Why Holocaust Memorial Day is important for us today
A few years ago my brother compiled our father’s family free, going back to Henoch Joseph DUVEEN (my Great Great Great Grandfather) who, it seems, was the first to use “Duveen” as a surname in the early 1800s. At the time, he in lived Meppel in the North West of The Netherlands .
When I look at the list of Henoch’s’ descendants, what strikes me is the number of those with dates of death in 1943, 1944, 1945, all killed in the Holocaust Those killed includes all eight of my Father’s Uncles & Aunts and their families. Indeed, if my Grandfather hadn’t left Amsterdam in 1935 and taken his family to live in what was then Palestine, it is more than likely that he, his wife, my father & uncle would also have been among the millions killed by those who believed that one race was better than another and those who did not belong to that race were less than human.
Why am I sharing this? On Tuesday, January 27th, it, is Holocaust Memorial Day, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. We as a nation will pause to remember those killed by the poisonous philosophy of the Nazi Party and also of other people, killed since 1945 because they were the wrong tribe, the wrong race or the wrong colour by others who put racial purity above humanity.
For me, when I look at the fate of my father’s family, it is more than just remembering the death of millions of people 70 years ago, it is personal, it is thinking about the great uncles & aunts I never got the chance to meet, the cousins that never had a chance to live, families taken from their homes and neighbourhood where they had lived, for generations in some cases, to be transported across Europe to be killed in the death camps.
Why should we in 21st Century Britain care about Holocaust Memorial Day? Unlike me, most people in the UK did not lose relatives to the Holocaust or even in the other more recent mass killings of people because of the heritage, to Rwanda or in the former Yugoslavia. The reason we should remember what happened in all these genocides is that it happened where people had lived side by side for years in peace and harmony. The purpose of Holocaust Memorial Day is to remind us that this can happen anywhere where those who preach hatred on the basis of religion. colour or race, are allowed to go unchallenged; it can happen where there are those who blame the problems in their society on others, the different ones, where any people start to believe that they are somehow superior to others that live alongside them. We must always beware when those who want to lead us start down the road of blaming minorities in our country for our problems. It is a slippery slope and we must not go down it.
Finally, as someone who lived in Israel, served in the Israeli Defence Forces and who has, mostly, been proud of his Israeli nationality, I cannot ignore what is happening in Israel & occupied Palestine today. Most Israelis are not racists and would willingly live at peace alongside a Palestinian state. However there are some, and sadly it seems to be a growing number, who have forgotten the hard lessons we as Jews should have learnt from the Holocaust. The attacking of Palestinian villages, the burning of mosques, the attempts to deny Arabs (in Israel itself as well as in Palestine) their rights and full participations in the civil life shows that Israel has some real problems that it needs to face up to. When groups in other counties attacked Jews in the same way some on the far right (and not so far right) attack Arabs, there are be cries of anti-Semitism and shouts to stop persecution, we should not stand silently by when Jews do the same to others.
