Holocaust Memorial Day – Education is vital
JVL Introduction
It is crucial that we never forget the 6 million Jewish and many millions of non Jewish victims of the Nazis and not only on this important anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz that has become Holocaust Memorial Day.
Education about the Nazi Holocaust must to include not only knowledge of the horrors of the ghettoes and the camps, but the earlier atrocities; the rounding up of Trade Unionists and Communists; the impunity given to Hitler’s Brownshirts who beat them up brutally in the back rooms of pubs and on the streets within hours of Hitler’s “election”; the incarceration, experimentation and “euthanasia” of disabled people; the vitriol and hatred meted out to Gypsy and Sinti peoples and the brutality meted out to anyone who opposed the regime.
We must remember them all and still acknowledge that, like all genocides, that directed at Europe’s Jews had a particular character and the lasting impact on the Jewish communities of Europe has been enormous. That the Nazis aims to systematically end Jewish existence altogether failed is due to a number of reasons, including courageous and heroic Jewish and non Jewish resistance fighters and others who, at great risk to themselves and their families, protected Jewish people.
As this piece makes clear, while it is the case that violence towards Jews has come from the right, antisemitic attitudes can come from the left, sometimes in terms of conspiracy theories and, far too often, through conflating Jews with the actions of the State of Israel.
The aim of Holocaust Memorial Day is surely to help make real the cries of “never again” . If never again – for anybody – is to be realised, education about the Holocaust needs to help people to understand the roots of antisemitism and to resist the rise of racism – whoever it is directed at – and, of fascism, which, as Michael Rosen says, will arrive as your friend. read here
This article was originally published by Morning Star on Thu 27 Jan 2022. Read the original here.
A time for renewed education on the horrors of the Holocaust
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I love Michael Rosen deeply though I have only seen him once, when I took my children to the poetry tent at Glastonbury Festival.
They shall not Pass!
Here’s a letter sent to HMDT today
Dear HMDT
I read the excellent article by Farayi Mungazi and Olivia Marks-Woldman in today’s Guardian and was pleased to see that it included this sentence. This is partly because unlike Jews, Roma and Sinti, black people were not marked for destruction.
My question concerns the way in which your organisation always refer to HMD commemorating the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, all victims of Nazi Persecution and those who have been murdered in subsequent genocides;
There seems to be a contradiction between noting that Roma and Sinti were marked for extermination and their inclusion with ‘all victims of Nazi Persecution’. I realise that many groups including the disabled, black people, Communists, Socialists, Polish intellectuals, Jehovahs Witnesses, Slavs, and homosexuals suffered greatly in Nazi Concentration camps. However only two groups were marked for extermination. One of these groups is always referred to by name when you mention the Holocaust. However the other is included under all other victims. Is there some way that you could highlight that Roma and Sinti (who still suffer great persecution today) were intended for complete destruction by the Nazis?
Why not mention them by name between the reference to the Holocaust and the victims of Nazi persecution?
In particular I think this would help young people and schoolchildren who will be made familiar with the term the Holocaust but not know that those who they will see and hear the media refer to as ‘Gypsies’ (usually in stereotypical and zenophobic ways) are the descendants of those who in Europe were once marked for mass murder.
Thank you, a very timely piece. The sheer horror of mass murder by a state is in itself disabling. It is long overdue for us British to acknowledge the atrocities of the British Empire which have underpinned our current prosperity as a nation. But today I just feel overcome by sadness and sympathy for all those terrified and bereft human beings.
Holocaust Memorial Day was a people’s event until the right-wing grabbed control of it and turned it into something like the Oscars, graced by all kinds of celebs and incapable of reaching the broad masses of people.
We need a Holocaust Memorial Day but not like this with celebs, toffs and right-wingers dressed up to the nines and uniting in faux grief
We need a people’s Holocaust Memorial Day that reaches out to trade unionists and working class people and fully includes representation of all groups and enthnicities done to death by the Nazis.
At the “official” – who decided that btw? – event did we ever hear the word “Communists” mentioned?
“The capitalism and imperialism we oppose are organic systems rooted in social systems, they are not the product of nefarious plotters”. Thank you. You have supplied me with words I need to counter this argument when it is put forward, not only in an antisemitic context, but in many other simplistic analyses, where one group of people is singled out for the evil committed within a system that often prevents moral choices.
……….but there is little or no remembrance for Gypsy Roma & Sinti.
I would like to echo the sentiments of Eamonn Riley above. We seem to be very selective about which of the Nazis’ victims we remember — for example, the Freemasons (up to 200,000 murdered) are never mentioned.
It is startling to read the Wikipedia page on “Holocaust Victims”, which lists up to 9 million Soviet civilians and prisoners alongside 5-6 million Jews. A huge number of the former were deliberately starved to death — the Nazis’ so-called “Hunger Plan” envisaged that “tens of millions” would die this way. They were all regarded as “subhuman”.
I was aware that at least 1.9 million ethnic Poles were murdered by the Nazis in one way or another; but it was only last year that I learnt (again, from Wikipedia) that in March 1940 Himmler declared: “All Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German volk consider the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task.”
It puzzles and alarms me that so many parallel genocides seem to be forgotten.