Holocaust Memorial Day and Auschwitz liberation anniversary

Today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau – a Nazi concentration and extermination camp located in modern-day Poland. It falls on Holocaust Memorial Day, an important date in the global calendar where we remember the terrible scale of mass murder that took place during the Second World War (WWII).

The Nazis systematically murdered six million Jews between 1941 and 1945 as part of their evil ‘Final Solution’ plan. This number equated to one third of the world’s entire Jewish population. This act of genocide became known as the ‘Holocaust’, or ‘Shoah’ in Hebrew.

Auschwitz was the most notorious of the many camps the Nazis established to carry out the mass, and often sadistic, slaughter of Jews and other humans. At least 1.1 million of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz were murdered, among them 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others, including the disabled and members of the LGBT community. Those who were not gassed died through starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments.

Unfortunately, the exact number of people murdered at Auschwitz and other camps are not known as the perpetrators of these horrific crimes destroyed evidence in the final stages of the war.

It is almost impossible to understand the scale of what happened to Europe’s Jews. This diverse community, which was integral to European life, producing successful prime ministers, influential writers, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, musicians, financiers, and athletes, came perilously close to being totally wiped out: two in every three Jews in Europe were killed by the Nazis.

To put it into perspective, if you held a minute’s silence for every Jewish person killed during WWII, you would be silent for over 11 years. If you did the same for all the people who died during the Holocaust you would be silent for more than two decades.

Bizarrely, in the immediate aftermath of WWII, people turned away from the personal testimony and stories about the Holocaust. Primo Levi, a survivor, found it very difficult to get a publisher for his book and Anne Frank’s father also struggled to get her diaries published. Yet Levi’s book, ‘If This is a Man’, is now considered one of the most important memoirs of the era, while Anne Frank’s diary has sold over 30 million copies worldwide.

The Holocaust and the scale of fear it caused among every single surviving Jew following the wholesale erasure of their families and friends, and the searing shame felt by the West for allowing this atrocity to happen, are the foundations upon which Isreal was built. It is why a Jewish state is such a necessity, ensuring there will always be a safe haven for this much persecuted nation.

Yet the trauma of the Holocaust has and will continue to echo down through generations. It is a trauma that will not, and should not, be forgotten.