confront what Hannah Arendt called ‘the abyss that opened up before us’ by telling their stories. In doing so, we aim to guard against the spectre of Holocaust denial. But when we vow to ‘never forget’ the terrible crimes of Nazism, what exactly is it that we seek to remember? What is sometimes forgotten is that the way we remember the Holocaust is as much a historical process as the event itself. Though the term ‘holocaust’ was used already in the 1950s, it was popularised (and capitalised) only in the 1970s, serving to distinguish the Nazi genocide from other wartime atrocities.

When Ziggy Shipper was 13, the Nazis forced him onto a train in the Lodz Jewish Ghetto bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. In hideously camped, cold, dehydrated conditions, Ziggy’s journey was made even more uncomfortable by a fully grown man who was crushing him. Only when the train stopped did Ziggy become aware that it was a corpse. His first emotion, however, when the body was thrown off the train, was not one of horror that the man had died, but of relief – of joy, even – that he could breathe again. It was an experience that has haunted Ziggy ever since: incredulity and horror at how his own humanity had been broken down to such an extent.

Can you feel the fascism yet? You ought to by now, more than a week after Britain leaving the EU. So many people warned us of this moment. There was the former journalist Paul Mason, who claimed to see crowds of fascists thronging the streets of London. The former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell became so disturbed by our national turn that at one stage he dressed up in a sort of regimental uniform and sang a song about Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. And then there was the cruelly titled Lord Adonis. The once-sensible former Blairite schools minister spent recent years so apparently worried about the dangers of Brexit that he became not just hysterical but homosexual too. It has been a disturbed few years for these, among other, people.

David Cameron announced five years ago that he was establishing a “Holocaust Commission”. The purpose? To “investigate what more needs to be done to ensure Britain has a permanent and fitting [Holocaust] memorial and the educational resources needed for generations to come.” Out of this Commission came a Holocaust Memorial Foundation; and out of this Foundation – technically an Advisory Board to the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government – a breathtaking proposal has been issued: to construct within Victoria Tower Gardens (next to the Houses of Parliament) a gigantic edifice incorporating a learning resource centre to honour Jewish and other victims of the Nazi Holocaust, such as Roma, disabled and LGBT people.