SVI assembly speech by Gregor C on the topic of Holocaust Memorial Day. First presented at Monday assembly 6th February 2023.
78 years ago, on the 27th of January 1945, the Red Army finally liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland which has come to be regarded as the site of some of the worst atrocities in human history. Despite holding 1.3 million people during its operation, by the time the Soviets reached Auschwitz, just 7,000 remained. The scenes of suffering that were witnessed by the liberating troops were horrifying, with Soviet General Vasily Petrenko remarking at his shock at the “indescribable hatred” that had befallen those held in the camp.
The Holocaust – as it came to be known – was the genocide of six million Jewish people. As a result, every year on the 27th of January during Holocaust Memorial Day, we remember the six million Jewish people who were systematically persecuted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust. We also remember other groups who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis. These include Roma and Sinti people, disabled people, gay people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political opponents, and many others.
Although the Holocaust happened almost 80 years ago, it is still part of living history. As such, it is it is important to remember, reflect and help share the legacy of the Holocaust with future generations. These events must be remembered as they serve as warning of what can happen when we allow racist and discriminatory ideology to grow and why we must stand up against it.
The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is 'Ordinary People’ because it was ordinary people, living ordinary lives, who were attacked, not because of something they had done, but simply because of who they were. Because of their religion, their nationality, the colour of their skin or the people that they loved. And it was ordinary people who stood by and allowed it to happen, persuaded by the propaganda fed to them or afraid to act for fear of retribution. Some ordinary people went to extraordinary measures to speak out or to try to rescue others. Other ordinary people were the attackers, the guards and soldiers, the politicians, the railway workers transporting people to their deaths, the enablers.
This theme of ‘ordinary people’ is a powerful one. Its message is one that applies not only to events on the scale of the Holocaust, but to everyday life because, in the words of Edmund Burke, “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” It is about ordinary people standing up for what they believe in because sometimes that’s all it takes. Throughout history, ordinary people have often decided to ignore what was going on around them, to become bystanders, to allow genocide to continue. This is what we must learn from the past, that we ordinary people have the ability to stand up for what we believe in and prevent atrocities like this from happening again.
After the Holocaust, the world said never again, but the truth is, humanity has failed to learn the lessons of the Holocaust, and around the world today people are still being targeted because of who they are. On Holocaust Memorial Day, we also remember the millions of men, women, and children, who have been murdered in the genocides which have followed – in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. In conflicts, government sponsored atrocities, and as part of everyday society, in countries all over the globe including right here in the UK, people continue to be persecuted because of who they are. And, reflecting on the murder of children in particular, it makes me think about those two unignorable rights which are at the very heart of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: Article 6 and Article 30, the first affirming the right to life and the second of these insisting on the child’s right to use their own language, culture and religion.
Since the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust, identity-based hostility and attacks have continued around the world. Genocide has taken place again and again, with this year marking the 20th anniversary of the Genocide in Darfur in which 300,000 people are estimated to have been killed. Genocides have continued to plague the world. Ordinary people became neighbours with machetes in Rwanda turning on each other overnight, schoolteachers turned concentration camp guards in Bosnia, and it was ordinary people who made the decision to ignore what was going on around that allowed genocide to happen.
Genocide does not happen out of the blue – it is the result of prejudice and persecution which sees a group treated differently from the rest of society. On Holocaust Memorial Day, we are reminded of what can happen when prejudice and persecution are left unchallenged, and of our responsibilities to stand against these processes when we see them in our own communities. The Holocaust Memorial Trust breaks genocide down into 10 stages moving from the classification of a group of people to the extermination of that group. We see these stages happening in countries around the globe in places like China where over one million Uyghur Muslims have been detained and targeted, with several countries accusing China of committing genocide. This shows us how easily history repeats itself when ordinary people don’t stand up and try to stop these actions. To stop these atrocities, we must educate ourselves and scrutinise the actions of people in power so we can build a world in which people can identify and challenge these actions.
To finish, I am going to return to the theme of ordinary people, because it is us ordinary people that allow these actions to happen, but it is also us ordinary people who can stand up against these actions and prevent them from taking place.