Voices: As the world commemorates the Holocaust, racism and intolerance continue to threaten our future
Voices: As the world commemorates the Holocaust, racism and intolerance continue to threaten our future
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Editorial: Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Holocaust Memorial Day is a solemn reminder of the past – and the persistence of antisemitism and genocide today. Holocaust Memorial Day is a moment to remember, to reflect on the present, and to contemplate the future of universal human rights.
However, the immediate focus is always, and rightly, on the unique nature of the Holocaust, which targeted Jews for slaughter and was the culmination of millennia of antisemitism. Many others died at the hands of the Nazis, their allies, and collaborators, and they should be, and are, memorialised, but it was the Jewish people of Europe who suffered from the conscious state-sponsored perversion of modern industry, organisational techniques, and transport links to exterminate 6 million people in the so-called “Final Solution”.
Visitors to the Holocaust memorial centre at Auschwitz always remark on the sheer size of the site, and, as the largest of the concentration camps, the scene of more than a million murders, and the first to be liberated, it has come to be symbolic of this terrible episode.
One out of every six Jews killed in the Holocaust died at Auschwitz. But it was only one of 44,000 such ghettos, transit camps, factories of death, and scenes of mass murder, and the names, each chilling, also deserve to be recalled: Sobibór, Treblinka, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, the Warsaw ghetto, Drancy, Westerbork.
