Today is Holocaust Memorial Day or at least it’s the UK’s national version of it and marks the day when the Auschwitz death camp was liberated by soldiers of the Soviet Red Army. The Jewish religious memorial for the Shoah is different and is called Yom HaShoah which this year takes place on the 23rd to the 24th of April (Jewish days start in the evening due to the Creation story in the Bible saying ‘it was evening then morning of the first day). The religious remembrance day doesn’t have the high public profile in the UK as today has and many people observe both the religious day and the UK national day of remembrance.
It’s a day of solemn remembrance of the lives that should have been lived to the full but which were brutally cut short by the murderous actions of the Germans. It’s a day to remember the babies that were not born because their potential mothers and fathers were murdered, to remember the Jewish communities throughout Europe that were destroyed by the Germans and their allies in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It is also a day to remind ourselves about the depths of bestial behaviour that humanity can sink to.
Auschwitz wasn’t the only death or concentration camp run by the Germans where the creation of death on an industrial scale was practised but it is one of the best known of the many iterations of hell on earth that were created by the Germans. Auschwitz has become a symbol of what happens when baseless and enduring hatreds, of the sort that had been embedded in the German people for centuries prior to the Shoah, becomes government policy. If there had not been the fertile ground of Jew hatred present in Germany and other European cultures then there might have been no death camps. This culturally embedded Jew hatred present in Germany up until 1945 was the fertile soil that the Nazis grew in, so much so that we need to remember that those death camps and death squads were often staffed not by reluctant conscripts but enthusiastic volunteers.
From our vantage point 80 years on from the liberation of Auschwitz the horrors of the Shoah are fading from living memory and as it passes from living memory to recorded history the story of the Shoah is getting twisted and abused for political reasons. The story of the Shoah is becoming increasingly de-Judaised and universalised to an extent that there are now younger generations who are completely unaware that it was Jews who were the primary target of the Uni-testicled Austrian Corporal’s malevolent attentions. These later generations, who have not and in future will not have living witnesses to the Shoah to tell them otherwise, who are the ones who either falsely believe that it was gays, transvestites, the disabled and gypsies who made up the bulk of the victims of the Nazis and not Jews, or even doubt the undoubtable facts of the Shoah itself. Too many people seem to have forgotten or have deliberately ignored the fact that it was 6 million Jews that were murdered by the Nazis not 6 million gypsies or gays or socialists or trannies.
Following the Shoah the world and many of its leaders made pious statements about how such a horror should never happen again but as we’ve seen from the political reaction to the Pogrom of 7/10 the words ‘Never Again’ have been shown to be utterly empty. The international political class could not cope with Jews fighting back against the savage Jew haters of Hamas and Hezbollah and used their energies not to criticise the murderers that these groups produced but urged Israel to go easy on those who had murdered Israelis and others on 7/10. Just as awful is the sight, in many Western cities, of streets have been stained with the cries of Jew hatred from Leftists and the imported Muslims many of who have had Jew hatred pumped into them with their mother’s milk. Very little of the hatred expressed by Muslims and Leftists towards Jews and the Jewish state has been effectively countered by the organs of the State, especially in the United Kingdom where police forces such as London’s Metropolitan Police have become a byword for appeasement of some of the worst sorts of Islam and giving a free pass to Islam-derived Jew hatred. Over the last year and a quarter or so I can clearly see how ‘never again’ are meaningless words to those, such as the Metropolitan Police, who are supposed to keep everyone, including Jews safe, but who are failing dismally at that task.
We as individuals cannot wholly repair the world that was broken but we can do our bit to make ‘never again’ mean something again. For me, my part of that work of repair and making ‘never again’ meaningful is supporting Israel, calling out Islamic Jew hatred, highlighting and criticising the policing that favours the Islamists who want me and mine dead and remembering, always, always remembering.
