Today is the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in formerly German occupied Poland by the Soviet Red Army. It is a date that has been adopted by some secular nations to remember the Holocaust, although others have their remembrance day in mid April which is roughly, calendrical differences permitting, on or around the same date as the Jewish remembrance day which is Yom HaShoah.

I wondered what to write on this day. I normally mark this day quietly, by lighting a Yarzheit candle as it’s not my religious day of remembrance, that’s later in the year. Should, I thought, I write about my wife’s family’s epic escape from soon to be occupied Paris and tell of the members of her family who were not so lucky as to get to the United Kingdom and were instead captured and murdered by the Germans? I suppose that I could write a ‘never again’ type article reminding people that one of the major lessons of the Holocaust was that when some nutcase or nutcases say they want to kill you then it’s probably a good idea to believe them and take steps to defend yourself against them.

I will not, at least in this piece, write about the horrors that were experienced under German Nazi rule, there are people who are far better qualified than me to do that. Neither will I ponder the sort of mindset that could create the Holocaust, as Airey Neave, who served the indictments on the Nuremberg defendants and who closely observed the trial, did a far better job of that with his account.

I suppose I could write about the politicians of today who care or think nothing of Jews for the rest of the year, but who stand up and speak eloquent but empty words about remembrance or who use Holocaust remembrance for their own base political ends. Maybe not, at least not today.

Instead of that what I will do to mark today is put up a Jewish punk rock song called ‘They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat’. It’s primarily a song about countering and taking the piss out of the enemies, survivor guilt, celebrating life and about Jews not being used as a shield for various political causes. It sums up most of what I was intending to say but says it better. It’s also a song about survival against unspeakable odds and that to me is important.

Postscript:

At 16:30 yesterday my son, the miraculous child that my wife and I prayed for in Jerusalem, was exactly eight years old. His loud, lively, creative existence is in my view my personal “fuck you” to the uni-testicular Austrian corporal and his deranged pals. That our little ball of wondrous turbulence is the grandson of a man whom the Nazis could not catch, is also something that I do not forget.